book review

Brown's Progress

Arthur Brown Jr.: Progressive Classicist
By Jeffrey T. Tilman
W.W. Norton & Company, New York, NY; 2006
272 pp.; hardcover; 30 color and 200 b&w illustrations; $60
ISBN 0-393-73178-2

Reviewed by Domiane Forte

It is most assuredly the case that songs in praise of many a worthy architect are kept in silence by the lack of interest of worthy monographers. It is also unfortunately true that many a monograph, biographical or otherwise, is mishandled either because the historian attempts to cover too many aspects, or doesn't properly treat of the essential matter that really shouldn't be missed. One thing is for certain: many of those architects whose work is more than worthy of praise and study will not be the subject of more than one monograph in any one or two generations.

It was, therefore, with a reserved sense of anticipation that I began reading a new monograph of a favorite architect. I wanted to see it done right the first, and potentially only, time. Thankfully, Jeffrey T. Tilman's new biography, Arthur Brown Jr.: Progressive Classicist, which covers the life and practice of one of the greatest architectural treasures not only of California but also of the American Classical tradition, does not disappoint.

Arthur Brown (1874-1957) began his formal architectural education at the University of California, Berkeley, although it was at a very early age, through travels with his architect father and art-loving mother, that his love affair with the built world began. During his time at Berkeley, he, along with other notable Californian architects in potentiae – such as Julia Morgan and Harvey Wiley Corbett – studied under the most efficient mentorship of Bernard Maybeck.

This mode of informal atelier, held in the home of Maybeck, must be viewed as a wonderful preparatory experience for Brown's entrance to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1896 for a significantly more formal atelier environment. It would be an understatement to say that his time at the ecole was a success, for Brown won the Prix Godeboeuf, and placed second in the Prix Rougevin, under the able tutelage of Victor Laloux. The former being the greatest prize awarded after the Prix de Rome itself, while the latter had never been won by the winner of the Godeboeuf in the same year, and was lost to none other than Paul Cret.

During his recount of Brown's particular projects while in Atelier Laloux, Tilman leads the reader through a delightful diversion, describing the everyday life for the students, albeit only the American students, at the ecole. This diversion prefigures the structure of the whole, as the chapters are organized such that more general topics, as well as presentations of Brown's theoretical underpinnings, are described in chapters alternating with more particular and thematic projects that Brown dealt with over the course of his career. Surprisingly, it is this structure that satisfies all. The historian in us all can delight in the meticulously researched data described in the even-numbered chapters, given the astute evaluations of Brown's intellectual and pragmatic output, while the architectural practitioner in us can learn from the odd-numbered chapters how Brown applied his theory and method in answering design problems of any scale and in multiple locales.

Brown returned to America, armed with a decently well-connected family, and an insatiable appetite for high-quality work. Immediately following the formation of the firm of Bakewell & Brown with John Bakewell Jr., San Francisco was rocked by the great earthquake of 1906, and it must be from some greater plan that out of the rubble and ashes Brown and Bakewell were among those who were entrusted with the rebuilding of the city, initially in stone, but ultimately in spirit.

From 1905 until the firm's dissolution in 1927, Bakewell & Brown had well over 100 commissions, ranging from simple memorial headstones to the city halls of San Francisco and Pasadena. Together, they tirelessly applied universal principles to regional situations. According to Tilman, Brown remained convinced throughout his architectural career "that the formal principles he had learned in Paris were as applicable to twentieth-century building as they had been two millennia earlier, and that it was the job of the architect to apply this ethic of design to new programs, materials, and construction practices."

Brown's fastidious involvement with the construction of the San Francisco City Hall is a testament to his excellence in fulfilling this job description of an architect. The city hall was completed on time and 15 percent under the original appropriation and three percent under the revised budget. This was no small feat given the nature of a city fraught with scandal and corruption, "the likes of which even 'Boss' Tweed's New York barely approached," as Tilman states.

While Bakewell was also trained at the ecole and the two men enjoyed a great deal of mutual respect, it is apparent from Tilman's descriptions that the true creative backbone of the firm was Brown himself; a fact that Arthur's wife Jessamine was not shy to pronounce. According to family oral history, every day at breakfast she would ask her husband, "Is this the day we fire Johnny Bakewell?" While it just might have been the "gentle" pressure from his wife, it was more likely that it was the invitation to participate in the reshaping of Federal Triangle in Washington, DC, that ultimately led Brown to dissolve the partnership.

Like his mentor at the ecole, Victor Laloux, Brown made the conscious decision to become a primarily regional architect, while still taking part in the architectural development of a nation through work in the capital city. "He most wished to be remembered as an architect whose buildings supported the political and cultural life of the region, the nation, and the world," Tilman writes. This is a natural, albeit rarely followed, tendency for any architect.

It is with great acuity that Tilman presents the life and work of Arthur Brown not merely as a celebration of a particularly talented individual from a particular time and place, but rather as an exemplary model after which contemporary architects would do well to pattern their own professional lives. It is with some irony and misfortune that the architectural campus that seeded the first fruits of Arthur Brown's development, and the same campus at Berkeley to which he returned and did so much to reshape, turned so far away from the ideals he worked and stood for.

The book contains ample illustrations that satisfactorily tell the story for those practicing architects among us whose time constraints or habits unfortunately keep them from reading the entirety of the text. Especially noteworthy are the numerous and beautiful competition renderings from Brown's own hand, although it is rather unfortunate that there are relatively few plans presented at a readable scale. In the words of Victor Laloux, "You can put forty good façades on a good plan, but without a good plan you cannot have a good façade." All in all, the book falls into relatively few of the common traps of architectural biography and would be a valuable addition to any academic's bibliography, principal's library, draftsman's cubicle or curious citizen's coffee table. TB

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