Arthur Brown Jr, Progressive Classicist
Arthur Brown Jr (1874-1957) was trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and returned to San Francisco to become one of the city’s most renowned architects. His amazing career demonstrated his versatility seen in the designs for the French Neoclassical San Francisco City Hall, the Romanesque Art Institute, the Byzantine Temple Emmanuel and the Art Deco Coit Tower. He went on to design Pasadena City Hall, the San Diego railroad station, the Federal Triangle in Washington DC and Sproul Hall at UC Berkeley.
Brown’s first major Bay Area building, designed and built eight years after graduating from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
Bakewell and Brown’s masterpiece. The winning entry for a competition to rebuild City Hall after the 1906 Earthquake and Fire and completed in time for the Panama Pacific Exposition to celebrate both the city’s reconstruction and the opening of the Panama Canal. French Neoclassicism at its most sophisticated.
The rotunda is one of the grandest spaces in the city with its splendid staircase that flows town into the hall like molten lava.
At the same time they were designing the Neoclassical City Hall in San Francisco, Bakewell and Brown designed the Union Station in San Diego in a Spanish Mission style to coincide with San Diego’s Panama Pacific Expo in Balboa Park.
The station Waiting Room
Bakewell and Brown were equally versatile in Romanesque architecture here at the Art Institute on Russian Hill, San Francisco.
The Art Institute was added to forty years later by a Le Corbusian extension by Paffard Keating Clay in 1965. Both buildings are built out of poured-in-place concrete.
Brown was skilled in a range of styles including in Byzantine architecture in his majestic designs for Temple Emmanuel on Presidio Heights.
The design has a fine courtyard entrance leading to the main temple.
Bakewell and Brown designed one of San Francisco’s most distinguished office buildings, the headquarters for PG&E on Lower Market Street.
It was designed to match the adjacent Matson Shipping Building by George Kelham.
Brown’s design for Pasadena City Hall is one of his finest buildings, a heroic entrance to a civic courtyard.
Brown was the architect for several of the government buildings in the Federal Triangle between the Capitol and the White House, fulfilling the intentions of the 1909 Macmillan Plan for the reconstruction of Washington along City Beautiful planning principles.
Brown’s Art Deco style monument on the top of Telegraph Hill to celebrate the work of the firefighters who helped save the city after the 1906 Earthquake and Fire.
Brown was campus architect for both UC Berkeley and Stanford University.
At Stanford he designed the Hoover Tower and library in a combination of Art Deco and Mission Revival styles.
At the end of his career Arthur Brown was hired to design the first public housing project in San Francisco. Located on Bernal Heights the design consists of a series of linked courtyards organized along a pedestrian spine that step down the hill. Two-story concrete, walk-up flats. Recently handsomely restored by Gelfand Architects.