Charles Keeler

Charles Augustus Keeler (October 7, 1871 – July 31, 1937) was an American author, poet, ornithologist and advocate for the arts, particularly architecture.

Early life

Keeler was born on October 7, 1871, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He moved to Berkeley with his family in 1887. He studied biology at UC Berkeley, where he was a member of Beta Theta Pi fraternity and the organizer of an Evolution Club.

Career

Keeler was hired in 1891 by the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco and became director of its natural history museum.

That same year, he met the architect Bernard Maybeck on the commuter ferry. They became friends, and in 1895 Keeler asked Maybeck to design his home, in the Berkeley Hills on Highland Place, just north of the UC campus in North Berkeley. It was Maybeck's first residential commission, the first of many redwood-clad hillside homes designed by Maybeck, and the first in a cluster of influential First Bay Tradition houses in Berkeley, designed to blend in with their natural setting. Maybeck also designed a studio structure for Keeler near the house in 1902.

The desire of Keeler, Maybeck and others to promote locally this kind of architecture integrated with nature, in keeping with Arts and Crafts movement ideals, prompted creation of a Ruskin Club in Berkeley in 1895 and the Hillside Club in 1898. Although the Hillside Club was originally started by a group of women, men were soon admitted, and Keeler became its first secretary (1902–1903) and second president (1903–1905). He laid out his ideas for a new style of residence "infused with the art spirit" in his 1904 book The Simple Home, which became a manifesto of sorts for the club and is considered Keeler's most significant book. In 1905 he was one of the founders, along with Alfred L. Kroeber and George Rapall Noyes of a "Berkeley Folk-Lore Club" and then the California Branch of the American Folk-Lore Society, of which he soon became president. In 1907 he was elected president of a newly organized Studio Club of Berkeley. He associated with many of the artists in the local colony, especially the “art photographers,” and used them as actors in the plays he produced at the Hillside Club. Keeler even served as a model for Adelaide Hanscom Leeson’s photo illustrations in Omar Khayyam’s "Rubaiyat".