DESIGN BY HERB GREENE
Herb Greene
Berkeley, CA: Self-published, 1981. Original edition. Landscape quarto. Thick printed saddle stitched wrappers. 24 pp. 68 black and white photographs, illustrations and floorplans. Colophon rubber stamped to first page. Wrappers lightly worn with crimped binding, but a very good copy. Scarce.
11 x 8.5-inch promotional booklet assembled and published by the author in 1981, with 24 pages of black and white work reproductions along with short philosophical discourses, a chronology, bibliography, and exhibition history. Julius Shulman is credited with photography of the Greene, Joyce and Cunningham houses.
Includes references to the 1955 Mendell House; the 1957 Lyne Residence, Houston, Texas; the 1959 Joyce Residence, Snyder, Oklahoma; the 1960-1961 Prairie House, Norman, Oklahoma; the 1962 Cunningham Residence, Oklahoma City; the 1965 Unitarian Church, Lexington, Kentucky; the 1977 Cook Residence, Louisville, Kentucky; and the 1981- Villa Blanca Farm, Lexington, Kentucky among others.
American architect, artist, author and educator Herb Greene (née Herbert Ronald Greenberg, 1929 – ) left Syracuse University in New York in 1948 to enroll at the University of Oklahoma, where he studied under the direction of Bruce Goff, a modernist architect known for his iconoclastic design philosophy. While earning his degree and after, Greene worked for Goff, preparing architectural drawings.
Greene's work is known for original concepts, organic design characteristics and connections to landscape. His architectural drawings are in The Art Institute of Chicago's archival collection alongside work by Louis Sullivan (1856-1924), Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959), Bruce Goff (1904-82) and others associated with the “Prairie Tradition.”
During 1951 to 1954 Greene worked for John Lautner in Los Angeles, California and then relocated to Houston, Texas, where he worked for Joseph Krakower and established his own practice.
In 1957, Greene returned to the University of Oklahoma, where he and his colleagues, Bruce Goff and Mendel Glickman (1895–1967), among other faculty, developed the American School of architecture, a curriculum that emphasized individual creativity, organic forms, and experimentation. Donald MacDonald, an architect who trained under Greene and Glickman, described the American School as “a truly American ethic, which is being formulated without the usual influence of the European or Asian architectural forms and methodologies common on the East and West coasts of the United States.” Students were taught to look to sources beyond the accepted canon of western architecture and to find inspiration in everyday objects, the natural landscape, and non-western cultures such as the designs of Native American tribes of Oklahoma and the Western plains.
Greene realized the completion of his building, The Prairie House, in 1961, a structure that pre-dated the green building movement by a decade. Located in Norman, Oklahoma, this modernist residence, integrates concepts that are now associated with smart architecture: natural materials, passive design, natural lighting and ventilation, energy efficiency, and careful site placement. Julius Shulman photographs of The Prairie House were featured in Life and Look magazines, in addition to several international publications. This media exposure brought Greene recognition for his experimental architecture and counter-culture design philosophy.
In 1964 Greene left Oklahoma to become a professor of architecture at the University of Kentucky, where he taught for 18 years and designed buildings that reflected client-centered regional architecture. Greene believed that dialogue between the architect and client was paramount to creating a design that both could support. He subscribed to the philosophy that ultimately the users and clients needed to make buildings their own. He did this through the integration of regional and historical references and by incorporating the client's personal objects into a meaningful relationship with the actual design such as in the Joyce Residence.
Greene has lived in Berkeley, California, since 1982, where he continues to explore the interdisciplinary realm of architecture, art, science and philosophy. He is a published author, on the subject of visual perception and neurobiological systems. Greene's work as an artist, architect and writer explores symbolic relationships between memory, experience, object and environment.
Greene carried forward the American School legacy in his projects throughout the Great Plains area and Kentucky, focusing on contextual relationships to site and climate with an experimental and resourceful consideration of materials. Like his mentors, Greene strives for an individual solution to problem solving, stressing the particular over the general, however his fascination with the role of architectural symbols as a means of expanding individual expression, is an approach that is unique to his personal architecture practice.
Greene's architectural work has been included in exhibitions throughout the United States, including "Modern Architecture USA", 1965, Museum of Modern Art, NY; "Environmental Architecture", 1967, Kansas City Art Institute, MI; "An American Architecture",1977, Milwaukee Art Center, WI; "The Continuous Present of Organic Architecture",1991, Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, OH; and "Time Space Existence", 2018, Venice Architecture Biennale, University of Oklahoma installation in Palazzo Bembo, Italy. [Wikipedia]