Leslie M. Freudenheim, Building with Nature: Inspiration for the Arts and Crafts Home, Gibbs Smith, 2005.
Leslie M. Freudenheim’s Building with Nature: Inspiration for the Arts and Crafts Home, is a reworking of her earlier (1974) Building with Nature, Roots of the San Francisco Bay Region Tradition, written with Elizabeth Sussman. Her new book has two objectives – one descriptive, one argumentative. Freudenheim, first, presents a thorough overview of the first three decades (1880-1910) of the California Arts and Crafts movement, especially in terms of its architecture. Second, she argues a thesis – that the Reverend Joseph Worcester, known best as the leader and first minister of San Francisco’s famous Swendenborgian church, was the central instigator, advocate, and proponent of the movement.
The book excels as a general introduction to the Bay Area’s pioneering Arts and Crafts community – its practitioners, its theory, its practice, and its influence. With an engaging and conversational tone, Freudenheim traces the work and interactions of the movement’s founders – Bernard Maybeck, Ernest Coxhead, Willis Polk, John Hudson Thomas, John Galen Howard, and others who created the Craftsman aesthetic – simple structures, unpainted shingles, wood interiors with furniture built in, overhanging eves, and (relative) affordability. The text is wonderfully supplemented with sepia photographs.
The less successful element of Freudenheim’s book is her thesis giving Joseph Worcester central position as inventor of the Bay Area style. Speculating broadly from private correspondence and scrapbooks, she portrays Worcester not only as the most influential advocate and disseminator of the arts and crafts philosophy but also as the hidden intelligence behind much of its noteworthy architecture.
The 1976 Piedmont bungalow Worcester designed for himself, for example, she anoints as the Ur-cottage, the shingled bungalow prototype for all that was to come. His rustic cottage, she posits, so impressed his young neighbor, Bernard Maybeck, that Maybeck emulated its principles in his own Berkeley buildings. The Worcester designed homes on San Francisco’s Russian Hill, build some 10 years later, brought Arts and Crafts across the Bay, establishing a model that then spread through California, and beyond.
Similarly, she credits Worcester with inspiring the famous “mission” styled chair built for the Swendenborgian church, and with working behind the scenes to bring John Galen Howard to Berkeley as campus architect. According to Freudenheim, Worcester felt that Howard was likely to be far more sympathetic to the Arts and Crafts orientation than the Beaux Arts architect who actually prevailed in Phoebe Apperson Hearst’s famous campus design competition of 1899. “Worcester engineered Howard’s selection,” she writes, implying that he also powerfully influenced Howard’s own plans for campus buildings.
As history, Freudenheim’s speculations concerning Worcester’s preeminence rarely rise beyond the level of conjecture, and Freudenheim does hedge her thesis with myriad “we can speculate’s,” “it is likely’s,” and “perhaps’s.” While her hypothesis remains shaky, the book as a whole provides a refreshing retelling of Bay Area architectural history, and the valuable contributions of one of its lesser-known participants.
Contrary to this review, Mrs. Freudenheim has thoroughly researched the importance of Joseph Worcester and provides extensive quotations and footnotes to support her view.
One of the flaws in Leslie Freudenheim’s emphasis on the uniqueness and broad influence of Rev. Joseph Worcester is the lack of information on the Swedenborgian religion, which fits quite comfortably with the tenets of the Arts & Crafts movement. Secondly, there is an apparent lack of knowledge in regard to Rev. Worcester’s background. His father was one of the most distinquished figures in the Swedenborgian church. Both of his brothers were Swedenborgian ministers. One was the pastor of the Newtonville, MA church, which was designed by Ralph Adams Cram, one of the most important architects of the day and the chief articulator of the Gothic Revival in America. While far from the rustic California church, this too is an important facet of the Arts & Crafts movement. Years before Joseph Worcester moved to California, his brother, Rev. Benj. Worcester, designed the beautiful English Gothic Swedenborgian church (1860) in Waltham, MA.
Also, the Swedenborgians were not only devout and connected to nature, they were also very well educated. Most of the churches prior to Joseph Worcester’s San Francisco design are by very fine architects. Just a few years later (1899-1901) the Cambridge, MA Swedenborgian church was designed by Langford Warren, one of the central figures in the Boston Arts & Crafts Society and the founder of the architecture school at Harvard. It is a jewel of the Arts & Crafts movement.
This does not deminish Rev. Joseph Worcester’s influence in the Bay Area, but that influence did not spred from California to the Northeast. It does illustrate that the fusion of religion, esthetics, and nature was typical of the Swedenborgians. We should not forget that Ralph Waldo Emerson praised E.Swedenborg, Balzac wrote about the religion, Johnny Appleseed’s deeds were very much connected to that faith, as were the late paintings of George Inness and those by Keith. It is not exculsive to…or invented…in California.
In regard to the eventual selection of John Galen Howard for the Berkeley master plan, the tantrums of Emile Benard played a more decisive role in him being dropped than the behind the scenes role of Rev. Worcester in steering it toward Howard. And of course it should not be forgotten that Howard quickly squeezed Maybeck out of his faculty position at the university.