Aaron G. Green Collection
Scope and Contents
The Aaron G. Green Collection spans the years 1939-2017 (bulk 1953-1999), and includes files created by Green and his firm Aaron Green and Associates. The collection is organized into four series: Personal Papers, Professional Papers, Office Records, and Project Records. The collection documents his career including his education, architectural practice, and association with Taliesin. His career focused on designing residential and funerary buildings, of which many are well documented in this collection.
The Personal Papers series includes biographical information as well as student notebooks and drawings from Green’s education at Cooper Union in New York City. Professional Papers contain correspondence with publishers and architects, writings and presentation materials, records relating to involvement with associations and committees, awards, research, reference files, and consulting files, including extensive files on judicature. The Office Records series include brochures, photographs, and news clippings that extensively document completed projects. The Office Records series also holds the Chronological Files subseries, which includes the vast majority of project correspondence in chronological order.
Project Records containing drawings, photographs, and files comprise the majority of the collection and span the entirety of Green’s career. Well documented projects include The Newark Community Center and Library (1966, 1982), The Union City Civic Center (1974), St. Stephen's Catholic Church (1969) and St. Elizabeth Seton Catholic Church (1987). Green also designed many cemeteries and mortuaries, including the addition to Julia Morgan's Chapel of the Chimes (1955), and a mausoleum, columbarium and Chinese cemetery at Skylawn Memorial Park, San Mateo (1983).
The Aaron G. Green collection contains a small number of born-digital materials, mainly photographs (in jpg and tif formats) that were taken of project drawings for inclusion in the Randolph Henning book on Green. Some CAD files exist for the American Hebrew Academy project, but those files have not been assessed.
Dates
- Creation: 1939-1999
Access Statement
Collection is open for research. Many of the Environmental Design Archives collections are stored offsite and advance notice is required for use.
Publication Rights
All requests for permissions to publish, reproduce, or quote from materials in the collection should be discussed with the Curator.
Biographical Note
Aaron Green (born May 4, 1917 in Corinth, Mississippi, died June 5, 2001) grew up in Florence, Alabama. He studied at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, Florence State College and Cooper Union. Green was invited by Wright to join Taliesin as an apprentice in the early 1940s, from which point the two maintained a close friendship. It was his Taliesin fellowship at Spring Green, Wisconsin and Scottsdale, Arizona, from 1940 to 1943 under the tutelage of Frank Lloyd Wright that profoundly shaped his career.
Green enlisted in the Air Force during World War II, serving as a bombardier in the Pacific theater. After the war, he moved to Los Angeles and worked as an interior designer with industrial designer Raymond Loewy. During this time, he married and began a family. Green started his own firm in Los Angeles in 1948. In 1951, Green moved to San Francisco and founded Aaron G. Green Associates, Inc. Wright suggested a joint office wherein Green would act as Wright's West Coast representative.
Green participated in over thirty of Wright's projects. At the time of Wright's death in 1959, the Marin County Civic Center was uncompleted, and Green saw the project through to completion. Among Green's collaborations with Wright were the V. C. Morris Store in San Francisco, which was later restored by Mr. Green and renamed Folk Arts International, and the futuristic Butterfly Wing Bridge across the lower bay, which was never constructed. Green executed a large variety of building types such as the New Community of Hunter’s Point for the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency (1974), a number of Catholic churches, several Civic Centers, and various municipal buildings.
In 1968, he became a member of the College of Fellows, American Institute of Architects. He taught as a lecturer and critic at Stanford University's department of architecture for fifteen years. In 2001, he became the first recipient of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation's Gold Medal.
Sources:
Henning, Randolph C. Aaron G. Green: Organic Architecture Beyond Frank Lloyd Wright. United States: ORO Editions, 2017.
Extent
60 Linear Feet: (150 tubes, 37 cartons, 4 document boxes, 1 flat file drawer)
51 Gigabytes: (117 CDs, floppy disks, and zip disks)
Language of Materials
English
System of Arrangement
The collection is organized into four series. Within each series, original order has been maintained when evident; however, much of the collection arrived with no evident order. In these cases, an order has been imposed by the archivists.
Funding
Arrangement and description of this collection was funded by Frank and Allan Green.
- Title
- Aaron Green Collection
- Status
- Completed
- Author
- Emily Vigor and Katie Riddle; additions by Julia Larson
- Date
- 2025
- Description rules
- Describing Archives: A Content Standard
- Language of description
- English
- Script of description
- Latin
Repository Details
Part of the University of California, Berkeley. College of Environmental Design. Environmental Design Archives Repository