Arthur Brown, Jr. papers, 1859-1990,, bulk 1910-1950

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Summary

Abstract:
The Arthur Brown, Jr. Papers largely document the buildings designed by Arthur Brown, Jr. as a member of the firms Bakewell & Brown (1905-1927) and Arthur Brown, Jr. and Associates (1927-1950), through manuscript materials and drawings. Records also reflect the professional career of Arthur Brown, Jr., and, to a lesser extent, the personal life of the architect.
Extent:
Number of containers: 107 boxes, 4 oversize boxes, 575 oversize folders, 225 rolled drawings Linear feet: approximately 390 203 digital objects (207 images)
Language:
Collection materials are in English , French

Background

Scope and content:

The Arthur Brown, Jr. Papers largely document the buildings designed by Arthur Brown, Jr. as a member of the firms Bakewell & Brown (1905-1927) and Arthur Brown, Jr. and Associates (1927-1950), through manuscript materials and drawings. Records also reflect the professional career of Arthur Brown, Jr., and, to a lesser extent, the personal life of the architect.

The Arthur Brown, Jr. Papers are organized into ten series according to the Standard Series for Architecture and Landscape Design Records (Kelcy Shepherd and Waverly Lowell, 2000): Personal Papers; Professional Papers; Office Records; Project Records; Pasadena City Hall; Saint Mark's Cathedral; San Francisco City Hall; San Francisco War Memorial; United States Government; and the University of California, Berkeley.

The Personal Papers and Professional Papers series are comprehensive, spanning the full life of the architect and documenting many aspects of his personal life and professional activities outside the design of buildings, including his correspondence with other architects and design professionals and his membership and service in numerous organizations. Correspondence with professional associates who were also friends are filed in the Professional Papers series, and correspondence with clients who were also friends, namely Mrs. Truxtun (Marie) Beale, William and Agnes Bourne, and Mrs. (Celia) Tobin Clark, are filed by client name in the Project Records series with the associated architectural project.

The Personal Papers also document the lives of Arthur Brown, Jr.'s family members and his close associate, Jean-Louis Bourgeois. There is very minimal documentation of the life of John Bakewell, Jr., although some materials do exist within the collection primarily as part of the transfer of the Bakewell & Brown collection from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). This Bakewell & Brown collection, which had been originally donated to UCSB by the descendants of John Bakewell, Jr., is seemingly John Bakewell, Jr.'s share of the records of Bakewell & Brown.

Documents relating to Brown's work on major design committees such as the Board of Architectural Consultants Board of Consulting Architects for the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, the Architectural Commission for the Chicago World's Fair of 1933, the Architectural Commission for the Golden Gate International Exposition 1937-1940, and the Board of Consulting Architects to the Architect of the US Capitol 1956-1957 are typically placed in the Professional Papers series according to the Standard Series for Architectural and Landscape Design Records. However, in this case, because there is often a large design element to these particular committees, these records have been located in the Project Records or Major Project Records series.

The Office Records are less complete. Some of the obvious holes in the chronology of these records were filled in part with the transfer of the Bakewell & Brown collection from UCSB. The majority of the Office Records are the financial files of the firms Bakewell & Brown and Arthur Brown, Jr. and Associates, but some significant elements of this series are correspondence between Arthur Brown, Jr. and his primary employees and other personnel records.

The Project Records series contains a nearly complete collection of architectural drawings, including some preliminary sketches and presentation drawings, for most projects designed by Arthur Brown, Jr., although some significant deficiencies in drawings are listed below. This series also includes a large number of full scale detail (FSD) drawings for many of the larger architectural projects. Textual records for the most part were not retained for many projects. Almost no textual records exist for small residential projects, and for larger residential and some non-residential projects often only building specifications exist. For some larger non-residential projects, including those in the Major Projects series (Pasadena City Hall, Saint Mark's Cathedral, United States Federal Office Building, and the University of California, Berkeley) textual records are fairly complete, although textual records for the San Francisco City Hall, the San Francisco War Memorial, and the Department of Labor/Interstate Commerce Commission building are minimal relative to the size of the projects. Some photographs, clippings, and ephemera related to the architectural projects are also contained in the Project Records Series. A listing of all materials (e.g. drawings, text documents, photographs) available for a given project can be found in the Project Index.

The majority of drawings for the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, Temple Emanu-El, and the Olympic Club were transferred to the original clients by Jessamine Brown soon after the death of Arthur Brown, Jr. in 1957. Consequently, many the University of California, Berkeley, drawings are currently housed in the University Archives collection. The Stanford University drawings transferred in 1957 are currently missing, but any drawings remaining in the Arthur Brown, Jr. Papers were transferred in to the Special Collections and University Archives at Stanford University Library and are housed there as collection SC 707. Temple Emanu-El drawings are currently held in the Temple Emanu-El archives. Olympic Club drawings are currently held in the Olympic Club Archives. In many cases, a small number of drawings for each of these projects exist within the Arthur Brown, Jr. Papers, but they are often not the complete set of final drawings as is the case with many other architectural projects in this collection. Original sets of final drawings for federal projects were retained by the US Government; drawings of the San Francisco Federal Building and the Labor/ICC Building in the collection consist mainly of blueprint duplicates.

After the death of Jessamine Brown in 1970, the Arthur Brown, Jr. Papers were inherited by Arthur Brown Jr.'s daughter Sylvia Brown Jensen and her husband, Rollin Jensen. Both Jensens took a great interest in the collection of Arthur Brown, Jr. materials, even mounting an exhibition of architectural work of Arthur Brown, Jr. at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco in 1966. They continued to promote the work of Arthur Brown, Jr. for much of their lives, and Rollin Jensen, as a self-proclaimed amateur historian, spent a significant amount of time reorganizing and doing research on these records in addition to collecting clippings and ephemera relating to Arthur Brown Jr.'s buildings well into the 1980s. Thus, some of the papers relating to Rollin Jensen's research have been retained in the Personal Papers series.

Biographical / historical:
Family and Education

Arthur Brown, Jr. was born in 1874 in Oakland, California, the only child of upper middle class parents Arthur Brown, Sr. and Victoria Runyon Brown. Arthur Brown, Sr., was an engineer for Central Pacific Railroad during the completion of the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s. His position as the Superintendent of the Bridges and Buildings Dept put him in close contact with the powerful leaders of the Central Pacific. Along with his regular work for the railroad, including design of the Oakland Mole and the train car ferry Solano, Brown, Sr. was also the chosen construction manager for the Crocker, Hopkins and Stanford mansions in San Francisco. Brown, Jr. later benefited tremendously from these connections: the Big Four and their families provided him with many commissions throughout his career. Mark Hopkins' son, Timothy Hopkins, was in large part responsible for giving many Stanford University commissions to Brown.

After graduating from Oakland High School in 1892, Brown went on to the University of California (UC), Berkeley to study civil engineering. During his time at UC, Brown met local architect Bernard Maybeck, who was at that time teaching drawing courses in the engineering department. Because there was no formal architectural training at Berkeley, Maybeck, who had been trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, took it upon himself to offer architectural training in the evenings at his home. Other participants in the Maybeck studio were, among others, Julia Morgan and Brown's future business partner, John Bakewell, Jr. Presenting design exercises similar to those at the École des Beaux-Arts (the École), Maybeck was preparing his students to eventually go on to study at the French institution.

Brown arrived in Paris in 1896 with the intent of studying at the École. After passing the entrance exams and completing several general courses, Brown joined the atelier of Victor Laloux, a favorite among Americans attending the school and the former atelier of Bay Area architect John Galen Howard. École training at this time emphasized Imperial Roman, Italian Renaissance, and French and Italian Baroque models, with a particular focus on sculptural decoration. Arthur Brown, Jr. excelled at the École, winning numerous prominent competitions sponsored by the school. Moreover, like many other architects of the time, Brown made his lifelong friends at the École. These connections would prove to be key in obtaining many later commissions. Brown graduated from the École in 1901, achieving the status of Architecte Diplômé par le Gouvernement Français. Brown stayed on in France to continue his training in the Atelier Laloux and to travel through Europe until 1903.

In 1916, Brown married Jessamine Garrett of Seattle, a family friend of Brown's École colleague, E. Frère Champney. The Browns had two daughters, Victoria and Sylvia, and in 1925 the Brown family moved to Hillsborough, CA to the home Brown designed for his wife, naming the estate "Le Verger," or "the grove."

Early Architectural Practice (Bakewell & Brown, 1905-1927)

When Brown returned to the United States in 1904, the Beaux-Arts style was very much in vogue. The "White City" of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, with its Greek, Roman, and Baroque inspired buildings and bountiful sculpture, had popularized the style.

After a brief time with the firm Hornblower & Marshall in Washington, DC, Brown moved back to San Francisco to establish himself in the architectural world of the west. He first found employment in the office of Henry Schulze, working on the Folger Coffee roasting building in San Francisco. A year later Brown was approached by fellow École graduate, John Bakewell, Jr. with an offer to open a firm, and the two young architects joined in practice, opening Bakewell & Brown in 1905. Arthur Brown, Jr. acted as the design partner in the firm, while John Bakewell, Jr. handled the administrative and financial tasks of the firm.

The firm thrived in its early years, largely as a result of the opportunities afforded architects in the rebuilding efforts after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. Commissions for houses in Oakland for clients fleeing the ruins of San Francisco were followed by a commission to rebuild the interiors of the City of Paris department store in San Francisco. In 1907, Bakewell & Brown won the competition to design Berkeley City Hall (now the Berkeley Unified School District administration building), for which they designed a building modeled closely on traditional French city halls.

Bakewell & Brown's second success in competition came in 1912. Winning the commission to rebuild the San Francisco city hall, which had been destroyed in the earthquake, was a major accomplishment for such a young firm, and it required a significant increase in Bakewell & Brown's office staff. They invited Jean-Louis Bourgeois, a Frenchman and fellow École colleague, to execute the sculpture program for the building. Bourgeois, a close friend of Brown's, was called back to France to fight during World War I, and, sadly, died in battle in 1915. Other architects and draftsmen that joined the firm early on remained lifelong collaborators and friends of Brown and Bakewell, including John Baur, Edward Frick, Lawrence Kruse, and Ernest Weihe. Upon its completion in 1915, San Francisco city hall was widely accepted as a successful design.

Many significant commissions followed Bakewell & Brown's winning of the San Francisco City Hall competition. In 1913, the firm was hired as the design architect and master planner for Stanford University campus, positions they held until 1942. By 1915 Bakewell & Brown were responsible for the Palace of Horticulture at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco as well as the San Diego station for Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway. In the following years, they designed the Green Library for Stanford University (1919), the Pacific Gas & Electric office building in San Francisco (1922-1926), the Pasadena City Hall (1923-1928), Temple Emanu-El in San Francisco (1923-1928), and the California School of Fine Arts (1924-1928, now the San Francisco Art Institute).

With this success in practice came the demand for Brown to teach architectural design. From 1911-1913 Brown along with Jean-Louis Bourgeois led an atelier with the San Francisco Architectural Club (SFAC), a group formed in 1901 to provide instruction in architectural design for dedicated draftsmen working in leading San Francisco architectural firms. In 1918, Brown was invited to lecture in architecture at Harvard University, but soon returned to San Francisco, where he resumed his teaching efforts as acting professor of architecture at UC Berkeley, filling in for his friend and colleague, John Galen Howard, who was on sabbatical for a semester in 1919. Although Arthur Brown, Jr. was persistently pursued by University architectural programs, he chose full-time practice over teaching soon after his time at UC Berkeley.

Later Architectural Practice (Arthur Brown, Jr. and Associates, 1927-1950)

The firm of Bakewell & Brown dissolved in 1927, although the two former partners continued to collaborate on many later projects, most notably several buildings on the Stanford University campus. After the dissolution, Brown established his own firm, Arthur Brown, Jr. and Associates, while Bakewell formed Bakewell & Weihe with longtime employee Ernest Weihe.

Though Brown had an active office filled with draftsmen through the early 1930s, with large commissions such as Coit Tower, the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House and Veteran's Building, and the United States Department of Labor and Interstate Commerce Commission Building in Washington, DC, the firm suffered through several years of minimal work in the mid-1930s. Though the office continued to produce work, Brown himself spent much of 1934 and 1935 in Europe with his family, returning to a skeleton crew of draftsmen.

Brown also spent a good deal of this phase of his career serving on boards and committees, both local and national, including: the Board of Architectural Consultants for the US Department of the Treasury 1927-1933, the Board of Consulting Architects for the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, the Architectural Commission for the Chicago World's Fair of 1933, Chairman of the Architectural Commission for the Golden Gate International Exposition 1937-1940, and the Board of Consulting Architects to the Architect of the US Capitol 1956-1957.

Friends, colleagues, and influential organizations continually recognized Brown's architectural accomplishments throughout his lifetime. In addition to several awards from the American Institute of Architects, Brown was appointed a Fellow of the AIA in 1930. In 1931, the University of California conferred on Brown an honorary Doctorate of Laws. Brown was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1940 and additionally elected a member of the elite Academy of Arts and Letters in 1954. Brown also became an Associate of the National Academy of Design in 1951 in the Architecture Class, and was elected a Member in 1953.

Despite Brown's large commissions in the early 1930s, in the eyes of the architectural profession and much of the general public the Beaux-Arts mode was going out of style, considered stuffy and irrelevant to the needs of people in the Depression. The new architectural trend was Modernism, which was in such contrast to the ideals and traditions of the Beaux-Arts that Brown spent much of the rest of his life crusading against its acceptance. Brown had a particular dislike for architect Frank Lloyd Wright, seen as the main proponent of American Modernism.

Somewhat defeated by the popularity of Modernism, and his own consequent unpopularity, Brown retreated into institutional work in the late 1930s. The last ten years of his career (1938-1948) were spent as supervising architect for UC Berkeley, a position in which he designed many campus buildings but from which he was ultimately asked to resign to make way for an architect with a more Modern aesthetic. Brown retired from practice in 1950, continuing to consult on various projects including the extension of the US Capitol building and serve on boards until his death in 1957.

Date Event
1909
Berkeley City Hall, Berkeley, CA
City of Paris department store interiors, San Francisco, CA
1915
San Francisco City Hall, San Francisco, CA
Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway Station, San Diego, CA
Panama Pacific International Exposition: Palace of Horticulture, Ghirardelli Chocolate Pavilion, and Welch's Grape Juice Pavilion, San Francisco, CA
1916 Burlingame Country Club, Burlingame, CA
1919 Stanford University: Green Library, Palo Alto, CA
1926 Pacific Gas & Electric building, San Francisco, CA
1928
Pasadena City Hall, Pasadena, CA
Temple Emanu-El, San Francisco, CA
California School of Fine Arts(San Francisco Art Institute), San Francisco, CA
1932
Coit Tower, San Francisco, CA
San Francisco War Memorial Opera House and Veteran's Building, San Francisco, CA
1934
United States Department of Labor & Interstate Commerce Commission building, Washington, DC (currently the Environmental Protection Agency)
Saint Mark's Cathedral, Seattle, WA
1937 Stanford University: Memorial Hall, Palo Alto, CA
1939 Golden Gate International Exposition: Tower of the Sun, San Francisco, CA
1941
Holly Park Housing, San Francisco, CA
Stanford University: Hoover Institution, Palo Alto, CA
1942 University of California, Berkeley: Administration Building (Sproul Hall), Berkeley, CA
1949 University of California, Berkeley: Library Annex (Bancroft Library), Berkeley, CA
Acquisition information:
The Arthur Brown, Jr. papers were donated to The Bancroft Library by Rollin and Sylvia Brown Jensen in 1981. Additions by Rollin and Sylvia Jensen were made in 1985 and 1987. In 2000, the Bakewell Brown Collection at the University of California, Santa Barbara was transferred to The Bancroft Library. Some items were also purchased at auction in 2000. An addition by Margaret Jensen was made in 2002.
Physical location:
Many of the Bancroft Library collections are stored offsite and advance notice may be required for use. For current information on the location of these materials, please consult the Library's online catalog.
Rules or conventions:
Finding Aid prepared using Describing Archives: a Content Standard

Access and use

Location of this collection:
University of California, Berkeley, The Bancroft Library
Berkeley, CA 94720-6000, US
Contact:
510-642-6481
bancref-library@berkeley.edu
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