A new and Native Beauty: the art and craft of Greene & Greene.

Edited by Edward R Bosley and Anne E Mallek.

London: Merrell. 2008. [pounds sterling]39.95

Charles Greene and his brother Henry Greene have long been held the founders of a distinctive Californian architecture. As the American Institute of Architects claimed when it finally got round to honouring them in 1952, the Greenes 'reflected with grace and craftsmanship emerging values in modern living in the western states'. In fact, they had been almost forgotten for decades, with their best work built some 40 years previously.

Now, they are regarded as American architectural heroes, almost (if not quite) in the Frank Lloyd Wright class. No one has done more to promote the brothers than Edward R Bosley, director of the Greenes' greatest surviving masterpiece--The Gamble House in Pasadena, California, completed in 1908 who produced the definitive biography of the siblings nine years ago. Bosley's latest book. .A New and Native Beauty, edited with The Gamble curator Anne E Mallek, comprises a series of essays by experts on the decorative qualities of architecture.

At their height, the Greenes were at the forefront of the arts and crafts movement, hailed in 1909 by visiting English architect CR Ashbec, who declared that Charles Greene's work was 'quite up to our best English craftsmanship ... what all the others are screaming and hustling about, are here actually being produced by a young architect. In A New and Native Beauty, Margaretta M Lovell, history of art professor at the university of California, Berkeley, focuses on materials and their use. She suggests the brothers were revolutionary in that they embraced the abundance of new materials made available by the explosion of Pacific trade, particularly tropical hardwoods like teak and lignum vitae. But she contrasts that freedom with the 'antimodernism' of their stress on handiwork and craft in designs often commissioned by people who had made their money in industry--David Gamble, for whom The Gamble House was designed, was a soap tycoon.

Other essays examine both the importance of Chinese and Japanese themes in the Greene mix, and the English influence, which historian Alan Crawford suggests was based on a fascination for the picturesque, as much as for contemporary British work. David Streatfield, professor emeritus in the University of Washington, looks at the landscape designs ('garden art') of the brothers. To English eyes these were surprisingly disappointing, with huge lawns, ponds and shrubs dotted around, apparently at random--very different from the highly structured British arts and crafts gardens.

While Greene and Greene's best bungalows are undoubtedly demonstrations of superb craftsmanship, it is surprising that the nature of their construction is not analysed. As Edward R Ford demonstrated in his 1990 book The Details of Modern Architecture, the apparent exposed structure of precious woods that you see inside the houses is a panelled metaphor of the much rougher redwood or Oregon pine of the real structure, exposed only on the exterior. John Ruskin, one of the fathers of arts and crafts theory, who argued in the 1830s for honesty in structure and architecture, would have been horrified--particularly by some of the later houses, incorporating concealed steel joists.

Yet the brothers had to work with what was available. Most of their clients were rich but their pockets were not bottomless: simple, cheap balloon-frame construction allowed the creation of the spaces, but the wonderful sensuous qualities of the rooms and furniture were ensured by the tactile nature of the immaculate finishes. Greene and Greene indeed reflected 'emerging values in modern living' but, like all arts and crafts architects, they were ultimately defeated by speculative developers, who made some of the properties of the houses available to many by discarding with fine craftsmanship.

This book does as much as possible to demonstrate the tectonic qualities of Greene and Greene's architecture as can be captured on paper. A sole reservation is that there are rather too many large pictures of the brothers, their families and clients, taking up space that might have been devoted to more drawings and images of the work.