This New England

Photos (two are below) and commentary by WILLIAM MORGAN

The buildings, furniture, and decorative art of the firm of Greene & Greene is the subject of an exhibition at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts that runs until mid-October.

While the architects and brothers, Charles Sumner Greene and Henry Mather Greene, built almost 200 houses in Pasadena, they had--as their names suggest--New England roots. They studied at MIT, in the late 1880s when both the nation's oldest architecture program and the museum itself were Back Bay neighbors. They left for California during the economic downturn of 1983, but the museum's pioneering Japanese department provided their fateful exposure to the the arts of Orient.

The MFA show has three rooms packed with chairs, lamps, fire screens, chairs and stained glass from Greene & Greene's great houses in Pasadena from the first decade of the 20th century. Influenced by the English Arts and Crafts movement, the power of such American classics as the Gamble house (winter home for one of the soap makers from Cincinnati) derive from the architects' total design approach, wherein every object was not only designed by them but meticulously fashioned by craftsmen in their studio.

Objects in a museum setting, divorced from the spaces for which they were designed, rarely add up to the real dimensions of architecture. But these are splendid and poetic pieces that stand on their own as works of art.

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 Tags  Charles Sumner Greene; Henry Mather Greene MIT Museum of Fine Arts

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