Customer Reviews

Building with Nature: Inspiration for the Arts and Crafts Home

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This is the first book to truly explore the origins of the American Arts & Crafts Movement. A group in San Francisco began constructing simpler buildings and furnishing them with what eventually was called Mission furniture. This lead to the nationwide popularization of Craftsman homes and furniture by Stickley and others. If you have an interest in Architecture or the "Arts & Crafts" you should read this book.

Ms. Freudenheim has provided us with a very well-written book about how new and developing architectureal styles happen, using the SF Bay Area and the development of the Arts and Crafts style as a perfect example. Ms. Freudenheim's excellant research and engaging style shows, in words and photos, how a web of people and buildings continually interact and thus result in a new style. In this greatly expanded edition of a now hard-to-find great original book, we learn about these people, their interactions, and how this resulted in a new archtectural style. This book will be enjoyed by anyone interested in the Arts and Crafts style, either as a home owner, collector, scholar, or as a total observer of the Arts and Crafts movement and it's recent resurgence. Enjoy!

Leslie Freudenheim has captured an era that has given great beauty to our lives. With grace and wisdom she has presented the San Francisco Bay Area as a landscape filled with the richness of the architectural geniuses who gave the area their distinctive creations. The beauty of the arts and crafts buildings complements nature, and bonds our living spaces into it. The author has, with a great deal of style, significantly enriched our experience of this fine period in our history.

Building With Nature, when first published in 1974, brought attention to Bay Region Architecture as a tradition, as the progenitor of simple homes, grounded on the philosophy of Bernard Maybeck and Charles Keeler among others, and as an influence on residential architecture of subsequent generations. In this new and significantly expanded book, Leslie Freudenheim broadens the inquiry toward a wider appreciation of indigenous forms of California architecture, and an understanding of the relation of natural building and environmental sensitivity to the international Arts and Crafts Movement. The book is a must for any Arts and Crafts devotee and architectural history, personal, or professional library.
Robert M. Craig [author, Bernard Maybeck at Principia College The Art and Craft of Building]

This is a very important reexamination of the American origins of the Arts and Crafts Movement and the major contibutions of a small group of Bay Area designers. The central role is occupied by the Reverend Joseph Worcester who created one of the true landmarks of the movement with the Church of the New Jerusalem in San Francisco. The author provides new context and a great amount of new reseach. This book is a major accomplishment.

This is a great overview of the thriving architectural Arts and Crafts movement in the late 19th and early 20th century in northern California.