Greene & Greene

Charles and Henry Greene are key figures of the American Arts and Crafts movement. This large-scale monograph on the Greenes' life and complete range of works features new scholarship, newly commissioned photography, and previously unpublished archival material including recently discovered projects [...]
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Charles and Henry Greene are key figures of the American Arts and Crafts movement. This large-scale monograph on the Greenes' life and complete range of works features new scholarship, newly commissioned photography, and previously unpublished archival material including recently discovered projects. Charles and Henry Greene's work is concentrated in California - where they practised architecture together from 1906-22 before establishing separate offices - and they have become closely identified with the popular regionalist "Craftsman" style. The elegant houses of their peak period, such as the Gamble, Blacker and Thorsen houses, are masterful in their design and execution. No detail was overlooked: the whole interior including furniture, fittings, and glasswork, as well as the building (down to pegs, airvents, and bracing) were conceived as an organic whole, and finished exquisitely. Following the lead of the chronology of their intertwined personal and professional lives, the monograph begins with how the two brothers were raised to be architects and to practice together. they were sent to MIT (then the finest architecture school in America), where their natural artistic skills were combined with an excellent technical grounding, before apprenticing with liberal architects in Boston.After establishing their own practice together they quickly allied themselves with the progressive Arts and Craft movement, a movement they were soon to be shaping as much as responding to. Their distinctive and innovative designs were all-encompassing, treating every component of a house (both inside and out) as an element to be designed. Their work drew prestigious and wealthy clients, but their high fees and exacting (and therefore slow) process eventually led to the break down of their joint practice. The projects of their individual offices, while excellent examples of the Arts and Crafts style, never reached the same aesthetic and architectural level as the fruits of their symbiotic partnership.