NEW! Digital Collection

The Southeastern Architectural Archive (SEAA) and the Tulane Digital Library (TUDL) recently completed an exciting digitization project.

The new digital collection consists of architectural drawings made by various nineteenth-century New Orleans architects.

"The Architect's Eye" incorporates highlights from the Southeastern Architectural Archive, the largest repository of architectural records in the southern United States. Selected drawings illustrate nineteenth-century architecture as practiced by the Crescent City's leading designers, many of whom were educated in Europe. Building types include residences, commercial and institutional buildings. Selected drawings hint at the ways in which architectural drafting techniques separated the specialist from the layman. In an era of increasing professionalization, one's ability to render the third dimension on a two-dimensional surface elevated the socioeconomic level of one's clientele and the scale of one's commissioned projects. The collection represents some of the most accomplished architectural designs produced in nineteenth-century New Orleans.

To browse the collection......

http://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/collection/id/125

Image above: James Gallier, Sr. architect. Mechanics' Institute.  Canal Street Elevation. Tchoupitoulas and Canal Street.  Circa 1850-51.  Sylvester Labrot Collection, Southeastern Architectural Archive, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.

Architectural Photography Symposium

Documenting History, Charting Progress and Exploring the World: Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Photographs.

Indiana University South Bend and Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame

October 3 - 4, 2010

Held during the The Snite Museum exhibition Documenting History, Charting Progress and Exploring the World: Architecture in Photographs from the Janos Scholz Collection of Nineteenth-Century European Photographs (September 5 - October 31, 2010), this symposium is a collaboration between the Snite Museum at the University of Notre Dame, the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture, and Indiana University South Bend. It will bring together scholars who approach the study of 19-century photographs of architecture from a thematic point of view. The cultural role of architectural photography will be examined in 12 papers and two lectures by established and junior scholars. Participants from Canada, Ireland, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States will provide varied perspectives and insights on the cultural, social, and professional significance of 19-century architectural photography.

The symposium is free and open to the public.

Indiana University South Bend is located at 1700 Mishawaka Avenue, South Bend, Indiana and the Snite Museum of Art is located on the campus of the University of Notre Dame, near South Bend, Indiana. Directions to the two conference venues are available at www.iusb.edu and www.nd.edu/~sniteart/. For Symposium program, itineraries, and additional information, please contact Micheline Nilsen, (mnilsen@iusb.edu or 574-520-4277).

The Treeless Plain

One of my drawing professors claimed that he could never teach perspectival drawing techniques to children of the northern Great Plains, stating that because they grew up without any spatial referents, they had no inherent sense of perspective. Tulane University School of Architecture faculty member Milton Scheuermann has developed a concise guide to perspectival drawing, titled "Perspective Drawing: A Practical Approach for Architects." For those who wish to consult his summary of one- and two-point perspective drawing, go to Tulane University's Architecture Research Guide (http://libguides.tulane.edu/architecture) and scroll down the left-hand column to download the pdf files.

The photograph above depicts my great-grandfather's ranch, the Lazy SS, which was located in Triumph Township, Ramsey County, North Dakota, c. 1930s.

Architectural Photography

New Orleans architectural photographer Frank Lotz Miller (1923-1993) maintained a prolific career photographing the city's architecture, food and festivals. Although born in Shreveport, his family moved to the Crescent City when he was a child. By the late 1950s, he was a regular contributor to Architectural Forum, Architectural Record and Progressive Architecture, frequently drawing comparisons to modernist architecture photographers Julius Shulman (1910-2009) and Ezra Stoller (1915-2004).

In the mid-1960s, Frank Lotz Miller wrote essays for The Louisiana Architect magazine. He used this forum to articulate the aims and principles of architectural photography, and to establish guidelines for architects hiring photographers:

"To truly appreciate architecture one must experience it first hand; be present in the space it encompasses, walk through and around it. The ideal is not always possible, but the best substitute, and I will be the first to admit its limitations, is photography."

"The photographer should not be asked to work on speculation. This is another reason why whenever possible the architect and the photographer should visit the site together."

To read more, see: "Photography and the Architect." The Louisiana Architect (May 1965): p. 10. Louisiana Research Collection, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.

The Southeastern Architectural Archive retains Frank Lotz Miller photographs and negatives for the following architects/firms: James Lamantia, George Saunders, John Lawrence, and Curtis & Davis. To view a selection of digital reproductions, click here.

Image above: Frank Lotz Miller Advertisement. The Louisiana Architect (October 1964): p. 15.

Preservation of Architectural Drawings

The Fabrica
The New York Chapter of the Guild of Book Workers presents:

The Fabrication and Preservation of Architectural Drawings
An afternoon lecture with Lois Olcott Price
March 16th, 2010, 1-5 pm
Wood Auditorium, Avery Hall, Columbia University

Co-Sponsored by the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University

Because architectural drawings are not created as an end in themselves, but as graphic documents to construct a building, sell a project or explore a design concept, the materials and techniques chosen by the drafter are particular to the function of the drawing as well as the period in which it was created. The interpretation and preservation of architectural drawings depends upon an understanding of their functions in architectural practice and on a working knowledge of drafting materials and techniques. This lecture will include tracing the use of supports, media and photo-reproductive processes used to create architectural drawings in the 18th to 20th centuries, accompanied by examples. The emphasis will be on identification and understanding of materials and processes, and participants will have the opportunity to examine samples and ask questions. Building from this understanding of materials and using the available examples, we will also discuss housing and treatment options for these collections.

Lois Olcott Price is Director of Conservation at the Winterthur Museum, Gardens and Library near Wilmington, DE and assistant Winterthur Professor of Art Conservation in the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation. In 1994, she was senior conservator at the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts in Philadelphia, PA. As increasing numbers of architectural drawings arrived at CCAHA for treatment, unanswered questions about the materials and techniques used to fabricate them piqued her interest and resulted in research that has now spanned almost two decades. Lois has published, lectured and consulted widely about architectural drawings. She has received several grants to support her research resulting in a monograph, “Line Shade and Shadow, The Fabrication and Preservation of Architectural Drawings,” to be published by Oak Knoll in the spring of 2010.

To register for the lecture or for more information, please contact Clare Manias at newyork@guildofbookworkers.org The fee for the lecture is $20 for Guild of Book Workers members, $30 for non-members. Special admission for Columbia students, faculty and staff with ID.

Wood Auditorium is located on the lower level of Avery Hall at Columbia University. Columbia University is located at 116th Street and Broadway in Manhattan. For directions to Avery Hall, please see http://www.columbia.edu/about_columbia/map/avery.html.

Architectural Image-Based-Modeling

Architectural Image-Based-Modeling is an international collaborative effort to create 3D models from photographic representations and other historic data. Intended as a methodological and theoretical portal, Architectural IBM includes case studies, tutorials, scholarly articles, and a gallery of images, video and three-dimensional models. F. Remondino, et al.'s "The 3D-ARCH Project" (originally published in the International Archives of Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences v. 38) provides a synopsis of a four-year project to integrate 3D models and GIS data sets for the purposes of virtually reconstructing complex medieval architectural forms.

The new site allows students, teachers, and researchers to contribute 2D and 3D building representations generated from photographs.

Image above: Carthusian Monastery of Notre-Dame-du-val-de-Bénédiction, Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, France. Created by Jiakun Ll. From "Gallery" at Architectural IBM (direct link above). Last viewed 07.07.2009.

Digitized Architectural Drawings

For those searching for digital reproductions of architectural drawings, there are a growing number of resources available. Archivision, now accessible by subscription via ARTstor, has been mentioned in an earlier post.  The Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division is another important source, especially rich due to its housing the Historic American Buildings Survey.  

The Art Institute of Chicago (web capture shown above) is also a great resource, featuring digital reproductions of works by Burnham & Root, Buckminster Fuller, Bertrand Goldberg, Holabird & Roche, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Granted, they are small in scale, but the digitals may provoke a visit to Chicago.

Visual Literacy Now

Visual literacy initiatives have grown in popularity, and moved beyond the Arts and Design Colleges. A particulary noteworthy international and interdisciplinary collaboration is Visual-Literacy.org. Participating faculty include engineers, designers, computer scientists and physicists. Online tutorial modules are available for business and engineering students.

Above is a plan of London's Soho District (1845) that demonstrates what University of Lugano Communication Science professor Riccardo Mazza calls Graphics for Explorative Analysis:

"Graphics are also a mean for finding and identifying structures and properties in a given data set (Card, et al, 1999). The special properties of visual perception of data may facilitate the finding of relationships, trends, revealing hidden patterns, or as Bertin (1981, p. 16) says, 'it is the visual means of resolving logical problems.' To illustrate. . . [on this map] black dots represent individual deaths from cholera and "x" marks the position of the water pumps. The map allowed Dr. John Snow to observe that most of the deaths . . . were concentrated around the Broad Street water pumps, which was discovered to be the source of diffusion of cholera in the area (Tufte, 1983)." [Visual Literacy Demo Tutorial: Visualization for Engineering and Communication. Viewed 20.04.2009 at http://www.visual-literacy.org/pages/demo.htm].

To read more on visualization/nomenclature/academics of, click here for the group's recommended reading list.

Mapping Historic Preservation: Proto-HABS in New Orleans

N.C. Curtis. Map of the Garden District. Graphite, pen and ink on paper. 1932. Nathaniel C. Curtis, Sr. Collection. Southeastern Architectural Archive, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.

I've mentioned Louisiana's admirable contributions to the HABS program in earlier posts, and recently came across an early twentieth-century attempt to map and record the city's noteworthy structures.

Tulane University architecture professor Nathaniel C. Curtis wrote for the Journal of the American Institute of Architects in 1916:

"The Chapter is at work on a map of the city of sufficient extent to include all the old noteworthy buildings and those with interesting ornamental detail. It is understood that such a map would serve a basis of foundation on which might be built a later series of measured architectural drawings of all the buildings of the city which are worthy of record. In addition to such accurate measured drawings, including plans, elevations, sections, and large-scale details of moldings, iron work and modeled ornament, it is also proposed to acquire a large number of photographs from which half-tones might be made to accompany the line drawings and to prepare a descriptive monograph which would serve to further explain the origin and architectural character of each example. This is a serious undertaking, but one not quite so colossal as would seem to be indicated on its face. As a matter of fact, a number of local architects, several artists and a few historians have, with as much zeal as was at their command, occupied themselves with doing in an occasional sort of way just what the Chapter proposes to do with system and cooperation. All that has been accomplished heretofore in the way of record may be placed at the disposal of the committee for incorporation in the proposed work, and so a considerable saving of time and effort will be effected."

Excerpt from Nathaniel C. Curtis, "The Work of the Louisiana Chapter in Urging the Preservation of the Historic Architecture of New Orleans, and in Seeking to Restore Its Influence in Modern Building," p. 219. Biographical Files, Southeastern Architectural Archive, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.

Invincible Cities

Since the 1970s, sociologist Camilo José Vergara has been photographing the built environment of America's post-industrial cities, especially places associated with economically disadvantaged minority communities.  Drawing on disciplines such as anthropology, architectural history, history, photography, and urban planning, Vergara has discovered seven distinctive characteristics of ghetto neighborhoods:  fortification; ruins; empty lots; social containers; a visual language of art and advertisements; public service billboards; and bringing suburbanization to inner cities.  To read more about these features, visit the MacArthur Fellow's Visual Encyclopedia of the American Ghetto, sponsored by Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities at Rutgers University here.

Image above:  Camilo José Vergara, from the Visual Encyclopedia of the American Ghetto.  url:  http://invinciblecities.camden.rutgers.edu/intro.html  Viewed 06 March 2009.

Samuel Wilson's Quest

During the late 1950s, New Orleans architectural historian Samuel Wilson, Jr. participated in a coordinated effort to develop a national architectural archive system. Based on an initial proposal from Mrs. Eric Mendelsohn to develop an American architectural museum, a small group of architects convened informally to discuss such an endeavor and how it related to architectural archives. A preliminary program was developed and presented to the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Executive Committee in late 1955. The AIA then organized a Joint Committee on Architectural Archives consisting of members from the AIA, the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), the College Art Association (CAA), the American Historical Association (AHA), the American Association of Architectural Bibliographers, the Association of State and Local History, the Library of Congress and the National Park Service (NPS). The committee hoped to establish a means of preserving this nation's architectural records for future study and sought funds from the Council on Library Resources (established by the Ford Foundation) to determine the best methods for collecting, storing and servicing such records in both original and surrogate formats.

Wilson's committee stated the problem:

"Although ideally the architectural history of a country should be written in the main directly from its buildings, in practice this is not feasible. Buildings are subject to destruction all the time, they are immovable and have to be examined in situ, and many details are either not easily ascertainable or else have been greatly changed.

Consequently, it is necessary to rely in large measure on the written documentation of the building -- drawings, specifications, correspondence and printed contemporary descriptions. The drawings, however, offer peculiar problems of storage, cataloging and servicing in bulk, which must be satisfactorily resolved. Of even more importance is determining what should be saved since practical considerations of cost and space obviate the possibility of saving all such records." (undated, c. 1957)

Information gleaned from "Architectural Archives Problems/Investigation Committee." Box 3, Samuel Wilson, Jr. Papers Collection, Southeastern Architectural Archive, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.

ARCHITEXT Exhibition

The Southeastern Architectural Archive has recently installed a new exhibition, Architext: The Unity of Architecture and Typography, co-curated by Keli Rylance and Kevin Williams.

This exhibition covers a wide range of architectural letter forms, from the Renaissance and its introduction of classically-derived alphabets in the service of architecture and typography to the mid-twentieth century's attempts at a universal alphabet. Letters devised by Albrecht Durer, Geoffroy Tory, Johann-David Steingruber and Berthold Wolpe are included, as are the lettering designs of New Orleans architects Moise Goldstein, William Nolan, Douglass Freret, Albert Wolf, Herbert Benson and George Riehl.

Exhibition closes 8 May 2009.

Decoding Plans I: Electrical Symbols

Pencil Points (January 1924) published its "Standard Symbols for Wiring Plans" that were recommended and adopted by the American Institute of Architects (A.I.A.), the Association of Electragists (A.E.I.), and the American Institute of Electrical Engineering (A.I.E.E.) Standards Committee on 6 March 1924. For those interested in decoding the symbology of early twentieth-century plans, this may help. As new units and circuitry developed throughout the late twenties and early thirties, professional architects recommended new symbols. These included designations for early HVAC (Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning) systems and radio aerial outlets. American Architect developed these tentative symbols as part of its Time-Saver Standards (December 1935).

At Large in the Archive

The architecture periodical Pencil Points (1920-1942) included in each issue a regular book review column titled "At Large in the Library." Reviews focused on everything from the mundane (standard plumbing fixtures, engineering terminology, use of gypsum) to the sublime (architectural utopianism) and were written by article contributors. Taking that as my model, from this point forward, I will periodically feature a recommended book, either one available in the TSA Library ("At Large in the Library") or in the Southeastern Architectural Archive ("At Large in the Archive").

A Story of Accomplishment 1866-1916. [New York: Sanborn Map Company, c. 1916].SEAA Reference G1204 .A4 S35

Sanborn fire insurance maps are of course a vital resource to anyone interested in the history of urban planning and architecture, for they indicate location and size of buildings, construction materials, fenestration, function and occupancy. This corporate history presents a history of fire insurance maps as a whole, tracing their origins to British tithe maps. It describes Sanborn's production model, from the surveying work, to the draughtsmanship, to the lithography, hand-coloring, mounting to canvas and binding. It further addresses the process of making revisions, and the tedious printing and adhering of correction "pasters." The book's anonymous author recounts the use of Sanborn Maps by insurance companies, municipalities, and utilities companies. Profusely illustrated with photogravures of company headquarters, printing plants, and employees.

[Pictured Above: Detail of Key of Signs Bound Maps, 1916. Illustration from A Story of Accomplishment 1866-1916, n.p. Southeastern Architectural Archive, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries].