Toward A Simpler Way of Life – The Arts & Crafts Architects of California - Hardcover

Winter, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520209168 ISBN 13: 9780520209169

Publisher: University of California Press, 1997

Synopsis

This book celebrates one of the richest and most enduring themes in American architecture - California's Arts and Crafts Movement. Echoing the writings of Helen Hunt Jackson, Charles F. Lummis, and Charles Keeler, this movement represented a retreat into a quieter place from the materialism of American society. Anti-commercial, anti-modern, Arts and Crafts practitioners drew on the decorative schemes of English Tudor, Swiss chalet, Japanese temple, and Spanish mission, evoking an earlier time before modern industry and technology intruded. And if only one word is used to describe virtually every Arts and Crafts house in California, that word is 'woodsy': wood shingles outside, wood paneling inside, a wood fire burning in the homey, welcoming fireplace. Most chapters in this impressive and very readable book focus on one building by a particular architect or designer and illustrate that person's development and influences. Familiar architects such as Bernard Maybeck, Charles and Henry Greene, John Galen Howard, and Julia Morgan are here, but so too are less well-known names who were a vibrant part of the Arts and Crafts Movement. These late Romantics designed houses to complement nature rather than contrast with it. Their eclecticism and historicism reflected a Romantic bent as well, no doubt cultivated by their familiarity with the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where, in fact, Howard, Maybeck, and Morgan studied. The book's contributors also give attention to the builders, contractors, and craftsmen whose skills contributed to the lasting impact of the California Arts and Crafts Movement. Superb illustrations provide examples of elevations, composition details, interior fixtures, and gardens, all designed to promote the 'simple living and high thinking' of the Craftsman style, an esthetic that continues to influence architecture today.

About this title

About the Author

Robert Winter is Arthur G. Coons Professor of the History of Ideas, Emeritus, at Occidental College in Los Angeles. He is the author of The California Bungalow (1980), American Bungalow Style (1996), and coauthor of A Guide to Architecture in San Francisco and Northern California (1985) and Los Angeles: An Architectural Guide (1994).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Toward a Simpler Way of Life: The Arts and Crafts Architects of California

By Robert Winter, editor

University of California Press

Copyright 1997 Robert Winter, editor
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520209168
1
A. C. Schweinfurth
Edward R. Bosley

San Francisco Bay Area residents of the 1890s witnessed a heady decade of creative architectural experimentation. Lacking an underlying theory or manifesto, it could hardly have been called a movement. But the period was characterized by a growing desire among a small group of young architects to reinterpret the region's architectural heritage. This desire, fueled by a combination of raw talent and a romantic outlook (tempered by formal training), led to some of the most idiosyncratic and thought-provoking building designs of the early Arts and Crafts period in America. This band of independent-minded designers included Ernest Coxhead, Bernard Maybeck, Louis Christian Mullgardt, A. C. Schweinfurth, and others who helped to steer the domestic architecture of San Francisco and its environs away from an earlier fascination with ornamented Victorian Eastlake, Stick, and Italianate designs toward simpler houses that were more responsive to the surrounding landscape and more reflective of the maturing community's desire for a cosmopolitan and cultural identity.

Albert Cicero Schweinfurth (18641900) is today perhaps the least celebrated of this group, though his designs were praised and published in prominent periodicals during his brief career. He would undoubtedly be better known had he not caught typhoid fever and died at the age of thirty-six. Born in Auburn, New York, the son of a engineer-turned-wood-carver who specialized in architectural ornament, Schweinfurth and his three brothers all became architects, learning the basics in their father's wood-carving shop. Albert later apprenticed as a draftsman, gaining experience in the Boston offices of the nationally respected firm of Peabody and Stearns. While there, he was taught to value the regional traditions of American Colonial architecture and to seek ways to reflect those traditions in his work. Working in 1880s Boston, he also came under the inescapable influence of H. H. Richardson, who was based in that city. Along with design responsibilities he was to receive later in New York City and San Francisco, this background prepared Schweinfurth to pursue a regional architecture.1

After working sporadically for his contemporary A. Page Brown in New York from 1885 to 1888, Schweinfurth came west for his health, first to Denver in 1889, then to San Francisco in 1890. Brown himself had come to California two years earlier to work on commissions for the wealthy Crocker family, and he probably persuaded Schweinfurth to make the move from Denver to join him in San Francisco. Once there, working as chief designer in Brown's office, Schweinfurth

Swedenborgian Church (1894), garden side

sought to produce an architecture that reflected a reverence for California's Hispanic past while avoiding the imitations of the Franciscan missions that characterized so much of the Mission Revival period.

As head designer in Brown's office (succeeding Willis Polk in that position), Schweinfurth deserves credit as the principal designer, if not architect of record, of the San Francisco Church of the New Jerusalem.2 Also known as the Swedenborgian Church, the building was commissioned in 1894 by the minister and amateur architect Joseph Worcester. It is known that Bernard Maybeck was also drafting in Brown's firm during the same period, and it has often been suggested that he had a major role in the design of the church. (As partial evidence, there exists a rough preliminary sketch resembling the final design, dated 1894, which is signed on the back by Maybeck.) However, most of the available evidence, both stylistic and anecdotal, indicates that Schweinfurth's hand was at work on Worcester's vision, inspired by a drawing that the artist Bruce Porter had made of a church in Italy's Po River valley.3 Being the junior draftsman in the office, Maybeck was probably involved in sketching decorative details.4

This Italian church, photographed
about 1900, may have been a model
for the Swedenborgian Church.

The modest Swedenborgian Church, set in the residential Pacific Heights neighborhood, heralds the arrival of Arts and Crafts tenets in Northern California architecture and so places Schweinfurth among the pioneering California Arts and Crafts architects. But more important, the ensemble of diverse forces and personalities that brought about the church's creation paints a picture of true Arts and Crafts collaboration, inspired by a minister who appreciated both the teaching potential of architecture and the sympathetic resonances between Swedenborgian teachings and the writings of John Ruskin and William Morris. Indeed, the church's spiritual underpinnings reveal much about its bricks and mortar.

Emanuel Swedenborg (16881772), for whom the Swedenborgian faith is named, was a Swedish scientist, philosopher, and theologian who spent many of his later years articulating a philosophy of nature. According to Swedenborg, natural objects hold specific spiritual significance. He extended this belief even to

architecture, which he considered a divine art. "The designs of heaven's buildings," Swedenborg wrote, "are so perfect that you would say they represent the very essence of the art; and small wonder, since the art of architecture comes from heaven."5 Many in his own time and since also considered him to be a mystic, an attribute that would have appealed to late-nineteenth-century followers of the Arts and Crafts movement.

The principal figure to bring Swedenborgian teachings to the Bay Area was Joseph Worcester. Raised near Boston and educated at Harvard, Worcester was regarded throughout his life as exceptionally devout. Though as a youth he had considered becoming an architect, he ultimately followed the example of his father, the Reverend Thomas Worcester, and like his brothers, John and Benjamin, pursued theological studies and became a minister in the family's faith. In an unpublished reminiscence written by a friend, it was said of Worcester: "Not without hesitation had he chosen his life [of] service. Strongly artistic and gifted with a fine instinct for line and proportion, he had seriously thought of being an architect. A rarely useful one he would have made, so expressive of pure taste and harmony, so free from garishness would his designs have been."6 On a visit to California in the mid-1860s, young Joseph was moved by the area's natural beauty and by the people he met, including John Muir. Upon returning to Boston for his ordination, he overcame his father's objections and returned to California a few years later to follow his theological calling there.

Worcester's interest in architecture, in the region's scenic appeal, and in the writings of Ruskin and Morris all had significant ramifications. The simple, unpainted wood-shingle bungalow he designed for himself in 1877 in the East Bay town of Piedmont is probably the earliest rustic suburban house designed in the west, predating even the East Coast's famous Shingle-style resort houses and bungalows. The house (and its designer) had an important impact on the artists and architects who were in Worcester's informal circle of friends. Charles Keeler, a poet and Berkeley's self-appointed arbiter of taste in building and decorating, summed up Worcester's influence in discussing the state of art and architecture in San Francisco of a decade before in a 1905 article in The Craftsman magazine:

[A]n art spirit . . . was taking possession of a small but increasing number of people. If one were to look for its original inspiration, they would not go far astray in attributing it in large measure to a certain quiet and retiring minister,a man of gentle nature, of devoted love of the beautiful, and of exceptionally true, though reserved taste. From. the inspiration of his modest little home, and the picturesque church built under his direction, and more especially from direct contact with the man himself, a group of architects, decorators, painters, and lovers of the beautiful have acquired a new point of view. They have gained the ideal of a quiet, spiritual, reserved type of beauty which has found expression in homes, in stores, and indeed in many important forms of art work.7

The figures to whom he alludes included many of the best-known creative talents of the day: the artists William Keith and Bruce Porter; the architects Coxhead, Maybeck, and Polk; and Keeler himself. Though unnamed in the article, the "quiet and retiring minister" can only be Joseph Worcester.

Swedenborgian Church, front elevation

Schweinfurth's drawing for the Crocker lemon-curing warehouse, Montecito (1891, altered)

In 1894, after holding services for many years in Druid's Hall on Sutter Street, Worcester purchased land for a new church on a corner lot at Lyon and Washington streets. The commission to design the church went to the well-connected A. Page Brown. This came simultaneously with a request from Gertrude Bowers to design an adjacent house at 2121 Lyon Street, intended to be the pastor's residence. Both the church and parsonage lots had been purchased on May 1, 1894, and construction contracts were signed for both buildings in August, upon completion of the architectural plans. The cost of the church was to be $4,432 and of the parsonage, $4,463.8 Construction moved along that fall and winter, and the church was dedicated in a Sunday service on March 17, 1895. The parsonage was completed some time shortly before, but it was never used as the minister's residence. Worcester presumably preferred the cottage he had built for himself on Russian Hill.

The front of the Swedenborgian Church is an enigma, showing neither a direct entrance to the sanctuary itself nor very much of what lies behind its massive retaining wall. Steps lead to an arched entry flanked by two similarly arched openings, the south arch taller than the north, reflecting the drop in elevation on the Lyon Street grade. Wrought-iron grillwork fills each of the three arches. A double course of bricksthe inner course exposing a side, the outer one exposing an enddefine the arch of each opening at the entry. The forms and materials reflect a respect for Richardsonian detail that Brown, Schweinfurth, and Worcester shared. However, the whole also communicates Schweinfurth's love of the Franciscan missions and fascination with California's Hispanic past, the void behind the openings emulating the missions' arcaded passagewaysan image strengthened by the entry's simple shed roof, which is covered in Spanish tile. Overhead, a brick gable defines the terminus of the sanctuary's hall. The gable is embellished with a circular stained-glass window that is surrounded by the characteristic double course of bricks. Throughout the balance of the exterior elevations, including the retaining wall that wraps around to the south, a concrete pebble-dash finish coat suggests neither stone nor adobe but a kind of ancient textured aggregate of rubble, visually rooting the compound to the hillside.

The entry itself is reminiscent of Schweinfurth's earlier San Francisco work for Brown. In particular, his 1891 drawing for Crocker and Company's lemon-curing warehouse in Montecito, near Santa Barbara, also suggests mission arcades. The arched entrance, immediately flanked by iron-grilled window arches, closely resembles the composition of the church entry.

The cool darkness of the passage just inside the church is a brief but effective suggestion that the cares of the outside world have been left behind. A few steps through this transitional area pull the visitor to the symbolic second stage of the journey: the light of the unexpectedly vast garden that is sheltered and buttressed high above the sidewalk by the retaining wall. The garden's landscaping, once matured, became an integral part of the teaching aspect of the church, in whose theology trees correspond to spiritual knowledge.9

Seen from the garden, the structure's composition and materials suggest an Italian precedent. The brick tower is an architectural reference to the bell towers of twelfth- and early-thirteenth-century Italy. In the traditional manner, the upper portion is pierced by a double-arched opening divided by a marble colonette. The

Swedenborgian Church, passageway and garden details

tower's decorative brick gable, peaked with angled courses and intricate corbels, also derive from Italian models.

Throughout, the purplish-red bricks, slightly over-fired, are laid in a Flemish bond pattern and pointed so that the mortar cants up at a forty-five-degree angle from the top edge of each course back to a point well behind the lower edge of the course above. The effect of this patterning is that the lower edge of each brick course casts a shadow on the mortar supporting it, creating a repeated horizontal accentuation on the wall. On the structure's east elevation at the garden level, three brick crosses stand in relief, positioned asymmetrically just above doorknob height. These, like the slit window set off-center in the tower, produce a compositional tension that builds interest in the overall design. Three large multipaned windows, resembling humble industrial sash, allow light from the garden into the sanctuary. Between them, the walls are buttressed with a double thickness of brick to correspond to the interior placement of the structural posts and roof trusses. Planting beds extend along the wall beneath the windows, where wrought-iron trellis grills are permanently affixed between the brick buttresses.

Brick-pattern detail

At the garden's northwest corner stands the entry to the sanctuary. Massive dark-fumed oak doors (with hardware detail typical of Maybeck's medieval interpretations) open into a passage that recalls the arcade at the street entry, a small dark space to pace the visitor's progress, which in this case is reoriented to the right for entry into the church hall itself. To the left, a door leads to a small vestry area and bathroom occupying the south wing of the L-shaped plan.

Once the visitor is inside, the contrast with life on the street seems even more pronounced. The union of nature and architecture seeks a poetic (and religious) level, materials seeming to have come willingly from their habitats to fashion an

environment designed to inspire contemplation and worship. Entering this space is like arriving at a friend's home, perhaps to discuss a favorite subject by a fire crackling behind the hearth. Chairs, instead of pews, fill the intimate hall. Dark stretches of Oregon pine paneling also recall a home, an image broken only by the great madrone tree trunks, bark left on, that support the roof. The framing of the roof is carried out in hand-shaped six-by-eight-inch rafters (adz marks are clearly visible), notched and seated on six-by-eight-inch purlins. The purlins and trusses are backed up by the madrone-tree bracing system, which is secured by wrought-iron straps, and are in turn supported by the double-thick brick buttresses visible from the garden. Additional eight-by-ten-inch trusses, joined with the roof purlins, spring from the vertical, load-bearing madrone-tree posts. Over the rafters is one-by-fourinch diagonal milled sheathing, over which the roof tiles are placed. The west wall is constructed of loose-aggregate concrete surrounding a burned-brick chimney that is set off-center. On the east wall, concrete covers the brick gable above the roofline, while below, the wall is made of a rough-aggregate concrete.

Opposite the three south windows, the north wall's tree-trunk posts separate four oil paintings depicting the seasons in Northern California, executed by Worcester's close friend William Keith. The paintings were aptly described in a 1901 House Beautiful article by Mabel Clare Craft: "The themes are the seasons, translated and changed to suit California, and the panels, instead of showing the conventional spring, summer, autumn and winter, are devoted to the early and late rains and to the two seasons of harvest. This story of the western seasons tells the gradual change of the hills from brown to green, to brown again, and describes vividly the luscious colors of the meadows and the deep shadows."10 The paintings were intended from the start to be an integral part of the architecture, not a self-conscious addition. Accordingly, they helped promote the church beyond the status of a mere clublike

Swedenborgian Church, madrone-tree posts and sanctuary

Swedenborgian Church, sanctuary

environment to one expressly designed for worship amid God's nature and its Swedenborgian spiritual correspondences.

Similarly, the legendary rush-seated maple chairs were designed and crafted to complement the solid, nature-bound environment of the church. The massive chairs were made by Alexander Forbes of the San Francisco-based Forbes Manufacturing Company from a design of unconfirmed origin, though one that was probably sketched in Brown's office by Schweinfurth in conference with Worcester and perhaps Maybeck. A small number of identically designed chairs have appeared in other houses produced by graduates of Brown's office, notably in Maybeck's Wyntoon castle for Phoebe Apperson Hearst, in his William P. Rieger house, and in the living room of Schweinfurth's Volney C. Moody house ("Weltevreden") in north Berkeley of 1897. Known examples of these chairs, however, are never made of maple, as they are in the church, but of oak. One of the early Forbes chairs was sent to Joseph P. McHugh in New York City in 1894; it became the basis for an entire offering of Arts and Crafts furniture named the "Mission" line, a term that became a generic for the style.11

Rush-seated chair made
for Swedenborgian Church

Bruce Porter designed two decorative windows of double-paned, opalescent leaded glass that bring muted accents of color into the sanctuary. The first is round, embedded in the east wall's gable, constantly visible to the seated congregation. Rather than an ecclesiastical scene, it is a natural one, depicting a dove poised on the edge of a basin with a blossom-laden branch overhead. Irises nod in the lower corners of the central scene, surrounded by a multihued border

Swedenborgian Church, under construction

pattern. The second window, on the sanctuary's garden side, depicts St. Christopher holding the infant Jesus aloft on his shoulders as they cross a stream. The dark, swirling blues and greens of the stream are notable in that the method of manufacture of the material itself contributes significantly to the beauty and intention of the design.

With its close association of fne art and building craft, wrapped in the spiritual and intellectual mantle of Joseph Worcester's Swedenborgianism, the church is, both in the process of its creation and in physical fact, a paradigm of what the Arts and Crafts movement was striving to be. High thinking and simple living (or in this case, worshiping) were brought together in a structure full of lofty spirit inspired by nature. In 1903 Charles Keeler elegantly characterized the influence of the church on the region and hinted at its Arts and Crafts lineage:

The spirit of the [church], with all its quiet restfulness, its homelike charm, its naive grace, has sunk deep in the lives of a small but earnest group of men and women. . . . The message of its builder has reached his mark, and here and there through city and town, homes have been reared in the same simple fashionplain, straightforward, genuine homes, covered with unpainted shingles, or built of rough brick, with much natural redwood inside, in broad

Moody house (1897), living room

First Unitarian Church (1898), porch detail

unvarnished panels. . . . To find this spirit, which would have been a delight to William Morris, so strongly rooted as to assume almost the aspect of a cult, is, I take it, one of the most remarkable features of a civilization so new as that of modern San Francisco.12

Those who participated in the making of the church, not least Schweinfurth, also brought its lessons to later work. His Moody house returns to devices used in the church, boldly combining traditions. It features a Dutch stepped gable and open porches reminiscent of Italian loggias. Similarly, Schweinfurth's First Unitarian Church in Berkeley of 1898 has a domestic bearing, close to the tone of his earlier effort for Brown and Worcester, by way of its low-pitched gabled roof and rustic redwood pillars with the bark left on them.

Schweinfurth's later independent work explored more literally the possibilities of adapting California's Hispanic tradition to contemporary architecture. Through his efforts on the Swedenborgian Church and with the stimulus offered by Joseph Worcester, he had created one of the earliest manifestations of the Arts and Crafts movement on the West Coast and, indeed, in the United States.

Continues...

Excerpted from Toward a Simpler Way of Life: The Arts and Crafts Architects of California by Robert Winter, editor Copyright 1997 by Robert Winter, editor. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520209168
• ISBN 13: 9780520209169
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320