PS04 Open Session 1 8:30 - 10:40am Thursday, 30th April, 2020 Track Track 1 Session Chair Tara Dudley
All session times are in US PACIFIC DAYLIGHT TIME (PDT).
8:35 - 8:55am
PS04 The Collective Enterprise of Baroque Architecture: The Design of the Villa Pamphilj, Rome
Stephanie Leone Boston College, Chestnut Hill, USA
Abstract
Much of architectural history has been written from the perspective of the star architect. Yet, many buildings do not conform to this standard. When considering Italian Baroque architecture, the triumvirate of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Francesco Borromini and Pietro da Cortona provokes the question of attribution in architectural history. In the case of the Casino del Belrespiro of the Villa Pamphilj (1645-48), scholars have long debated the attribution of the design to Alessandro Algardi, Giovanni Francesco Grimaldi, Girolamo Rainaldi, or even Bernini. Instead, I will argue that the Casino del Belrespiro cannot be attributed to a single designer; its design represents the creative assimilation of ideas from three celebrated architectural treatises: Serlio’s Tutte l’opere d’architettura, Palladio’s I Quattro Libri, and Scamozzi’s L’idea della architettura universal. The result was a novelty in Rome—the first thorough adaptation of the northern Italian Renaissance villa. I contend that the patron, Camillo Pamphilj, inspired the design. Justus Sustermans’s Portrait of Cardinal Camillo Pamphilj (1645) is the smoking gun that links Camillo to architectural treatises. I have identified the plan in Camillo’s hand as Serlio’s Corinthian central-plan temple (1619). The portrait offers a visual declaration of Camillo’s interest in architectural treatises, embodied in the perfect form of the central circle within the square. My visual analysis further demonstrates that the Casino’s design draws upon the plans, architectural vocabulary, and ideas found in not only Serlio's work but also that of Palladio and Scamozzi. I argue that several architects in the Pamphilj circle, as well as the stucco sculptor Giovanni Battista Ferrabosco, were capable of transforming the ideas in architectural treatises into concrete form and, ultimately, that the Casino del Belrespiro is better understood as a collective enterprise rather than a singular creation. 8:55 - 9:15am
PS04 Thomas Ustick Walter’s Travel Diaries: A Study of NYC in 1835
Glen Umberger The New York Landmarks Conservancy, New York, USA
Abstract
Long before the advent of social media, Americans kept personal diaries to record important events, places they visited, and things they saw around them. Such diaries rarely survive, but those that do are useful resources for the historian to better understand the complexities of the past. This paper will examine the unpublished diaries of the distinguished nineteenth century architect and a founder of the American Institute of Architects, Thomas Ustick Walter (1804-1887), in particular a diary from his trip to New York City and Brooklyn in January 1835. Traveling from his home in Philadelphia, Walter’s observations, architectural critiques, and drawings document New York’s modern architecture including studies of several landmarks that are no longer extant. This documentation provides information about these structures not found in other sources and affords twenty-first century architectural historians with remarkable insights into what buildings were considered important landmarks, the style and theory of architecture in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and the state of the architectural profession prior to the founding of the AIA. Walter’s diary also provides insight into the cultural, social, and architectural development of the cities of New York and Brooklyn as compared with that of Philadelphia. While we may never know if Facebook will ever become a useful resource for future historians, this paper will demonstrate that scholarly research can benefit from the examination of wide range of primary sources including personal diaries. 9:15 - 9:35am
PS04 Creating the Iconic New Mexican Interior: The Pueblo-Spanish Revival Room
Lillian Makeda University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA
Abstract
Creating the Iconic New Mexican Interior: The Pueblo-Spanish Revival Room
The emergence of the Pueblo-Spanish Revival as an architectural idiom at the beginning of the 20th century prompted an important question: What should the interiors of these new buildings look like? Early Pueblo- Spanish Revival architecture, including Hopi House at Grand Canyon National Park (1903), Hokona and Kwataka dormitories at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque (1906), and El Ortiz Hotel at Lamy, New Mexico (1909) offered interior designs that drew on a variety of stylistic currents. Although Sylvanus Morley, one of the tastemakers who established the "Santa Fe Style," claimed the interior décor of these buildings should be “a matter of personal taste,” a very specific ensemble of decorative art became characteristic of Pueblo-Spanish Revival rooms. Inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement, Native American design, and the traditional arts of Spanish New Mexico, these rooms signaled New Mexico’s cultural identity as intentionally and effectively as the buildings that surrounded them. During the 1930s, the iconic New Mexico interior became formalized with a series of important public architectural commissions. These commissions, which included the central library at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, the visitor center at Bandelier National Monument near Los Alamos, the National Park Service Region III headquarters in Santa Fe, and the Albuquerque Municipal Airport were furnished in an almost identical fashion with Spanish Colonial Revival furniture, tinwork light fixtures, wrought iron fittings, and walls and woodwork embellished with Native American motifs. In the decades that followed, these historic designs shaped subsequent iterations of the Pueblo-Spanish Revival interior and they continue to epitomize the New Mexico room at its most distinctive. 9:35 - 9:55am
PS04 Labor and the Cultural Landscape at Bellevue’s Thoroughbred Farm
Mary Fesak University of Delaware, Newark, USA
Abstract
During the 1930s, influential American thoroughbred racehorse owner William du Pont, Jr. developed his father’s American country house estate, Bellevue Hall, near Wilmington, Delaware, into a state-of-the-art training center. Du Pont crafted the landscape to showcase his immense wealth, innovative training facility designs, and fine racehorses, while minimizing the presence of the dozens of employees who enabled his racing stable to function. This paper analyzes the structure of du Pont’s workforce in conjunction with Bellevue Hall’s cultural landscape to reveal how du Pont imposed order on his employees through the built environment. It provides insight into how a leading racehorse owner constructed a landscape to reflect class, race, and gender hierarchies during the early to mid-twentieth century. This paper takes an interdisciplinary approach, combining in-depth archival research on the development of Bellevue Hall’s training facilities and du Pont’s racing stable workforce with the architectural analysis of buildings. It employs the long walk, a method used by cultural landscape scholars, in conjunction with historic aerial photography and building inventories to evaluate du Pont’s prioritization of spaces and the ways in which he used the built environment to control his workforce. Du Pont’s landscape at Bellevue Hall created a visual narrative that erased the workforce, serving to reinforce the myth that horseracing was an activity exclusively pursued by social elites. Furthermore, many scholars of American country houses and house museums at these sites perpetuate the invisibility of the workforces by focusing on the estates’ elite owners, talented designers, high-style architecture, and extravagant material culture. This paper repopulates du Pont’s landscape at Bellevue Hall through the inclusion of the working-class people whose labor enabled the success of du Pont’s thoroughbred racing stable. 9:55 - 10:15am
PS04 A “Darky Village” in Whiteville: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fisher Houses
Joseph Watson Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA
Abstract
In April 1956, Jesse C. Fisher, a white real-estate developer from Whiteville, North Carolina, wrote to Frank Lloyd Wright proposing a project for modestly priced homes for “a group of better-type colored people— doctors, teachers, and merchants.” Over the next two years, Wright’s office developed a scheme for Fisher’s rural tract that included several dozen quadriplexes—or “cloverleafs,” as Wright called them—on half-acre garden plots, a country store, service station, and communal parks. The project never materialized, but drawings of the Fisher cloverleafs were included in The Living City, the 1958 publication of Broadacre City, as prototypical of utopian housing. The little-known Fisher project provides a unique lens through which to reexamine Wright’s work, which is too often treated apart from the realities in which it was produced.
Wright did not offer any substantive insights into the troubled attitudes about race and American society that informed the Fisher Houses’ design. He tacitly embraced the developer’s insistence that the project would provide “an adequate and beautiful residential section, especially in this period of tension between the races,” even as one of his draftsman scrawled the derogatory epithet, “Darky Village,” across a site plan. Broadacre City, which Wright developed from the early 1930s through the publication of The Living City, mirrored and amplified the Fisher Houses’ ambitions. For instance, the architect imagined that, concerning religion in his utopia, “Protestants, Catholics, Darkies, and the Synagogue will be with us.” The contradictions underpinning the Fisher Houses—a desire for racial reconciliation and an undercurrent of racist condescension—form the basis of this paper’s reconsideration of Wright’s work. The peculiar brand of white identity politics that informed Broadacre City, which scholars are only beginning to appreciate, allow for a broader examination of architecture and race in midcentury America.