Column Three:
WHY THE NAME BRANTWOOD?
December 2020
Brantwood’s Construction Progress
Our first two columns described the background to the transformation of the Playhouse Village, leading to the building of Brantwood at the corner of Oakland and Union. It will be completed in 2023. Brantwood is a club-like residence for active adults who still want to explore a life of the mind.
People have asked, why is this building called Brantwood? Brantwood was the home of John Ruskin on Lake Conniston, England. It was his retirement home. And some ask, who was John Ruskin? Ruskin was among the most preeminent English Victorians. At a time when England was reshaping its identity through explosive economic growth and political expansion, an art critic writing about how to view the world became more popular for several decades than most political leaders, opera stars and military heroes.
John Ruskin
Ruskin is thought to have been the most influential writer shaping English tastes and values in the 19th century. In retrospect, it seems hard to imagine that one of his key intellectual contributions was considered innovative, but he championed the notion that art is a reflection of the current values of a society, thus opening the minds of Europeans to understanding centuries of art from an historical perspective. He went further— at a time when society was swept up in the material advantages of industrialization, Ruskin advocated a return to naturalism in art for man to feel grounded in an uncertain economy. He is credited with unleashing an explosion in art appreciation and artistic expression, shaping the way contemporary art unfolded, and founding a new form of ecological awareness and thinking.
Ruskin wasn’t without his faults, so in today’s reckoning with historic icons, celebrating someone with Ruskin’s erudite personality might be challenging. But Ruskin was known for his immense social sensitivity in addition to his sensibilities. “He believed life should be beautiful, inequality was an outrage and that capitalism leads to aesthetic degradation,” a recent Guardian writer observed, noting his current resurgence in popularity despite new challenges to the social hierarchy endorsed by many eminent Victorians.
Putting aside the debate about Ruskin’s perfection and flaws, there is no question that Pasadenans in the early 20th century were tremendously influenced by the teachings of Ruskin, directly and indirectly. Ruskin aroused in England and America a connection between the arts and human initiative, arts and humanism. Alson Clark’s murals in the Bank of the West building at Madison and Colorado are such an example, an artistic celebration of early Los Angeles’ fields of endeavor — agriculture, fishing and film.
William Morris Tapestry
Among Ruskin’s greatest disciples was William Morris, known as the father of the English Arts & Crafts movement in the mid 19th century. Morris championed an approach to practicing art as a lifestyle, a means of maintaining or restoring human dignity during a period of industrialization that trivialized the contributions of individuals, measured only by output like cogs in the machinery rather than the gifted creators Morris saw in mankind.
The English Arts & Crafts movement spawned the ideals of the American Arts & Crafts movement toward the end of the nineteenth century, and Pasadena - from its bungalows to its plein air painting - became one of a half dozen centers of American Arts & Crafts practitioners. If Bob Winter were still with us, a former professor of architectural history at Occidental College, he would write that no single individual influenced the early aesthetics of Pasadena more than Morris. Essentially, Morris begat our turn-of-the-century great architects who established Pasadena’s grace and loveliness - Louise B. Easton, the Heinemans, the Greenes, Myron Hunt and Elmer Gray among others.
Interior of a Greene & Green home in Pasadena
The design mantle of the Arts & Crafts movement passed to a postwar period of European expression, largely Beaux Arts and Mediterranean-revival in various forms. For the most part, these two styles defined and created the Playhouse Village in the 1920’s. But underlying those styles was still the Morris culture of integrating the arts, humanities and community through expression in our everyday lives. When peeling back architecture of the 1920’s in Pasadena, you often still see the Arts & Crafts influence, little tell-tale signatures from craftsmen and artists who tried to incorporate everything around them into beauty, as Morris would say, often naturally driven.
The Playhouse itself was reflective of Morris and other Arts & Crafts ideals, particularly collaboration. Collaboration in creativity or expression was a key notion both in England and America during their Arts & Crafts movements, with such work communes in Chipping Camden, England and Roycroft in East Aurora, New York. The Playhouse was not developed exclusively by an individual or even a small group, but by a wide assortment of Pasadenans expressing their individual talents.
Fire curtain of the Pasadena Playhouse, designed by Alson Clark
Its original name and funding reflected its broad appeal: the Pasadena Community Theater, founded by over a thousand residents with individual financial donations. Its working style was equally pluralistic - volunteers from all walks of life making costumes, sets, even acting on stage. Its first chairman was Ernst Batchelder, worthy of another column in the future. Batchelder, about whom Bob Winter was history’s leading expert, founded a tile making business in Pasadena in 1909 - he embodied the Arts & Crafts ideals that Ruskin cultivated and Morris refined. Alson Clark, the previously mentioned plein air painter who lived in Pasadena, was also on the board. He painted this extraordinary fire curtain for the Playhouse in 1925 that has not been seen in years, but is still stowed above the stage.
It could be asked why it is appropriate to name a building after Ruskin’s home? Brantwood was more than a place of repose for Ruskin, as idyllic and beautiful as it was: it was a home for reflection, where he wrote one of the most “revealing and impactful” of his works: Praeterita. This autobiography is a reminder that like Clint Eastwood, an individual’s most creative days can follow an already successful career in another endeavor. Ruskin pursued many of his broad interests, particularly historic preservation and his early writings leading to environmental planning and sensitivity, while at Brantwood.
Brantwood is thus a symbol, an invitation to the exploring mind, perhaps a state of mind: inspiration through the exploration of the arts and ideas, a curated living environment that will bring speakers in and arrange visits out - to galleries, concerts, and libraries. Residents can participate to the extent they wish, or simply find themselves immersed in a stimulating neighborhood. Like the house system in Ivy colleges, Brantwood will have a commons room, library and a dining area, where ideas can be shared with others, but enough room for its approximate 86 residents that one can be left alone for quieter pursuits as well.
Ruskin’s retirement home on Lake Coniston, England