* Home in Pasadena
* Home where grass is greener
- Edward Bosley: The Arts and Crafts movement was a reaction
to the overindustrialization of society.
The Arts and Crafts movement in California
recognized a closer connection with nature.
Pasadena was a locus for its own particular expression
of the Arts and Crafts movement,
and that's largely thanks to the presence
of two brilliant architects, Charles and Henry Greene,
from about 1893 on.
The movement was an approach to design and craft
that incorporated a high level of handwork.
And I can't think of a place where it's better expressed
than here at the Gamble House.
[gentle orchestral music]
- The Gamble House is one of the most important pieces
of residential architecture in our country,
and probably internationally.
It's a celebration of American craft and decorative arts.
It's a timeless piece of Arts and Crafts architecture.
California the setting had a big influence
on Charles and Henry Greene.
They were influenced by the environment, by the lifestyle,
the climate, and they were searching
for their own architecture that they considered
to be a California architecture.
- Edward: The Gamble House was seen as a radical statement
on the land when it was built in 1908,
and when the Gambles occupied it,
they knew they were moving into a work of art.
[gentle string music]
- Tracy Gamble Hirrel: I came here as a child
for Sunday lunch.
It was sort of a command performance that we be here.
We were allowed after our lunch to put our play clothes on
and roam around wherever we wanted to go in the house.
I think the dining room was my favorite
because of the family, together.
This was a home, and we like to think of it still as a home.
- Kelly: I lived here in the house
while I was studying architecture at USC.
I was so fortunate to be able to experience it
as a home, as the Gambles did.
I was able to experience this building
as the Greenes designed it to be experienced.
The Greenes were exploring how to bring good design
to the daily lives of the people who interact with it,
whether it be architecture, decorative arts,
textiles, furnishings.
For the Greenes, no detail was too small
to be considered and done well.
[gentle piano music]
- Edward: One of the reasons the Greenes
have the reputation for high art architecture
and beautiful craftsmanship that they have
is because of the makers.
They had put together a group of people who were able
to execute at the level that they were designing at.
- Jack Ipekjian: The Halls were a pair of brothers,
John and Peter Hall.
They were essentially the only contractors
who were building the furniture and lighting
for the Greene and Greene firm.
Peter was a general contractor and John was his shop foreman,
and they had their own shop here in Pasadena.
In almost all Greene and Greene designed chairs,
the width at the back is narrower
and it's wider at the front,
and the legs are not square; they're parallelograms.
And that shape is to meet the angle
created by that tapering in the back.
The Halls came up with a technique
for how to do the joinery on these parallelogram legs.
In addition to cutting the mortise for the tenon,
you have to cut a secondary mortise
to house the entire rail.
[gentle piano music]
- James Ipekjian: There is a simplicity
that hides the complexity
in the Hall-built Greene and Green designed piece.
It was the Hall's understanding of wood
and the seasonal wood movement
that actually contributed to some of the design elements
that we see in the Greenes' work.
There's just this interplay of understanding
that had to exist, and it affects the final outcome.
- Edward: The Greenes designed a small handful of houses
on the scale of the Gamble House
and at this level of design and quality,
and one of them was the Blacker House
on the other side of town here in Pasadena.
[gentle piano music]
It's a 12,000 square foot house,
compared to the approximately 8,000 square foot house
that the Gambles had.
- James: The Blacker House needed a complete restoration,
which began in 1994 and has continued to this day.
The reproductions that I've done are built
to exactly match what was originally created.
In order to recreate the designs of Greene and Greene,
it was necessary to understand
the methodology that the Halls used
in joining the various pieces of wood together,
to understand what the different materials were,
to understand what that inlaid surface really was.
- Jack: We're doing a Greene and Greene designed chair
from the Thorsen House in Berkeley,
and this chair has inlay in the crest rail.
The chair is made of mahogany.
Most of the vine and branch and leaves
are made of white oak.
The root, which is darker in color, is made of rosewood.
When you want to achieve the look,
when you want it to look authentic
to the way it was done,
you really have to make it the way it was made.
We're not using a modern tool, like a random orbit sander.
We are using the tools the Halls were using,
hand planes and scrapers and sandpaper,
the way that they were using it.
We started by taking a tracing of the original crest rail.
From there, we make our own drawing
and we cut out each paper pattern.
Those paper patterns then get glued
to the inlay material we're using.
It can be wood, it can be precious metals,
it can be stone.
We take a jeweler's saw
and we cut out all of those puzzle pieces.
We arrange them on the background
and we inscribe around it with a knife.
The material's inlaid into the surface.
So you need to excavate a pocket,
approximately a sixteenth to an eighth of an inch,
depending on the size.
So you have to get it very, very precise.
We glue the puzzle pieces in. [tool tapping]
After the glue is dry, we carve those pieces
to give it a 3D sculptural effect.
There's a tactile texture to the work.
- James: Essentially, there have only really ever been
two companies that have ever built
Greene and Greene designed furniture
for a Greene and Greene designed house.
That was the Halls, and that was me.
I got to do that.
It was, and continues to be
this absolutely incredible experience.
[gentle string music]
- Edward: The Gamble House was built as a winter home,
and there are things about this house
that make a tremendous amount of sense
in the climate and topography of Pasadena
and the lifestyle of California.
[gentle orchestral music]
The entry hall at the Gamble House
is one of the great spaces
in American domestic architecture.
The tremendous leaded art glass triptych,
this great tree with spreading branches.
The idea of nature is a dominant feature
and transforms the emotions of people who walk in the door.
We feel very profoundly a sense of calm and beauty
when we're suddenly in this
completely different environment.
- David Judson: Glass is the perfect medium
to see this marriage of art and architecture,
which has been done for nearly a thousand years now,
and glass is just this amazing material.
The color is working with transmitted light
as opposed to reflected light,
and so it adds a whole 'nother dimension
to how an artist can work.
The Judson Studios was founded in Los Angeles in 1897
by my great-great-grandfather and his three sons,
and we've been making stained glass in Los Angeles
for over a hundred years.
Judson manufactured the windows for Frank Lloyd Wright
at the Hollyhock House,
as well as the Ennis House a little bit later.
The Judson Studios are based right here in the Arroyo Seco,
which was the location where
a lot of the artists and artisans settled
because it fit right in between the millionaires of Pasadena
and the business district of downtown Los Angeles.
California at that time was also a place of renewal.
William Lees Judson came here from Chicago
for health reasons,
but found renewed life and energy.
There was a very optimistic mentality
a lot of people had that played out in their work.
California attracts artists who think differently,
but also the clientele.
California provided a market for these artists,
and we're still in a growth area
where they're still building churches
and they're still building commercial buildings
and museums.
That has a really strong influence on the Judson Studios.
We've always been looking for new ways to express glass.
We've been able to do something a little bit different
and start fusing glass.
Fusing glass is a very contemporary,
modern approach to the use of glass.
- Quentin Blackman: Everyone on a thumb?
The difference between fused and stained glass
is that fused glass was designed
to have every color be compatible.
Different colors of glass
heat and contract at different rates,
and if you wanna melt them together,
one of them is gonna cool faster than the other one,
which will cause it to crack.
So we have a very large pallet of glasses
that all have the same coefficient of expansion,
which makes it so we can add as many colors as we want
into one single piece of glass without stress.
- David: All of the projects that we do here
at Judson Studios are custom designed.
And so we start by gathering information from a client
and putting that down
in a rough sketch form in the computer.
- Andrea Guzzetta: Being able to design things on the computer
and being able to change them just saves us a lot of time,
and when moving from design to the full size,
it also saves us a lot of time
because we can just print something
that's at the actual size.
It's called a cartoon.
- David: The full-size cartoon then
is used by the cutters to cut up sheets of Manila paper
that become templates to cut the glass.
And the glass is cut by hand with a simple steel wheel
that runs on the surface of the glass
and is broken into pieces.
- Luisa Valencia: Estos cortes son difíciles de sacar.
Se quiebra una punta y tu trabajo se echa a perder.
Ese es un gran problema,
buscar otro pedazo de cristal que sea semejante a ese.
- David: It's taken to the painters if it's painted on,
and then the painters paint and fire on the glass.
- Sean Chao: The color come from the glass.
And what I do is mostly creating light and shadow
and outlines to create image.
So we'll do water-based paint first
and then we'll do oil-based, then we'll fire it after,
and if we need to do more layer on top,
we can paint it and fire again.
- David: Once it's fired, it can come back for glazing,
which is the leading of the pieces.
The leading is basically channels of lead
that are wrapped around the pieces of glass and soldered,
wherever those joints meet.
- It's easy to work with lead because
we can bend it, you know?
I have 35 years in stained glass.
I love this job, no matter how difficult it is.
I enjoy more when it's more difficult.
[gentle piano music]
- Being the president of an old traditional legacy studio,
it's a tricky thing because you want to keep the quality
and reputation of the company while at the same time,
reaching out and looking for new ways
to push the medium of glass.
The sense of craft and the human hand
in our art and design is much more desirable now
than it has been in the recent past.
And so I think there's a renewed interest
in art forms that work in different materials,
not only in stained glass, but other mediums as well.
[gentle singing]
- Tracy: I always thought the Gamble House
was what everybody's grandparents house was like.
When I was a sophomore in high school,
the house opened to the public, and I remember standing in line
to get inside my grandparent's house
and realizing just everything that the Greenes put into it,
from the joinery to the carpets to the pegs in the furniture,
this really was something extremely special.
- Jack: It's hard to deny the sense of freedom
the Greenes must've felt being here in California.
In his writings, Charles talks about
the importance of climate and the environment
and the effect that that has on his designs.
There's a freedom in California.
There is inspiration from the past
and there's a fearlessness to go beyond it.
- Kelly: The Greenes were actually quite forward-thinking
and quite modern and very influential
in our mid-century modern movement
that came out of southern California.
The Gamble House is as relevant today as when it was built.
[gentle singing]