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Greene & Greene

The John Howard House and Studio

On a residential lot at 86 Avenue Maria Road in Monterey, on the hillside terraces above the Pacific that define the city’s residential geography, stands the building Charles Sumner Greene designed in 1929 as his last complete original architectural commission. The clients were the painter John Langley Howard, age twenty-seven at the time of the commission, and his first wife Adelaide. The program was a single-story shingled main house with an adjacent purpose-built artist’s studio for John Langley Howard’s professional painting practice. The architect was Charles Sumner Greene, working from his Carmel-by-the-Sea studio, in his sixty-first year, in what would prove to be the closing year of his career as an originating architect of complete new commissions.

The commission’s particular significance derives from two related considerations. The first is its identification, in the architectural-historical record, as the last fully original architectural commission Charles Greene secured in his professional life. After 1929, his architectural production would consist entirely of additions, alterations, and ongoing engagements with existing buildings — most notably the twelve-year Martin A. Flavin engagement at Spindrift in the Carmel Highlands beginning the same year (House 18 in this directory), and the continuing decades-long work on the D. L. James House at “Seaward” in the Carmel Highlands beginning in 1918. The Howard House thus represents not just an architectural commission but the chronological endpoint of Charles’s career as a designer of new buildings.

The second consideration is the unusual cross-generational architectural connection that the commission embodied. The client was the son of John Galen Howard — one of the most prominent California architects of his generation, supervising architect of the University of California, Berkeley campus from 1903 through 1924, founding Director of the UC Berkeley School of Architecture, and the leading Beaux-Arts architect in California. The decision by John Langley Howard to commission his Monterey residence from Charles Greene rather than from his father, or from one of the many architects of his father’s Berkeley professional circle, brought together two distinct California architectural traditions: the Beaux-Arts academicism of Berkeley and the Pasadena Arts and Crafts that Charles had spent his professional life developing.

John Langley Howard, Artist

John Langley Howard — known to his family and friends as “Lang” — was born on February 5, 1902, in Upper Montclair, New Jersey. The family moved to California in 1904, when John Galen Howard was hired to supervise the construction of the Hearst Memorial Mining Building at the University of California, Berkeley. The Howards settled in Berkeley, where John Galen would spend the rest of his professional life and where John Langley would grow up surrounded by the architectural and artistic culture of one of California’s most active university communities. By 1929, when Charles Greene was designing his house, John Langley Howard had returned to California from East Coast art training to begin what would become a seven-decade career as one of the most significant American Social Realist artists of the twentieth century.

Howard’s path to art had been indirect. He had attended the University of California, Berkeley, studying engineering and English for one semester before leaving in 1922 — the same year his father stepped down as Director of the UC Berkeley School of Architecture. He had then enrolled at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, and subsequently studied at the Art Students League in New York City under Kenneth Hayes Miller. He returned to California in 1926, and held his first solo exhibition at the Modern Gallery in San Francisco in 1927 — the year he married his first wife Adelaide. By 1929, he had exhibited at the Beaux Arts Gallery and the East-West Gallery in San Francisco, and at the San Francisco Art Association annual exhibitions; his early work showed the influence of Cézanne and the European modernist landscape tradition in which he had been training.

The decision to settle in Monterey, rather than in San Francisco or in his family’s Berkeley milieu, reflected Howard’s particular artistic sensibility. Monterey in 1929 was emerging as an important Northern California artistic community, with a developing colony of writers, painters, and musicians drawn to the dramatic coastal landscape and the relatively inexpensive cost of living. The Carmel-Monterey artistic community, of which Howard would become a contributing member, was one of the most vital regional art scenes in California during the late 1920s and 1930s. Howard’s purchase of a Monterey property and his commissioning of a new residence and studio from Charles Greene placed him within this community at the very moment of his professional emergence.

The architectural program for the commission reflected the practical needs of a young professional painter. The main house provided the residential space for Howard and his wife Adelaide. The adjacent studio — purpose-built as a separate structure rather than as a room within the main residence — provided the dedicated work space that Howard’s painting practice required. The separation of residence and studio into two distinct buildings, both designed by Charles Greene as part of a single coordinated commission, was an architectural pattern Charles had used previously for his own Carmel studio and house, completed in 1923-24, and the Howard commission represented his application of that residence-plus-studio model to a young artist client.

Howard’s subsequent career fulfilled the professional promise that the 1929 Greene commission seems to have anticipated. His artistic style evolved from the Cézanne-influenced landscape painting of his early period into the Social Realist work that would define his major career. In 1934, in the depths of the Great Depression, Howard was hired through the New Deal Public Works of Art Project to paint a mural for the interior of Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. The mural depicted California industry — workers, factories, agricultural labor, and the social conditions of California’s working class — in a Social Realist vocabulary that had become increasingly important to Howard’s artistic vision. The Coit Tower mural project, which involved twenty-seven artists working simultaneously inside the recently completed monument, became politically controversial when the political content of several of the murals — including Howard’s, along with works by Diego Rivera and other artists — drew accusations from anti-Communist political figures that the project was advancing Marxist political messaging. The controversy delayed the public opening of the murals for some time, but the works were eventually unveiled and remain in place today, with Howard’s mural recognized as one of the most significant individual contributions to the Coit Tower complex.

Howard’s political evolution paralleled his artistic development. He and his wife Adelaide became active in the Monterey John Reed Club, a political and cultural organization affiliated with American Communist and Marxist circles during the 1930s. His art increasingly engaged with the social conditions of California labor, the environmental degradation produced by industrial development, and the political relationship between technology and human welfare. By the 1950s, his work had moved toward what he called “magic realism” or “poetic realism,” with environmental themes that anticipated the ecological art movement of subsequent decades. He has been credited as one of the first American “eco-artists,” with his 1951 work The Rape of the Earth representing a particularly direct artistic engagement with the environmental costs of American industrial development.

Howard’s first marriage to Adelaide ended in divorce in 1949. In 1951 he married the sculptor Blanche Phillips Howard. He continued painting actively until shortly before his death in San Francisco on November 15, 1999, at the age of ninety-seven. His work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Oakland Museum, the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C., and other major American museums.

John Galen Howard, the Architectural Father

The architectural-historical interest of the John Langley Howard House extends beyond the building itself to the cross-generational professional connection it embodied. John Galen Howard, the client’s father, was one of the most consequential California architects of his generation. Born in 1864 in West Newton, Massachusetts, John Galen Howard had trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris before working in the New York office of McKim, Mead & White — the leading American Beaux-Arts firm of its era. His professional resume by the late 1890s included the design of the Newark Free Public Library, his service on the Board of Architects of the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo (1900-1901), and his design of the dramatic Electric Tower that defined the visual character of that exposition.

In 1902, when John Langley was an infant, John Galen Howard relocated from the East Coast to Berkeley, California, to work on the Phoebe Hearst Architectural Plan for the University of California. The plan, developed through an international architectural competition, established the master architectural framework for the UC Berkeley campus, and John Galen Howard was selected to serve as Supervising Architect responsible for implementing the plan across the subsequent decades. From 1903 through 1924, Howard supervised the construction of the major buildings of the UC Berkeley campus — including the Hearst Memorial Mining Building (whose construction had originally brought him west), the Greek Theatre, Sather Tower (the campus’s iconic Campanile), the Hearst Greek Theatre, Sather Gate, Doe Memorial Library, and many other structures that would define the architectural identity of the university into the twenty-first century.

John Galen Howard’s contributions to California architecture extended beyond the UC Berkeley campus itself. He served as Director of the UC Berkeley School of Architecture from 1913 through 1927, and as a Professor at the school from 1903 through 1929 — a thirty-six-year period during which he shaped the training of multiple generations of California architects. He wrote three epic poems dedicated to architects and artists he admired: Brunelleschi (1913), Pheidias (1929 — the same year his son commissioned the Greene house), and the unfinished Cezaronet. He represented, more than perhaps any other single figure, the Beaux-Arts academic architectural tradition in California, and his professional reputation in 1929 was at the level of the leading American architects of his generation.

The decision by John Langley Howard to commission his 1929 residence from Charles Greene rather than from his father — or, equally significantly, rather than from one of the architects of his father’s Berkeley Beaux-Arts professional circle — was a meaningful professional choice. The commission represented the son’s selection of an architect from a different stylistic tradition (Arts and Crafts rather than Beaux-Arts), from a different regional center (Pasadena and Carmel rather than Berkeley), and from a different generation of California architects (Charles was sixty-one in 1929, John Galen sixty-five — both at the senior end of their professional generations). The selection of Charles Greene was, in this sense, an active choice rather than an inherited family preference, and it brought together two California architectural traditions that had not generally overlapped during the prime years of either practitioner.

John Galen Howard died in 1931, two years after the completion of his son’s Greene-designed house. He saw the building constructed; he saw his son begin to occupy it as both residence and studio. The Howard House thus stands at the intersection of two California architectural careers in their final phases — Charles Greene’s career as an originating architect closing with this commission, John Galen Howard’s life closing two years later — with the next generation, John Langley Howard the painter, beginning his professional emergence as one of the most significant American artists of the mid-twentieth century from the architectural setting that this commission produced.

The Architectural Design

The Howard House and Studio commission, as documented in the available sources, consisted of a single-story shingled main house and a small purpose-built studio for the artist’s professional practice. The shingled exterior cladding represents Charles’s late-career return to one of the foundational vocabularies of his early Pasadena work — the Shingle Style and shingled Arts and Crafts vocabulary that had been part of the firm’s design language since its earliest commissions in the 1890s. By 1929, the Shingle Style had largely been displaced in mainstream American residential architecture by the various Period Revival vocabularies — Mediterranean Revival, Spanish Colonial Revival, English Cottage Revival — that had dominated 1920s residential design. Charles’s choice of shingled exterior cladding for the Howard commission represented a stylistic continuity with the Pasadena Arts and Crafts tradition rather than an accommodation to the Period Revival fashions of the late 1920s.

The single-story configuration of the main house gave the building a horizontal architectural composition that responded to its Monterey hillside site. Charles’s late-career residential commissions had increasingly favored single-story building masses over the two-story configurations that had defined many of his Pasadena Peak Period commissions; the horizontal compositions were better suited to California coastal residential sites and to the increasingly informal residential lifestyle that 1920s California had developed. The Howard House’s single-story horizontal composition placed the building within this late-career stylistic preference.

The separate studio building — small in scale, configured for the practical requirements of an artist’s working practice — represented the explicit acknowledgment that the architectural program required dedicated professional work space distinct from the residential function of the main house. North-facing studio light, ample wall space for hanging works in progress, storage for canvases and materials, and the kind of physical separation between work and domestic life that allows professional concentration: these are the basic programmatic requirements of an artist’s studio, and Charles’s design provided them in a small dedicated structure adjacent to the residence.

The specific architectural details of both buildings — the precise configurations of windows, the interior finishes, the relationship between the two structures, the site planning, and the integration with the Monterey landscape — are not extensively documented in widely accessible published sources. The principal documentary record of the design exists in the project drawings preserved in the Charles Sumner Greene Collection at the Environmental Design Archives at the University of California, Berkeley, and in the Greene & Greene Architectural Records and Papers at the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University. Both archives contain materials related to the Howard commission, with the Avery archive cataloging the project as “John Howard House and Studio, (Monterey, California, 1929)” — using the simpler “John Howard” form of the client’s name in the archive’s standard entry.

The Howard Family’s Cultural Context

John Langley Howard’s commissioning of the 1929 Greene house took place within the broader context of one of the most artistically prominent families in early-twentieth-century California cultural life. John Galen Howard and Mary Robertson Bradbury had five children, of whom John Langley was the second-youngest. His siblings — Henry Temple Howard (1894-1967), Robert Boardman Howard (1896-1983), Charles Houghton Howard (1899-1978), and Jeanette Howard Wallace (1905-1998) — were each, in their respective ways, contributing figures in California artistic and cultural life. Robert Boardman Howard was a sculptor whose work appears in major California public installations; Charles Houghton Howard was a painter whose work was exhibited internationally; Jeanette Howard Wallace was a writer; Henry Temple Howard pursued a professional career in academic architecture in his father’s tradition.

The Howard family’s cultural influence extended through the artistic and intellectual networks of Berkeley, San Francisco, and the broader California cultural establishment of the early twentieth century. John Langley Howard’s emergence as a Social Realist painter in the 1930s — and his subsequent participation in the Coit Tower mural project, in the Monterey John Reed Club, and in the broader American Social Realist movement of the New Deal era — drew partly on the artistic capital that the Howard family had accumulated over the previous generation, and partly on his own emerging political and artistic convictions that had moved him beyond his father’s Beaux-Arts academic tradition into a politically engaged artistic practice.

The 1929 Greene commission, in this context, represented something more than the construction of a residence and studio for a young artist client. It represented the architectural launching of a professional career within one of California’s most prominent artistic families, executed by an architect whose own career was reaching its closing phase, in a coastal setting that would prove to be the principal residential and professional setting for the artist’s most important early work.

Charles Greene in 1929

The Howard commission was, for Charles Greene, the third major architectural engagement of an unusually active 1929. The same year saw Charles begin his twelve-year engagement with the Martin A. Flavin House “Spindrift” in the Carmel Highlands (House 18 in this directory), with the Flavin engagement representing what would become his longest sustained late-career architectural relationship. The same year saw continuing work on the D. L. James House “Seaward,” a project Charles had been engaged with since 1918, and continuing work on Mortimer Fleishhacker Sr. alterations and additions in San Francisco. Within this active 1929 portfolio, the Howard commission was the only project that constituted a complete new architectural design — a building, or in this case a building and adjacent studio, designed entirely from the ground up rather than as an addition to or transformation of an existing structure.

The Howard commission’s chronological position as Charles’s last complete original commission gives it a particular significance within his professional biography. Multiple Greene & Greene scholarly sources, in characterizing the timeline of his career, explicitly identify the 1929 Howard commission as the closing point of his original-design architectural production. After 1929, Charles’s architectural work would consist entirely of additions, alterations, and ongoing engagements with existing buildings or with projects that had been initiated in earlier years. The Howard House thus represents the professional career-closing point at which Charles, having designed and built his last complete original commission, transitioned into the late-career production of additions and alterations that would define his work through the 1930s, the early 1940s, and into his eventual retirement.

This chronological position is meaningful in light of the firm’s broader trajectory. Greene & Greene as a partnership had been formally dissolved at the end of 1922. Charles had moved his family from Pasadena to Carmel in 1916. His Carmel residence and studio had been completed in 1923-24. The Pasadena Peak Period that had defined the firm’s most celebrated work was, by 1929, a generation behind. The Howard commission represented the final architectural project Charles would design from the ground up, and its completion marked the close of his career as an originating architect in the most direct sense of that professional designation.

The Building’s Place in the Greene & Greene Story

The John Langley Howard House and Studio occupies a singular position in the Greene & Greene catalog as Charles Sumner Greene’s last complete original architectural commission. The building marks the chronological endpoint of one of the founding partner’s career as a designer of new buildings, and it represents the close of a professional trajectory that had begun in 1894 with the firm’s first commissions and that had spanned thirty-five years of architectural practice. No other building in the firm’s catalog occupies this precise position; the Howard House is the closing punctuation of Charles’s career as an originating architect.

The building also represents an unusual professional bridge between two California architectural traditions that had not generally overlapped during their respective primes. Charles Greene’s Pasadena Arts and Crafts tradition and John Galen Howard’s Berkeley Beaux-Arts tradition had developed largely in parallel rather than in close professional contact, with the two traditions occupying different regional centers, different stylistic vocabularies, different educational pedigrees, and different professional networks. The 1929 commission, executed by Charles for John Galen’s son, brought the two traditions into the kind of direct architectural contact that their prime periods had not produced. The Howard House is, in this sense, an unusual cross-generational and cross-tradition document of California architectural history.

The building is, finally, the architectural setting in which one of the most significant American Social Realist painters of the twentieth century established his professional practice. John Langley Howard’s subsequent career — his Coit Tower mural, his political and artistic engagement with Depression-era California labor, his pioneering eco-art of the 1950s, his presence in the major American museum collections — was launched, in significant part, from the studio that Charles Greene built for him on Avenue Maria Road in Monterey. The architectural-historical interest of the Howard House extends, accordingly, beyond Charles’s career to encompass the launching of one of California’s most consequential mid-century artistic careers within an architectural setting that Charles designed at the close of his own.

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Closing Reflection

A career has chapters. There is the early period of an architect’s professional life, when commissions are uncertain and the architectural identity is still being formed. There is the prime period, when the architect’s practice is at full capacity and the commissions are arriving as fast as the office can execute them. There is the late period, when the major work has been done and the remaining commissions are accommodations of evolving client needs and continuing professional engagements. There is, eventually, the closing point — the last commission, the last building drawn from the ground up, the last project that begins on a blank piece of paper rather than as an addition to something already standing.

For Charles Sumner Greene, the closing point of his career as an originating architect was 86 Avenue Maria Road in Monterey, in 1929. He was sixty-one years old. His Pasadena Peak Period, which had produced the Gamble House, the Blacker House, the Cordelia Culbertson House, and the other Ultimate Bungalows, was nineteen years behind him. His brother Henry, six hundred miles to the south in Pasadena, was still designing original residential commissions in Henry’s solo practice — the William Thum House the same year, the Mrs. C. P. Daly House in Ventura, the continuing late-career work that Henry would sustain through the 1930s. Charles, in Carmel, was about to begin a different kind of late career — one of additions, alterations, sustained engagements, and continuing presence in his clients’ lives across years rather than across project timelines.

The Howard commission was the last opportunity to do what he had been doing for thirty-five years. A young painter, age twenty-seven, recently returned from East Coast art training, the son of one of California’s most prominent architects, recently married, recently established as an exhibiting artist, had bought a Monterey lot and needed a house and a studio. Charles drew it. The shingled main house was single-story; the studio was small and dedicated. Both buildings rose on the lot in 1929. The painter moved in with his wife. The buildings worked for what they were designed to do.

A few years later, in 1934, the painter would climb to the top of Coit Tower in San Francisco with brushes and pigments in his hands, and would begin painting, on the curved interior walls, his depiction of California industry — the workers, the factories, the agricultural fields, the political and economic structure of the state in which he had grown up. The mural, controversial in its political content, would establish him as one of the most important American Social Realist muralists of the New Deal era. The work that produced the Coit Tower mural was done, principally, in the Monterey studio that Charles Greene had drawn for him. The studio, having been designed for an artist’s professional practice, was used for an artist’s professional practice.

The Howard House and studio still stand on Avenue Maria Road in Monterey. John Langley Howard lived to be ninety-seven. Charles Greene lived another twenty-eight years after the commission, dying in 1957 in his Carmel studio. John Galen Howard, the father, died in 1931, two years after the building was completed. The painter outlived all of the architects in his life — outlived his father, outlived Charles Greene, outlived Henry Mather Greene, outlived all the architects who had built the buildings of his childhood and his early career. He continued painting until shortly before his death in 1999. The eco-art of the 1950s, the magic realism of the later decades, the careful continuing landscape work — all of it came, in the end, from the hands of the same painter who, in 1929, had moved with his wife into the new house and studio that Charles Greene had designed for him on a hillside in Monterey.

A career had chapters. Charles closed his last one in 1929. The painter for whom he closed it was just beginning his.

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