Arthur Brown Jr.
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Arthur Brown, Jr. (1874-1957) was an American architect, based in San Francisco. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1896, where he and his future partner, John Bakewell, Jr, were protégés of famed Bay Area architect Bernard Maybeck. Brown went to Paris and graduated from the Ecole des Beaux Arts in 1901, before returning to San Francisco to establish his practice with Bakewell. the firm designed the rotunda for the City of Paris department store in San Francisco and the city hall for Berkeley, California, across the Bay before entering the competition for San Francisco City Hall for which he is best known: the Beaux-Arts structure opened in 1915 (illustration, right). Brown also built the city's War Memorial Opera House (below, left) and Veterans Building, the former in collaboration with G. Albert Lansburgh. Brown was meticulously trained in the rigorous Beaux-Arts tradition, and in the City Hall project his attention extended to the smallest details of light fixtures, floor patterning and doorknobs.
The firm of Brown & Bakewell went on to design the Pacific Gas and Electric main office at Market and Beale, the San Francisco Art Institute, Temple Emanu-el, Pasadena City Hall, the Santa Fe depot in San Diego, the Horticulture Building at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, and many buildings at Stanford University before Brown dissolved the partnership in 1927.
Most of his later San Francisco works employed a stripped-down, abstracted classicism; the poured-concrete Art Moderne Coit Tower (1932), that crowns Telegraph Hill; and the Transbay Transit Terminal, designed with Timothy L. Pflueger, are both considered important Modernist landmarks in the Bay Area. Brown's last works were primarily at UC Berkeley, where Brown served as campus planner and chief architect from 1936 to 1950. His principal buildings there include Sproul Hall, the Bancroft Library, and the Cyclotron Building, commissioned by Ernest Lawrence and J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Brown's Coit Tower was the site of some of the first public works murals executed under the Public Works Administration, later known as the WPA. "The primitive nature of Coit Tower would lend itself better to that sort of thing than other public buildings," was Arthur Brown's first reaction to the project. Diego Rivera included Brown among the designers and craftsmen in his fresco mural of The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City (1931) at the San Francisco Art Institute, which Brown had designed.
In Washington, D. C. Brown designed a group of three buildings (the Interstate Commerce Commission Building, its near twin the Customs Department building (the two are now the home of the Environmental Protection Agency) and the Andrew J. Mellon Departmental Auditorium) that form part of the larger building group, the Federal Triangle, which was the largest construction project undertaken by the US Federal government, before the building of The Pentagon. Preliminary designs were begun in 1927 and construction occupied the Depression years between 1932 and 1934.
The new buildings were to be designed to reflect the "dignity and power of the nation" according to the brief, resulting in a conservative blend of classicism with a timid modernism.
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[edit] References
- Tilman, Jeffrey T. (2006). Arthur Brown Jr., Progressive Classicist. W. W. Norton. ISBN 0-393-73178-2.
