We don't go to the movies very often. I think the last movie we saw in a theater was a James Bond. That Sean Connery guy just might have a career in acting. OK, it wasn't THAT long ago. It was the most recent Bond film. You know, the one with a villain intent on world domination. Bond drives a cool car and there's an attractive woman. That one.

So obviously, we haven't seen Inception, a new Summer blockbuster that opened a couple of weeks ago. In fact, I know almost nothing about it. I have a vague notion that it is a thriller of some sort. And I know that it stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page and the Freeman A. Ford house. Honestly, I had to look that up. I've never heard of any of those people except for DiCaprio. Believe it or not, I've never seen one of his movies -- please refer to the first sentence of this post.
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Advance copies of my book have arrived at the publisher's offices. My publisher is F+W Media. Popular Woodworking Magazine is published by a separate division of the same company. Therefore, the editors at PopWood have seen the book. (I haven't yet seen it -- a disadvantage of being located far, far away.)
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Yesterday I saw a quote, posted on Twitter and Facebook, from a 1963 New York Times editorial. It reads, "We will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed." In other words, that which we choose to stop honoring says more about us than that which we choose to honor. That seems about right to me.

There's a straightforward corollary here regarding architecture: We should be judged not by the buildings we erect but by those we demolish. Our societal memory is faulty; our quest for the new, unrelenting; our thirst for the almighty dollar, unquenchable. Nothing and no one can stand in the path of progress. It's unAmerican. Those who attempt to do so are subject to scorn and ridicule.
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Furniture, lighting and art glass designed by Greene & Greene resides in at least fourteen major museums in the United States. Ten of those fourteen own pieces from the Robert R. Blacker house and two more have Blacker pieces on loan. Why is it that one commission so dominates the firm's representative work? Even if we restrict the menu to only those houses for which the Greenes designed decorative objects in large numbers, there would be roughly a dozen from which to choose.

There are several reasons for the predominance of Blacker pieces. The number of pieces designed for that house is very large. There are complete suites for the entry, living room, dining and breakfast rooms and the owner's bedroom. The furniture and lighting demonstrate inspired design and excellent execution which, naturally, makes them of interest to museums. However, the primary reason for the presence of many Blacker items in collections, both institutional and private, has to do with a yard sale.
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The Robert R. Blacker house. It is difficult to put into words how stunningly, spectacularly beautiful it is. I first became aware of the Blacker house by reading Randell Makinson's book about Greene & Greene, The Passion and the Legacy, a little over a decade ago. It was in those pages that I first encountered the claim that Charles and Henry Greene considered the Blacker house to be their masterpiece.

The David B. Gamble house, designed soon after the Blacker house, is the best known building by Greene & Greene because it has been open for public tours for more than thirty years. It too is spectacular, a wonderful testament to the marvelous possibilities afforded by the coming together of design genius with enlightened client, substantial budget and dedicated craftsmen. The total unification of the result leaves one in awe.
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Patty and I moved to Central Ohio in 1996. We had just gotten out of grad school when Patty got a job in R&D for a very large company. Large doesn't quite cover it, let's say soul-robbingly huge instead. But I digress. We settled in Dublin, a wonderful suburb of Columbus located about midway between the city and Soul-robbingly Huge, Inc. After spending a year at Indiana University (commuting on weekends), I got a position at Ohio State. We bought a house, had a couple of kids, bought a station wagon with fake wood paneling on the side. Life was good.

The "Central" in Central Ohio indicates that it is located, more-or-less, in the middle of the state. About two hours to Cleveland and a little less to Cincinnati. We'd been to Cincinnati years earlier when Patty's sister lived there for a time but we had never visited Cleveland. After living in Ohio for several years, we still hadn't been to Cleveland. Locals were beside themselves. "You've never been to Cleveland?! Why not?" We didn't have a good answer. We weren't avoiding that fine city, we simply hadn't gone.
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Greene & Greene are best known for a small set of houses known as the Ultimate Bungalows. As the name implies, these houses are the ultimate expression of the Greene & Greene aesthetic and, perhaps, of the Arts & Crafts in the United States. (See the entry from June 3, 2010 for a discussion of which houses belong in that set. For the purposes of this discussion, we'll adhere to the traditional set: Blacker, Ford, Gamble, Pratt and Thorsen.)

Of course, the Ultimates didn't arise from the ether. They represent the culmination of an intense evolutionary process that occurred over the previous five years. In particular, a number of houses from 1906-07 provided the link between earlier houses and the Ultimates. Without houses such as the Phillips, Pitcairn, Cole and Bolton, one might be puzzled by the appearance of the Blacker and Gamble houses.
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The photo I am sharing today is from the dining-room of the Mary Ranney house. Mary Ranney was a draftsperson in the Greene & Greene office. In 1907 she built a home in the "Little Switzerland" neighborhood, in close proximity to Charles Greene's house, the Cole house, the Hawks house, the first Van Rossem house, the Irwin house, the White sisters' house and the site where the Gamble house would soon appear. The design of the house is credited to Mary Ranney herself.
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Continuing the occasional series of entries excerpting from Poems of Wood & Light, what follows is the Preface.


On a beautiful Southern California evening a couple of years ago, I had one of the more surreal experiences of my life. At about sunset, I found myself standing at the front door of the Gamble house, the best-known of a series of significant and wonderful residences designed by Charles and Henry Greene in the first decade of the 20th century. Having rung the doorbell, I waited for someone to answer, to open the door to the most beautiful man-made place I had ever been.
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The first time I saw photos of the Cordelia Culbertson house, a sizable Greene & Greene commission from 1911-13, I didn't react well. This Culbertson house, not to be confused with that for James Culbertson a decade earlier, is not very Greene-ish. Ralph Adams Cram described the work of the Greenes as "a wooden style built woodenly." That phrase applies less well to the house for Cordelia Culbertson and her sisters than almost any other built by Greene & Greene after 1902. After that first encounter, via Randell Makinson's The Passion and the Legacy, I probably said something along the lines of, "This is Greene & Greene?"
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Pasadena Heritage Craftsman Weekend is one of THE events on the annual Arts & Crafts calendar. Earlier today, PH sent an email with some information about the 2010 edition (you can sign up on their website to receive such emails). I'm sure that there will be many wonderful events but I haven't been able to look beyond the Saturday evening reception.

Each year, the showcase event during Craftsman Weekend occurs on Saturday evening. It consists of a house tour and reception at an Arts & Crafts house of note. Greene & Greene have been well represented in recent years with the Cordelia Culbertson, Robinson and Ford houses all playing host to the event. Though distance usually prevents my attendance, I was there in 2007 for the Robinson tour and reception. It was quite an experience, outstanding in every regard.
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Each Fall, on the third weekend in October, Pasadena plays host to a highly anticipated event – Craftsman Weekend. A venture of Pasadena Heritage, Craftsman Weekend gives visitors the opportunity to tour historic homes, including bungalows in Pasadena’s Bungalow Heaven neighborhood and, quite often, a house by Greene & Greene. Houses on the schedule in recent years include the Cordelia Culbertson house, the Edgar Camp house, the Caroline de Forest house, the Laurabelle Robinson house and the Freeman Ford house. In addition, each year the weekend includes a marketplace where antique dealers and craftspeople exhibit and sell their wares. Included in the marketplace is a silent auction.

During Craftsman Weekend 2007, I bid on a beautiful, small art glass panel made by one of the exhibitors. Looking as though it was straight out of a Greene & Greene house, this piece already had a place in my home, if only in my mind. That’s as close as it came to my home – I was outbid. I learned later that the successful bidder was twelve years old, I had lost to a child. Apparently, a well-funded child. More than two years later, I can still see that beautiful stained glass, by Southern California artist John Hamm, so similar in style to the wonderful work of Emil Lange.
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In 1903, Greene & Greene designed the first of what would ultimately be three houses for client Josephine Van Rossem. Intended for use as a rental property, the first Van Rossem house was not a particularly large commission for the firm. That fact did not, however, preclude exceptional work by the Greenes. Mrs. Van Rossem chose an excellent location -- the Park Place neighborhood, just several doors from Charles' own home. The second owner of the house, James Neil, had the Greenes make significant changes. Thus, this house is often referred to as the Van Rossem/Neil house.

The defining feature of this wonderful home is visible from the curb. It is, in fact, at the curb. The Van Rossem/Neil house boasts the world's greatest clinker brick wall. Clinker bricks are bricks deformed and darkened by excessive heat during firing. Greene & Greene made extensive use of clinkers, to very good effect. None more so, however, than the impressive wall that spans the front of the Van Rossem/Neil property. In addition to clinker bricks, the wall incorporates massive arroyo stones and green Chinese tiles that make another appearance in the dining-room in the house's interior. The same tiles are also featured in a wooden gate toward the East end of the wall.
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The importance of Peter and John Hall to the work of Charles and Henry Greene has been recognized for some time. Rightly so. In fact, "important" likely undersells the case. The talented craftsmen that the Halls brought to their partnership with the Greenes allowed for increasingly complex and sophisticated designs. Greene & Greene could create with impunity, confident that the workers in the Hall shop were up to the challenge and that the quality of implementation would be very high.
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