“The bungalow architect must study carefully the practical conditions of the problem,” wrote Charles Greene in 1915. “And the personality of the owner forms one of the most difficult and at the same time most interesting parts of it.”
By the time he penned those words, Charles and his younger brother Henry had already done the major work that would secure their legacy as pioneers of “a new and native architecture,” in the language of the special commendation they would receive from the American Institute of Architects more than 35 years later in 1952.
The homes and furnishings the firm of Greene & Greene built (mostly) in the leafy Los Angeles suburb of Pasadena, between 1906 and 1914 incorporated elements of Native American, Asian and European design, but were irreducibly the product of the brothers’ own aesthetic of simplicity. They believed buildings should exist in harmony with the climate and the natural composition of their surroundings, and that homes should express the lifestyle and even the personality of the people who lived in them.
Of the furnished houses the brothers created with master builders Peter and John Hall, only the Gamble House survives in its original state, protected by the University of Southern California School of Architecture since 1966. But a Renwick Gallery exhibit on view through early June offers visitors the opportunity to step through a replica of the iconic, U-shaped 1903 Arturo Bandini House. The recreation is a highlight among the roughly 130 objects — tables, metalwork, rugs, lamps, architectural drawings, stained glass panels — that comprise the largest-ever overview of the brothers’ body of work. The show is particularly rich in material dated circa 1907-1910, the apex of their collaboration.
One could suggest that the monumental houses the Greenes built sometimes venerated their designers more than their owners, and the show offers abundant evidence both to support that notion and to rebut it. Excerpts of correspondence with Mary Gamble, James Culbertson and Adeladie Tichenor, among the Greenes’ notable clients, amusingly illustrate that to commission the brothers was to engage in what might charitably be called creative collaboration. When Charles Pratt wrote to protest the soaring cost of his Ojai, Calif., residence, completed in 1911, Charles Green assured him that his house was a priceless work of art.
It took a while for the rest of the world to agree. The Greenes were all but forgotten in the 1920s and ’30s. But by the time the brothers died, in the mid-1950s, a new generation of admirers hailed them as the proponents of an early strain of Modernism — one that was distinctly and irreducibly American.
If you go
“The Art and Craft of Greene & Greene”
Where: Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 17th St. and Pennsylvania Ave. NW
When: Through June 7
Info: Free; 202-633-7970; americanart.si.edu
