Arthur Brown Jr.

Arthur Brown Jr. (1874–1957) was a prominent American architect, based in San Francisco and designer of many of its landmarks.

Brown was a member of Beta Theta Pi fraternity and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1896, where he and his future partner, John Bakewell Jr. (1872–1963), also a member of Beta Theta Pi, were both protégés of famed Bay Area architect Bernard Maybeck. Brown went to Paris and graduated from the École des Beaux-Arts in 1901, attending the atelier of Victor Laloux, before returning to San Francisco to establish his practice with Bakewell in 1905.

Their first commissions included the interior of the City of Paris department store and the city hall for Berkeley, California, before entering the competition for the 1915 San Francisco City Hall for which they are best known. Brown also designed the city's War Memorial Opera House and Veterans Building, the former in collaboration with G. Albert Lansburgh. Brown was meticulously trained in the rigorous Beaux-Arts tradition, and in the City Hall project his attention extended to the smallest details of light fixtures, floor patterning and doorknobs.

In addition to their well-known monumental works, Bakewell and Brown designed several homes in the Arts and Crafts style championed by Maybeck. Early among them were two redwood framed "double houses" for Stanford University in 1908, and the only fraternity house they designed de novo, the Beta Chi Chapter House of Sigma Nu in 1910 (razed by the University in 1991 despite student and alumni efforts to give it historic designation and restore it). They later designed additions to Ernest Coxhead's 1893 Beta Theta Pi house they had lived in as undergraduates, now a listed Berkeley landmark.

The firm went on to design a series of familiar San Francisco landmarks, and many buildings at Stanford University, before Brown dissolved the partnership in 1927. For contractual reasons many buildings at Stanford through the 1930s continued to be credited to both.

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