Architect Arthur Brown Jr.

Arthur Brown, Jr. (1874–1957)

Arthur Brown, Jr. was an American architect, based in San Francisco. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1896, where he and his future partner, John Bakewell, Jr, were protégés of famed Bay Area architect Bernard Maybeck. He went to Paris and graduated from the Ecole des Beaux Arts in 1901, before returning to San Francisco to establish his practice with Bakewell.
The firm designed the rotunda for the City of Paris department store in San Francisco and the city hall for Berkeley, California, across the Bay before entering the competition for San Francisco City Hall for which he is best known. Brown also built the city's War Memorial Opera House, the Veterans Building, the Pacific Gas and Electric main office at Market and Beale, the San Francisco Art Institute, Temple Emanu-el, Pasadena City Hall, the Santa Fe depot in San Diego, the Horticulture Building at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, and many buildings at Stanford University. Most of his later San Francisco works employed a stripped-down, abstracted classicism, as the poured-concrete Art Moderne Coit Tower. Brown's Coit Tower was the site of some of the first public works murals executed under the Public Works Administration, later known as the WPA. He died in 1957.

Important works by Arthur Brown Jr.

  • San Francisco City Hall
  • San Francisco Art Institute
  • Temple Emanu-el
  • Pasadena City Hall
  • Coit Tower