Upcycle Pioneer (1944)

In 1941, Hazel Dell Brown (c. 1892-1982), the chief interior designer for Armstrong Cork Company, penned her first Album of Room Ideas. She followed with subsequent albums, each time making creative suggestions to readers, and soliciting their written questions. For her 1944 "new approach to kitchen design," Brown developed an "all-in-one" scheme hidden behind a "home-painted" bird's eye view of the town (shown above).

Utilizing corner and wall cupboards to maximize storage space, Brown was able to combine storage bins, pan/utensil holders, shelving and additional counter space.

She harmonized linoleum colors with the painted elements, textiles and comestibles.

Brown collaborated with Sears-Feibleman's interior decorator Lucille Gray to create "Honeymoon Home," Armstrong Cork's New Orleans model residence. Built on the corner of Webster and Benjamin Streets near Audubon Park, the Honeymoon Home opened to the public in July 1937.

Images above:  Brown, Hazel Dell. Album of Room Ideas [Armstrong Linoleum]. N.p.: Armstrong Cork Company, 1944. TS 1779.L5 B76 1944. Architectural Trade Catalogs, Southeastern Architectural Archive, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.

"Honeymoon Home." Times-Picayune advertisement. 31 July 1937.

Water Fight

The Southeastern Architectural Archive (SEAA) and the Association for Preservation Technology International (APTI) recently completed a mass digitization project. Thanks to financial support from the APTI, nearly 700 of the SEAA's architectural trade catalogs have now been included in the Internet Archive's Building Technology Heritage Library.

The illustration above was used as the cover for the Kuhn Paint Company's promotional manual regarding waterproofing. Harry J. Kuhn managed the Kuhn Paint & Varnish Works, which was based in Houston, Texas. He was a prominent member of the National Paint, Varnish and Lacquer Association's Varnish Manufacturers' Committee. As early as 1921, he sought to enhance his marketing by hiring New Yorker Allen B. Henry as his advertising and sales promotion manager.

After World War II, Kuhn distributed an important pamphlet written by Lonore Kent (1907-1993), who also penned Paint Power and How to Sell It and From the World's Four Corners for the National Paint, Varnish and Lacquer Association. Kent's How to Win Your War Against Water itemized the need to establish good household ventilation and "vapor barriers."

You may wonder about representing moisture and paint in a bellicose relationship.

For more about the relevant history of building science, see Dr. Allison Bailes III's "Why Did Painters Refuse to Paint Insulated Houses in the 1930s?" Energy Vanguard Blog. 18 November 2013.

Image above: Lonore Kent. How to Win Your War Against Water. National Paint, Varnish and Lacquer Association, undated. Architectural Trade Catalogs, Southeastern Architectural Archive, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.

Red Lead

The New York Review of Books recently featured Helen Epstein's review of Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner's Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America's Children. It reminded us in the Southeastern Architectural Archive how much we see documentation associated with the use of lead as a painting medium. Often architects required lead white for use in building projects, and the SEAA retains many specification contracts indicating type and percentage of lead white demanded for painting work.

We recently came across the National Lead Company's (upper right) and Sherwin-Williams Company's (upper left) promotional pamphlets for "red lead," both with paste variants that they recommended as a cost-effective and safe replacement for dry red lead pigment. Marketing its new product to architects and engineers, the National Lead Company advocated the use of its Dutch Boy Red Lead paste as a way to protect structural iron and as a wood primer:

"Engineers and architects who were thoroughly aware of the supreme excellence of the pigment itself as a protector of steel often objected to using it simply because they could not get shop coats applied properly, where the labor was of the most unskilled kind, and even field coats were sometimes precarious because of the difficulty of brushing out the paint properly from high and dangerous perches on bridges and sky-scrapers."

and

"Dutch Boy Red Lead in Oil, like old-style red lead, makes a most desirable primer for all kinds of lumber, particularly pitchy and sappy hard wood, such as yellow pine, cypress, spruce, walnut, etc., where difficulty is oftentimes experienced in making paint adhere properly. Unless a good, hard foundation is laid on hard wood the resinous matter in the wood is apt to soften under the heat of the sun and work its way back to the surface -- a frequent cause of scaling and cracking in outer coats. Red lead not only insures a solid foundation but it acts on the resinous substance in the nature of a drier, keeping it hard and confined."

Although the League of Nations proposed a worldwide lead paint ban in 1922, the first U.S. regulations limiting lead content in paint were enacted fifty years later.

Quoted matter and top right image from: National Lead Company. Pure Red Lead in Paste Form. New York: National Lead Co., 1914.

Top left image: Sherwin-Williams Company. Perfect Method Red Lead in Oil: Semi-Paste. Cleveland: Sherwin-Williams Co., n.d.

Bottom image:  Detail of American Paint Works letterhead, 1919. Martin Shepard Office Records, Southeastern Architectural Archive, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.