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The Rudolph Schevill House

On a quiet residential street in the Berkeley Hills, the Rudolph Schevill House at 77 Tamalpais Road carried, behind its brown shingled walls, one of the most consequential cultural rooms ever designed by a Greene & Greene architect. The room itself — known in the family as the “big room” — was added to the existing house in 1922 by Charles Sumner Greene, working from his Carmel-by-the-Sea studio on what would become one of his last commissions executed under the dissolving Greene & Greene partnership. The room was attached to the south end of the residence, purpose-built as a social salon for the Schevill family, and it would, over the next two decades, host events that placed the building near the center of Berkeley’s cultural and political life: Pablo Casals’s cello recital of 1924, Margaret Schevill’s art classes for neighborhood children, Carl Jung’s circles of correspondents and visitors, and the Spanish Civil War fundraising operation that drew Rudolph Schevill into the orbit of Robert Oppenheimer, Haakon Chevalier, and the leftist intellectuals who would, a generation later, find themselves at the center of America’s atomic-age political upheavals.

The architectural commission was, in the firm’s record, a CSG — a Charles Greene attribution, executed under the partnership name in the partnership’s final year. The dissolution of the formal Greene & Greene firm came in 1922, the same year as the Schevill commission. The Schevill big room is, in this respect, a closing-period work: drawn by Charles, in Carmel, for a Berkeley client of cultural and political consequence, in the year the firm formally ended.

The Commission and the Big Room

The Schevills did not hire Charles Greene to design their house. They already had a house, a brown shingle Berkeley Hills residence in the prevailing Bay Area Craftsman vocabulary that had defined the East Bay’s middle-class architecture since the early 1900s. What they hired Charles Greene to design was a single, substantial room — the “big room” — to be added to the south end of the existing residence. The brown shingle house that the Schevills already owned would continue to function as the family’s day-to-day living space. The big room would function as something else: a hall, in the older sense of the word, large enough to accommodate the kinds of events the Schevills wanted to host.

Brown shingle houses, as Bay Area architectural historians have noted, were the party houses of their era. The vocabulary lent itself to large open interiors with high ceilings, exposed timber, and the kind of generous social space that the families building these houses in the early twentieth century specifically wanted. The Schevills’ commission to Charles Greene was, in this sense, a fairly direct extension of an existing typology: they wanted a bigger party house, with the addition designed by the most distinguished California Craftsman architect available, and they were prepared to commission Charles Greene specifically — not the partnership generically, not Henry Greene from Pasadena — to design it.

The 1922 commission appears in the firm’s records under the address 77 Tamalpais Road, Berkeley. The actual construction of the big room appears to have taken place in the following year, with the addition operational by 1923. The exact configuration of the room, its dimensions, its detailing, and its relationship to the existing brown shingle house are best understood through the documentary record of what happened inside it over the following two decades.

Rudolph and Margaret Schevill

Rudolph Schevill, born in 1874, was a German-American Romanist and Hispanist — a scholar of the Romance languages with a particular specialization in Spanish literature, especially Cervantes. He was, at the time of the 1922 commission, the founder and chair of the Department of Romance Languages at the University of California, Berkeley, a position he had built into one of the most important Spanish-language academic centers in the western United States. His scholarly distinction was matched by his political and personal connections. Among his closest friends was the cellist Pablo Casals, whom he had befriended during time in Spain, and who referred to Schevill as “mi hermano del alma” — my soul brother. Through Casals, Schevill was connected to the broader Spanish cultural and political world, including the diplomat Fernando de los Rios, who would later serve as Spain’s ambassador to the United States.

Margaret Schevill, his wife, was an artist and a scholar in her own right. She was a follower of Carl Jung, with whom she would eventually study in Switzerland, accompanying him on his 1924–1925 fieldwork trip to the American Southwest, where she interacted with Native American elders and began the work that would result in her published retellings of Navajo myths. She was a friend of the sculptor Alexander Calder, whose sister Peggy Calder Hayes lived several houses up the street on Tamalpais Road and who attended Margaret’s New Year’s parties in the big room. Calder later gifted Margaret a brass-wire necklace of his own design, an object now known as the Margaret Schevill Necklace and exhibited in museums.

Margaret was also, briefly, the lover of Frank Lloyd Wright. The romance, conducted in 1923 during a stay in Chicago, lasted approximately nine months before Margaret broke it off and returned to Berkeley. The two would remain friends for the rest of their lives. The chronology — the Greene addition designed in 1922, completed by 1923, with Margaret’s affair with Wright running through 1923 — places her at the cultural intersection of two of the most consequential American architects of the early twentieth century, in the same year. The big room at 77 Tamalpais Road was designed by one. The brief romance in Chicago was with the other.

The Big Room as Salon

What happened inside the big room across the next two decades constitutes one of the most consequential records of any single domestic interior in Northern California cultural history.

In 1924, Pablo Casals performed a cello recital in the room. The performance was a private event for the Schevills’ invited circle — concerts, lectures, and poetry readings were among the standard programming the Schevills hosted in the room — but it stands as a documented moment in the long history of California’s cultural connections to the Spanish-speaking world. Casals would, over the following decades, become not only the world’s most celebrated cellist but one of the leading figures of the Spanish Republican exile community. His friendship with Rudolph Schevill, established before the room existed and sustained through the room’s existence, was one of the channels through which the events of the Spanish Civil War would reach Berkeley.

Margaret Schevill used the room, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, as a teaching space. Together with Peggy Calder Hayes, who lived on the same street, she taught art to neighborhood children. The room’s scale and natural light made it suitable for the kind of teaching environment that an artist of Margaret’s range — drawing, painting, mythological storytelling, the integration of visual art with narrative — wanted to provide. The room was, in this sense, both a salon for the Schevills’ adult cultural circle and a working studio for Margaret’s pedagogical practice.

The room also became, by the late 1930s, the operational center of one of California’s most consequential political activities. At the request of Casals and Fernando de los Rios, Rudolph Schevill founded the West Coast Committee for the Defense of the Spanish Republic. The committee’s work — fundraising, organizing, networking, propagandizing — drew on the Schevills’ established cultural network and ran, in significant part, out of the big room at 77 Tamalpais Road. The building Charles Greene had designed as a Berkeley party space had become, by the mid-1930s, the West Coast headquarters of American support for the Spanish Republican side in the Spanish Civil War.

The Politics of the House

Rudolph Schevill’s Spanish Republican fundraising activities placed him in direct contact with the broader leftist intellectual community of the Bay Area during the 1930s and into the 1940s. Among the figures with whom he interacted, through this work, were the physicist Robert Oppenheimer and the French-language professor Haakon Chevalier, both at the University of California. Oppenheimer would, a few years later, lead the Manhattan Project and direct the Los Alamos Laboratory through the development of the atomic bomb. Chevalier would become the central figure in the so-called Chevalier Incident, the 1943 conversation in which a request to Oppenheimer to pass scientific information to the Soviet Union was made or alleged to have been made — an incident that would resurface during Oppenheimer’s 1954 security clearance hearings and contribute to his loss of clearance.

The big room at 77 Tamalpais Road was, in this period, a node in the network that connected Casals in Europe to Schevill in Berkeley, and Schevill in Berkeley to Oppenheimer and Chevalier in their separate UC departments. Whether the conversations that mattered most to American Cold War history actually took place in the room cannot be reconstructed from the available record. What can be said is that the room sat near the center of the cultural and political networks that produced those conversations, and that the Schevills’ political circle was the circle within which Oppenheimer and Chevalier moved.

The Schevills divorced in 1939. By that point, Margaret had been studying with Jung in Switzerland for more than a decade, and her cultural and intellectual life had developed in directions different from Rudolph’s academic and political world. Margaret would remarry George K. K. Link, a University of Chicago professor, and eventually purchase the Eastman house at 10 Inverness Way North in Marin County, where she would continue her work as an artist and scholar. Rudolph remained in Berkeley, continuing his academic career and his political work, until his death in 1946.

Charles Greene in 1922

The 1922 Schevill commission was one of Charles Greene’s last documented works under the Greene & Greene firm name. By 1922 Charles had been operating from Carmel-by-the-Sea for six years. The Pasadena office, run by Henry, was preparing for the formal dissolution of the partnership that would come at year’s end. Charles’s late-period commissions — fewer in number than his Pasadena Peak Period output, more concentrated geographically in the Monterey Peninsula and along the Northern California coast — were increasingly the work of a single architect with a small studio rather than the work of a major firm.

A Berkeley commission was, for the Carmel-based Charles, a sensible geographic reach. The drive from Carmel to Berkeley took most of a day in 1922, but it was within the Northern California world that Charles’s late practice operated within. The commission’s small scale — a single substantial room, added to an existing residence, rather than a full house — was also consistent with the smaller programs that Charles’s Carmel studio was taking on. The 1918 D. L. James House on the Carmel Highlands, which Charles had just completed, was a major Northern California Charles Greene work; the 1922 Schevill room was a different kind of commission, closer in scale to what a small studio could complete in a year.

The choice of Charles for the Schevill commission, rather than Henry’s Pasadena office, would have followed from geographic and professional logic. Charles was the brother working in Northern California. The Schevills wanted a Northern California architect of distinction. Charles was available, was the senior partner of the firm, and was the architect whose name carried the Craftsman authority that the Schevills wanted. The brown shingle vocabulary that he was being asked to extend was the same vocabulary that Bay Area Craftsman architecture had been working in for two decades, and Charles had been operating in that world as a Carmel resident since 1916.

The Loyalty Oath and the House’s Second Generation

James Erwin Schevill, the son of Rudolph and Margaret, was born in Berkeley on June 10, 1920 — sixteen months before his parents commissioned Charles Greene to design the big room. He grew up in the house at 77 Tamalpais Road, in the room and around the room and within the cultural world that the room hosted. He would become, in his own life, a major American poet and playwright, the author of more than ten volumes of poetry, more than thirty plays, and a long list of critical and biographical works.

In 1950, when he was thirty years old, James Schevill was asked by the University of California at Berkeley to sign a loyalty oath as a precondition of becoming a teaching instructor. He refused. In a letter to UC President Robert Sproul, he wrote that loyalty was not a matter of signature, and that he could not bring himself to betray the devotion with which his father had served a free university while watching his father’s friends — Rudolph’s colleagues — be fired during the same loyalty oath controversy. He was immediately fired and blackballed from teaching at public institutions in California. He was hired soon after by the California College of Arts and Crafts, where he would meet Richard Diebenkorn and the painters who would become the Bay Area Figurative School. The dismissal, in James’s later assessment, was the best thing that ever happened to him.

The loyalty oath story is a piece of California cultural history that runs directly out of the cultural and political world of the big room. The Spanish Republic fundraising that Rudolph had organized in the 1930s, the broader leftist political community of pre-war Berkeley, the friendship with Casals and Chevalier and the orbit around Oppenheimer — all of this was the world into which James Schevill had been born, and the world that the loyalty oath of 1950 was specifically designed to discipline. James’s refusal to sign was a refusal made out of the values he had absorbed in the room at the south end of the house his father had commissioned twenty-eight years earlier.

The Building’s Place in the Greene & Greene Story

The Rudolph Schevill House at 77 Tamalpais Road occupies an unusual position in the Greene & Greene catalog. It is not a full residence — Charles Greene’s commission was only the big room, attached to an existing house — but the room he designed was the architectural setting for one of the most consequential cultural and political domestic spaces of mid-twentieth-century Northern California. It is also one of the closing commissions of the formal Greene & Greene partnership, executed by Charles in 1922, the year of the partnership’s dissolution.

The room’s importance derives from its use rather than its scale. As architecture, it is a large brown shingle hall by Charles Greene, attached to the south end of a Berkeley residence. As a cultural artifact, it is the room where Pablo Casals played his cello in 1924, where Margaret Schevill taught the children of Tamalpais Road how to draw, where Spanish Republican fundraising letters were drafted in the late 1930s, and where the political world that produced and then consumed Robert Oppenheimer was, for a period, partially conducted. The fact that Charles Greene designed it makes it part of the Greene & Greene record. The fact that it functioned as it did makes it part of California history.

The commission also sits at a particular architectural moment in Charles’s late career — Carmel-based, partnership-closing, working on additions to existing structures rather than on full houses — that is not always given the attention given to his Peak Period Pasadena work. The Schevill commission is among the strongest single arguments that Charles’s late practice continued to produce work of consequence, even at the smaller scale and lower visibility of the Carmel studio years.

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Closing Reflection

A single room, in a single house, in a single residential block of the Berkeley Hills. Designed by Charles Greene at the dissolving end of his partnership, in the year the Greene & Greene firm formally ended. Used, across the following two decades, by a Spanish-language scholar who was Pablo Casals’s soul brother, by an artist who studied with Carl Jung and accompanied him to the Navajo nation, by a child who would become a major American poet, by a sculptor named Alexander Calder who walked over from his sister’s house up the street, and by a fundraising committee whose work for the Spanish Republic placed Rudolph Schevill in the same Berkeley political world as the men who would, a few years later, build the atomic bomb.

The room is brown shingled, attached to the south end of the existing house, and was added in 1922. That is what is true of it as a piece of architecture. What is true of it as a cultural artifact is that, in the long history of Northern California houses, it is among the rooms in which the most happened.

The Charles Greene attribution on this commission has not always received the kind of attention that the better-known Carmel-period Charles works have received. The big room at 77 Tamalpais Road is not the D. L. James House on the Carmel Highlands. It is, however, very arguably, the room in Charles’s late portfolio in which the most cultural and political weight was carried, in the longest run, by what he designed. The architect who drew it understood, in 1922, that he was designing a hall for a household that intended to use it. The household used it. The room held what was held in it. That, in the end, is what an architect’s late work is for.

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