Overlooked inspiration

Students and advocates of the Arts & Crafts style in architecture regularly invoke the names of the 19th century Englishmen John Ruskin and William Morris as its founding visionaries. Much less has been said about Joseph Worcester, a Swedenborgian minister who came to the Bay Area from New England in 1864 and built a shingle-clad cottage in Piedmont that sparked California’s soon-to-be prodigious contributions to the movement Ruskin and Morris started.

It is Freudenheim’s purpose to make clear the extent of those contributions, heretofore overlooked, she submits, as a result of East Coast bias. An art historian and author of a previous book about San Francisco architecture, Freudenheim argues for the importance of Worcester and his circle, which included architects such as A. Page Brown, Frederick Law Olmstead and Bernard Maybeck.

Freudenheim documents with academic precision the development of the distinctive California shingle style, whose reliance on natural materials, craftsmanship and simplicity could be traced back to England but that on the Pacific Coast grew to incorporate Mission, Swiss, Japanese and Native American elements. Worcester himself was not an architect, yet evidently had a gift for design to match his charisma as a purveyor of the Gospel. In collaboration with Brown and Maybeck in 1894, he built the beautiful Swedenborgian Church, which still stands today on Lyon Street in San Francisco.

-- Sean Mitchell