Drawing Toward Home

Exhibition Preview

By James F. O’Gorman

A major component of the American pursuit of happiness has long been a home of one’s own (the automobile is a distant second: the one a castle, the other a chariot). Early on it might have been a four-square neo-classical box or a cozy Gothic cottage. Of late, for the middle class, it has taken the form of a detached single-family dwelling set on a weed-free lawn in suburbia, preferably with two- or three-car garage, although town houses, apartments, condos, and seaside or country trophy houses may also qualify. It might be a ranch house, a Cape, a Colonial, or a McMansion. It might have been designed by a “name” architect or a faceless drafter working for a developer. In any case the center of the nuclear family looms large in the popular American psyche. “American Dream Homes,”  “American Dream Realty,” “American Dream Builders,” “American Dream Mortgages”-- the Internet abounds with commercial enterprises seeking to help us, at a profit to themselves, to achieve the prefect framework for our birthright domestic bliss. (The origins of the current economic crisis may be sought in the failure to properly finance the Dream.)

The meaning of the American home ranges from refuge to showplace. Frank Lloyd Wright designed hearth-centered houses with sheltering roofs and inconspicuous entryways, following age-old symbols of domestic security. His Zimmerman House of the 1950s in Manchester, New Hampshire, is a canonical example. Silas Lapham, in William Dean Howells’s 1885 novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham, saw the dream house rising for his family’s use in Boston’s new Back Bay district as proof of his upward mobility. As the center of self expression, the home is perhaps the most characteristic building type in a capitalistic democratic society. Its central position in American life makes it an architectural design problem worthy of attention. The drawings selected for Drawing Toward Home exemplify that fact. They are all for domestic buildings in New England in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Although specific to life in the Northeast, they parallel the history of architecture, and hence architectural graphics, at the national level.

A house, like any building, is the result of a two-stage process: conception and execution. The design drawing is the mediator between the mind of the architect and the material forms of the building. It makes graphically manifest the translation of the client’s wishes, expressed as the building program, into their physical embodiment. Before a new house is a home, it is commonly a desire, a dream, an air castle that may be made concrete by the repetitive product of a speculative developer or a custom home designed by a registered architect. The developer’s clients take more or less what is offered; an architect trades on personalized work. The domestic architectural commission comes from people who describe what they want in a house, where it will be located, the size of the family as well as the budget, the number of pets, and other matters affecting the final product, including the personalities of the owners and the image they want to project to the world.  The designer translates this verbal information into preliminary graphic images that he or she hopes will satisfy the client’s needs and wants, and eventually produces the working or contract drawings that will, with a set of written specifications, form a legal contract and direct the builder in the construction of the house.

Domestic architecture, like any other type of building, varies over time in technology and style, as do the drawings created to explain a proposed building to client and builder. Whether hand crafted or computer generated, whether of a Gothic Revival cottage or an International Style house, the drawings are of various standard types. There are the preliminary sketches of a project that eventually evolve into a series of definitive graphics. The latter include the fundamental plans, or horizontal slices through a proposed dwelling that are the diagrams of the clients’ intended pattern of living. They show the shapes of and relationships among the rooms. Sections, or vertical slices through the house, illustrate the relationship of superimposed spaces, the structure, and the interior elevations of the rooms. Exterior elevations reflect the expression of those interior arrangements on the outside of the home through the placement and shape of windows, doors, wings, roofs, porches, and so on. There are also details, drawings at a larger (sometimes full) scale that explain typical or important aspects of construction or design. Architects also prepare drawings for ancillary elements of a domestic complex, such as landscaping, outbuildings, and gateways to estates. This exhibition even includes the elevation of a two-story martin house designed by Luther Briggs, complete with cupola, to provide upscale nesting quarters for the clients’ avian neighbors. 

All of the above are flat graphics that are not intended to suggest the three-dimensional reality of the finished design. Mere diagrams that show undistorted, measurable relationships between the parts of a house, they are useful for instructing the builder, or, as colored elevations, for impressing the client. In either case they are two-dimensional.

Not until well into the nineteenth century did the majority of American architects, especially in New England, begin frequently to intrude upon the domain of the artist, to project three-dimensional views, or anticipatory presentation perspectives, that became a standard part of their graphic repertory. Furthering their new stature as artists, architects used perspective views as visual aids to their sales pitch. As Benjamin Linfoot put it in 1884, the “architect . . . must keep his client’s enthusiasm alive and active by sending or submitting bright, jaunty little perspectives of his contemplated work.” 

Some architects are gifted enough to do their own presentations, which are of course useless as instructions to the builder but useful to persuade the client to build, or—published in the new professional journals—to show off their skills to their peers, but early on there appeared men called “perspectivists” or “renderers,” who specialized in such eye-catching drawings.  These renderers existed either in-house, on the staff of one architect, or were itinerant, traveling from office to office, even city to city, to rent their pencils or brushes to any who wanted them. By late in the nineteenth century such views of intended or realized buildings came to exist independently of the construction process. This gave priority to their artistic rather than their utilitarian value. They were exhibited at galleries, museums, and clubs, and published in journals and books, with the drafter’s intention of reaching beyond a specific client to a wider audience.

The first formal exhibition of drawings by the Boston Society of Architects took place at the Art Club in February 1886. The show included more than two hundred works, some sent over by English architects, in pen, pencil, and watercolor. A residential design by Maine’s John Calvin Stevens drew particular attention. But the most important early show of architectural drawings was held in October 1890 at Boston’s fashionable St. Botolph Club, a select social gathering founded in 1880 by a group of men including painters, sculptors, architects, and amateurs interested in the arts. Since the club hoped to attract an audience from beyond the architectural drafting room or the clients’ conference table, the exhibition committee said it wanted to have “largely perspectives, and, in general, such drawings as would interest not only the profession, but the outside public generally.”

 The large number of presentation perspectives in this exhibition distorts the graphic production of architectural offices. Many of these views are beautiful objects in their own right, suitable to hang on living room walls, and they can often be found in dealers’ shops and, as we have just seen, in museum or gallery exhibitions. Their attractiveness helps to preserve them. But the basic plans and sections, the essential working drawings that make up the bulk of the architect’s office time, often lack sufficient eye appeal for the general public, and as often do not survive.

Unlike the preparatory sketches of artists that are recognized as collectable works of art, architectural drawings created as means to an end are not always valued for themselves, especially if the architect is not famous. They get manhandled or are discarded altogether; they are not considered precious objects. Architects retain them only as they find them useful in the production of the finished product. At the terminus of the construction cycle, or the demise of the architect, they become obsolete; their sheer volume overwhelms, people lose interest in them.

An archive such as that at Historic New England is necessarily selective, but it is nonetheless an essential tool in explaining our cultural heritage. The preservation of these historic documents—however incomplete--ensures that our understanding of the history of domestic design in the Northeast will be formed as fully as possible.

Design for the New England human habitat in all its variety is celebrated in this exhibition. The drawings stem from the six northeastern states and from the offices of architects unknown as well as famous. They represent domesticity from a broad spectrum of the social hierarchy, from suburban and coastal estates to Boston three-deckers. They span the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, from the origins of architectural draftsmanship in this country to the dawn of Computer Assisted Design (or CAD) programs.

Historic New England collects these architectural drawings as part of its mission to preserve and interpret regional material and social history. Its many house museums are not the only portals to the past that help it fulfill that aim. The full story of architecture and society in the Northeast cannot be told from surviving buildings alone. Some drawings do prescribe what was built and still stands, but some preserve the design of houses now lost, and others record the stages in a design process that ultimately resulted in something different or unexecuted.  The student needs both buildings and drawings. 

The collection of architectural graphics owned by Historic New England represents a major resource for the study of the region’s history and culture and adds a significant dimension to our understanding of the evolution of the domestic environment in New England, and, by extension, of the entire United States. What is shown in this exhibition is the mere tip of the iceberg, a small sampling of an extraordinarily rich and indispensable resource for the fulfillment of the organization’s mission.

James F. O’Gorman, architectural historian and author, is professor emeritus at Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts.
 
© 2009 Historic New England. Reprinted with permission.

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