For many people, an occupation is what pays the bills, and truer passions are relegated to what time we have left for hobbies. For Rochester-based Modernist architect, author, illustrator, and theater designer Claude Fayette Bragdon (1866-1946), his many occupations were an opportunity to explore and to live his belief system of harmony and balance in all things, whether they be nature, buildings, society, ornamentation, or music.

For the bulk of his multi-faceted career, Bragdon lived and worked in Rochester, and left behind his legacy as an artist and a thinker in the more than 100 remaining structures he designed; in 20 books on subjects ranging from Henry James to feminism to yoga to the fourth dimension; and in a massive collection of drawings and letters collected in The Bragdon Family Papers, now held at the University of Rochester. Through December, a series of exhibits and lectures will honor Bragdon in several venues around town, and afford viewers the opportunity to get to know the fascinating man behind many local masterpieces.

Bragdon's unique perspective as an architect cannot be understated. Cynthia Howk, architectural research coordinator at the Landmark Society of Western New York, says that Bragdon "had that certain edge in his designs; he was more forward-thinking" than many of his contemporaries. "Whenever we talk to someone who's lived in a Bragdon house, they almost always say something about it being the most ‘liveable' house."

Individuals who have experienced a Bragdon design firsthand, either as a homeowner or as a visitor to one of his public spaces, often speak about a feeling of "rightness" in the way he designed it spatially, with an intense focus on how humans would interact with the space, says Jean France, an architectural historian, Bragdon scholar, and retired University of Rochester adjunct and associate professor of art history.

"Claude Bragdon was important in many ways in many fields," says France, who also delivered the opening lecture for the Bragdon exhibit currently on display UR's Rush Rhees Library. "He developed for himself a philosophy of architecture and was able to articulate it in his writing."

Bragdon's architecture, and nearly all of his writing and design work, focused on principles he found in nature and mathematics. Per a UR press release, Bragdon called that "infinitely simple, infinitely subtle, incommunicable, evanescent" element found "in nature, in number, in geometry, in music," the "Beautiful Necessity," drawn from Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Conduct of Life." That work includes the following passage: "How idle to choose a random sparkle here or there, when the indwelling necessity plants the rose of beauty on the brow of chaos, and discloses the central intention of Nature to be harmony and joy."

About 100 Bragdon houses remain in Rochester, but fewer larger structures were left untouched over the years. Among his surviving works are the Universalist Church at 150 South Clinton Street, completed in 1907, and the Bevier Memorial Building at 42 South Washington Street, finished in 1910. Perhaps more familiar is the West Garden at the George Eastman House, constructed between 1916 and 1917. Most other structures have had such severe changes, so that "not much of the spatial effect remains," says France.

Perhaps the most lamented of Bragdon's lost opuses is the New York Central Railroad Station, completed in 1913, which used to stand at Central and North Clinton avenues, where the current Amtrak station is now. The station was demolished in 1966, after the once-booming railroad business lost many of its passengers to exciting, new air travel and personal automobiles, and is now gone with barely a trace.

As I stared at the University of Rochester's collection of hand-drawn plans and photographs of the station's elegantly sweeping vaulted interior, I could not help but mentally populate the image with travelers in overcoats, hats, and gloves, and I still feel a wistfulness and a disappointment about what Rochester (and many other cities) used to be, and what has been lost with shifts in values and aesthetics. When the railways were a primary means of transportation, stations must have been one of the most memorable aspects of strange cities. In turn, they made their cities memorable.

In looking at the images of Bragdon's rail terminal, the word "grand" comes to mind. Our region is in discussion about including high-speed rail into our public transportation system, and this prospect cannot help but renew questions about our city's lack of foresight in destroying this station, which might have become valuable once again. Bragdon's spaces are something you "have to experience yourself," France says, "as local owners are privileged to do." But Bragdon for the masses has been largely lost with the public spaces he created.

After World War I, Bragdon's architectural practice was not as fruitful as it had been, and preferences in style fundamentals changed, a move that France called the "dead hand of the past" rising, as the public's tastes shifted to architecture modeled on historic Roman and Greek designs. "By clinging to models set up hundreds of years ago, they were denying the current innovations their proper place," France says. Bragdon left Rochester for New York City and began a career in stagecraft, designing sets and costumes for the theater.

But Bragdon created many works in Rochester before he moved to New York City, and you can learn about many of them at two current exhibits, and two upcoming lectures. The Bragdon celebration-examination kicked off in April at the Rare Books and Special Collections Library at Rush Rhees Library at the University of Rochester. The exhibit's title, "Claude Bragdon and the Beautiful Necessity," is also the name of a new book of essays, published by Rochester Institute of Technology's Cary Graphic Arts Press, and edited by architect and scholar Eugenia Victoria Ellis and UR curator of the Bragdon Archives, Andrea G. Reithmayr.

Nearly 300 items in the exhibit showcase Bragdon's architectural drawings; bookplates; poster, stamp, and book-cover art; and information and items from the Song & Light Festivals held in Highland Park and then in Central Park in New York City in the 1910's. During these events Bragdon created "outdoor cathedrals" that incorporated music, lanterns, and colorful mandala-like light shields, as well as stage and costume designs from his later career. Most of the prolific man's work was preserved in the University's Bragdon Family Papers, a collection that was donated to UR starting in 1950 by the Bragdon family and others, and which includes about "100 linear feet of manuscript materials and more than 5000 architectural drawings," per the university.

Wall cases exhibit rows of detailed, hand-drawn architectural drawings of building plans for houses, gardens, bridges, and furniture; other cases hold ornate fragments of tiles from the railroad terminal or books and articles by Bragdon. Row by row, the exhibit reveals in nuanced, captivating detail the history of Bragdon's creative and philosophic journey from the 8-year-old who produced hand-illustrated and -written periodicals, to the young architect who would produce thousands of architectural drawings and designs, to details of marriage and family, and a growing interest in Theosophy, a type of mysticism that affirms that all religion attempts to aid humanity's evolution, and therefore each contains a portion of the truth. In the large room off to the right of the exhibition space viewers will find information and photos on the Song & Light Festivals, and watercolors of costumes and sets Bragdon created for Walter Hampden's Shakespearian theater productions.

At the Memorial Art Gallery's Lockhart Gallery, an impressively full, informational, and colorful exhibit examines the friendship between Bragdon and Rochester Modernist painter and teacher Fritz Trautmann, "whose shared ideas about cosmic forces in art and life fueled a steady friendship until Bragdon's death in 1946," says the gallery in a provided statement. Trautmann was a colorist and a longtime teacher at the Mechanical Institute (where Bragdon also taught, which is now RIT) and at the MAG's Creative Workshop, and each artist was "equally passionate about creativity, philosophy, and the relationship between seen and unseen worlds."

The show includes 15 mandala and tessellation-like original artworks by the artists, architectural fragments from the railroad terminal, a portion of the pair's 37 years of philosophically searching, unpublished letters and writings, information on the Song & Light Festivals, books, and a timeline that tracks the personal, professional, and creative intersections in their lives, as well as the MAG's role in their professional histories.

One of Bragdon's most important innovations, which is highlighted in both exhibitions, was "Projective Ornament," his own design system of using various geometrical forms as the basis for the construction of patterned ornamentation. He called it "a visual space-language which shall express modern life in terms of beauty." Frustrated with "modern architecture's fixation on ornamentation not free of cultural and historical associations," per the MAG info plaque, Bragdon "sought sacred geometry of cosmic significance and harmonious design" that would be universal and unbounded by particular associations of time and place.

Four framed 19th century Japanese Katagami stencils, intricately cut in mulberry paper and used for putting patterns on textiles, were found among Bragdon's papers. The structural balance of masculine, rigid patterning and feminine, organic balance exemplifies the Eastern thought and its aesthetic manifestations of balancing opposites that so inspired Bragdon.

Just as Bragdon's paintings and drawings were based on mathematical relationships and universal forms, Trautmann's "River Garden," painted in 1921, offers vibrant impressionist strokes, harmonious colors, and balance of form. His l942 work, "Galaxy," is a mesmerizing macro- and microcosmic exploration of both molecules and celestial bodies, and was used as a teaching tool to symbolize "the great truth that every phenomenon in life involves ALL of life," Trautmann said, according to the accompanying plaque. Each globe is wrapped by the color spectrum in exactly the same way, suggesting that each whole is comprised of the same fundamental parts.

For more information on Bragdon, take in the upcoming lectures at the Memorial Art Gallery. On Sunday, September 19, at 2 p.m., MAG assistant curator Jessica Marten will explore the exhibition in the monthly "What's Up" talk and Q&A. On Sunday, October 10, at 2 p.m., Linda d. Henderson, professor or art history at the University of Texas at Austin, will speak on Bragdon and his place in modern art.

"Claude Bragdon and the Beautiful Necessity"

Through October 16

Rare Books and Special Collections, Rush Rhees Library, University of Rochester

275-4477, library.rochester.edu/rbk

Mon-Fri 9 a.m.-5 p.m.

"Episodes from an Unwritten History: Claude Bragdon and Fritz Trautmann"

Through December 12

Memorial Art Gallery Lockhart Gallery, 500 University Ave.

276-8900, mag.rochester.edu

Wed-Sun 11 a.m.-5 p.m., Thu until 9 p.m., $4-$10