Book Review: Greene & Greene, Creating a Style

Greene & Greene, Creating a Style

Book Review: Greene & Greene, Creating a Style
by Randell L. Makinson and Thomas A Heinz

As much as I like a good woodworking book that gives me instructions and dimensions I can use as a basis for a project, I have just as big an affinity for books that make me think about what I’m creating before I even make my first saw cut. These are the kinds of books that also help me to stop worrying about being so exact with my measurements and dimensions and just let the form evolve and grow as I build it. This is the spirit I want to nurture in my own artistic style of woodworking.

Greene & Greene: Creating a Style is not your typical coffee table book on Greene & Greene furniture, though it does contain some of the best detailed photographs of Charles & Henry Greene’s works I have seen to date. Instead, this is more of a study of how their architectural style, and resulting furniture style, developed and how they refined this style over the years. It works to provide substance to the architectural beliefs that Charles Greene wrote about early in their career. He said:

Our attempts mostly in the line of domestic architecture may be arranged in three grand divisions: 1) to understand as many phases of human life as possible; 2) to provide for its individual requirement in the most practical and useful way; 3) to make these necessary and useful things pleasurable.

The first chapter discusses plans, beginning with the request for a simple bungalow from Mr. & Mrs. Arturo Bandini in 1903. This U-shaped design was one of their first that encouraged a flowing relationship between inside and outside spaces. In the houses that follow, Makinson and Heinz show you another 13 or so plans, stepping through the evolution of the overall idea of building a structure that is harmonious with its surroundings.

In the second chapter, the focus turns to the materials they used, from shingles and siding to natural stone and brick garden walls. Through their distinctive and creative use of natural materials in their design elements, they fashioned graceful and inviting houses that did not rely upon grandiose budgets.

The chapter most woodworkers are going to jump to is the third one, which focuses on interior rooms they designed in their entirety, from the hardwood flooring laid on a bias to the candlestick sitting on the fireplace mantle. This chapter contains photographs of rooms staged as they would have appeared when the home owners saw them for the first time. Though they depict different rooms, in different houses, during different stages of their architecture career, they always display what Charles Greene referred to as “the oneness of all that exists.” If you take your time, and really examine at the details in the imagery, you can easily find the small things that build on and complement each other to create continuity and harmony within each space.

If you are looking for a book with a bunch of pictures of the typical Greene & Greene elemental styles we see every time Charles or Henry Greene’s name is mentioned, then this may not be the right book for you. But, if you are interested in reading about their first architectural projects and seeing how these projects planted seeds that grew into what we now expect to see, and if you are interested in trying to apply Charles Greene’s third grand division of architectural belief to your own work, to make necessary and useful things that are also a pleasure to touch and use and see, then… maybe this is a book you should consider reading.