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Toward a Simpler Way of Life: The Arts and Crafts Architects of California

University of California Press

San Francisco Bay Area residents of the 1890s witnessed a heady decade of creative architectural experimentation. Lacking an underlying theory or manifesto, it could hardly have been called a movement. But the period was characterized by a growing desire among a small group of young architects to reinterpret the region's architectural heritage. This desire, fueled by a combination of raw talent and a romantic outlook (tempered by formal training), led to some of the most idiosyncratic and thought-provoking building designs of the early Arts and Crafts period in America. This band of independent-minded designers included Ernest Coxhead, Bernard Maybeck, Louis Christian Mullgardt, A. C. Schweinfurth, and others who helped to steer the domestic architecture of San Francisco and its environs away from an earlier fascination with ornamented Victorian Eastlake, Stick, and Italianate designs toward simpler houses that were more responsive to the surrounding landscape and more reflective of the maturing community's desire for a cosmopolitan and cultural identity.

Albert Cicero Schweinfurth (18641900) is today perhaps the least celebrated of this group, though his designs were praised and published in prominent periodicals during his brief career. He would undoubtedly be better known had he not caught typhoid fever and died at the age of thirty-six. Born in Auburn, New York, the son of a engineer-turned-wood-carver who specialized in architectural ornament, Schweinfurth and his three brothers all became architects, learning the basics in their father's wood-carving shop. Albert later apprenticed as a draftsman, gaining experience in the Boston offices of the nationally respected firm of Peabody and Stearns. While there, he was taught to value the regional traditions of American Colonial architecture and to seek ways to reflect those traditions in his work. Working in 1880s Boston, he also came under the inescapable influence of H. H. Richardson, who was based in that city. Along with design responsibilities he was to receive later in New York City and San Francisco, this background prepared Schweinfurth to pursue a regional architecture.1

After working sporadically for his contemporary A. Page Brown in New York from 1885 to 1888, Schweinfurth came west for his health, first to Denver in 1889, then to San Francisco in 1890. Brown himself had come to California two years earlier to work on commissions for the wealthy Crocker family, and he probably persuaded Schweinfurth to make the move from Denver to join him in San Francisco. Once there, working as chief designer in Brown's office, Schweinfurth

Swedenborgian Church (1894), garden side

sought to produce an architecture that reflected a reverence for California's Hispanic past while avoiding the imitations of the Franciscan missions that characterized so much of the Mission Revival period.

As head designer in Brown's office (succeeding Willis Polk in that position), Schweinfurth deserves credit as the principal designer, if not architect of record, of the San Francisco Church of the New Jerusalem.2 Also known as the Swedenborgian Church, the building was commissioned in 1894 by the minister and amateur architect Joseph Worcester. It is known that Bernard Maybeck was also drafting in Brown's firm during the same period, and it has often been suggested that he had a major role in the design of the church. (As partial evidence, there exists a rough preliminary sketch resembling the final design, dated 1894, which is signed on the back by Maybeck.) However, most of the available evidence, both stylistic and anecdotal, indicates that Schweinfurth's hand was at work on Worcester's vision, inspired by a drawing that the artist Bruce Porter had made of a church in Italy's Po River valley.3 Being the junior draftsman in the office, Maybeck was probably involved in sketching decorative details.4

This Italian church, photographed
about 1900, may have been a model
for the Swedenborgian Church.

The modest Swedenborgian Church, set in the residential Pacific Heights neighborhood, heralds the arrival of Arts and Crafts tenets in Northern California architecture and so places Schweinfurth among the pioneering California Arts and Crafts architects. But more important, the ensemble of diverse forces and personalities that brought about the church's creation paints a picture of true Arts and Crafts collaboration, inspired by a minister who appreciated both the teaching potential of architecture and the sympathetic resonances between Swedenborgian teachings and the writings of John Ruskin and William Morris. Indeed, the church's spiritual underpinnings reveal much about its bricks and mortar.

Emanuel Swedenborg (16881772), for whom the Swedenborgian faith is named, was a Swedish scientist, philosopher, and theologian who spent many of his later years articulating a philosophy of nature. According to Swedenborg, natural objects hold specific spiritual significance. He extended this belief even to

architecture, which he considered a divine art. "The designs of heaven's buildings," Swedenborg wrote, "are so perfect that you would say they represent the very essence of the art; and small wonder, since the art of architecture comes from heaven."5 Many in his own time and since also considered him to be a mystic, an attribute that would have appealed to late-nineteenth-century followers of the Arts and Crafts movement.

The principal figure to bring Swedenborgian teachings to the Bay Area was Joseph Worcester. Raised near Boston and educated at Harvard, Worcester was regarded throughout his life as exceptionally devout. Though as a youth he had considered becoming an architect, he ultimately followed the example of his father, the Reverend Thomas Worcester, and like his brothers, John and Benjamin, pursued theological studies and became a minister in the family's faith. In an unpublished reminiscence written by a friend, it was said of Worcester: "Not without hesitation had he chosen his life [of] service. Strongly artistic and gifted with a fine instinct for line and proportion, he had seriously thought of being an architect. A rarely useful one he would have made, so expressive of pure taste and harmony, so free from garishness would his designs have been."6 On a visit to California in the mid-1860s, young Joseph was moved by the area's natural beauty and by the people he met, including John Muir. Upon returning to Boston for his ordination, he overcame his father's objections and returned to California a few years later to follow his theological calling there.

Worcester's interest in architecture, in the region's scenic appeal, and in the writings of Ruskin and Morris all had significant ramifications. The simple, unpainted wood-shingle bungalow he designed for himself in 1877 in the East Bay town of Piedmont is probably the earliest rustic suburban house designed in the west, predating even the East Coast's famous Shingle-style resort houses and bungalows. The house (and its...