Maura Lucking “Seeing Clearly What Is Good”: Russell Sturgis and The

At the turn of the twentieth century, architect and critic Russell Sturgis suggested MauraAmericans needn’t visit the great European Lucking capitals. “It is better to sit at home with a plan and twenty photographs,” he wrote in his popular textbook, “with a sense of what that architecture truly means, than it is, without that sense, to visit the cathedral itself or all the cathedrals in France.”1 Sturgis contradicted more than three hundred years of educational history by eschewing travel as the bedrock

“Seeingof architectural knowledge acquisition; like many Clearly of his generation, he preferred Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00029/1611514/thld_a_00029.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 What to place his faith in the photograph. He believed that comprehensive visual literacy would provide his audience with improved faculties of judgement from a pedagogical rather than simply aesthetic perspective.

That positivism would prove problematic at times, as in the cantankerous critic’s islate-life Good”: public battle with Frank Lloyd Wright. Sturgis decriedRussell Wright’s recently Sturgis completed Larkin Building as “a monster of awkwardness,” overwhelming in its monolithic massing with desperate need for modulating surface ornament, citing his “pile of photographs” as evidence.2 The architect took offense not so much at the mischaracterization of a site Sturgis had not visited in person or an aesthetic gesture he did not grasp, but, rather, at the critic’s use of the wrong kind of andphotographs. Wright the defended his work by callingDidactic for adequate representations Image that might better simulate the position of a pedestrian bystander, at street-level 68 and without “murderous, wide-angle slanders” (Figure 1).3 Sturgis had indeed confused the façade direction and made a few factual errors, but worse: he had developed his analysis using photographs taken from an elevated position.4 Either retouched or taken on a bright, cloudy day, the building’s brick coursing does indeed appear to dissolve into pure surface.

Histrionics aside, the incident points to the heightened weight given to photography in architectural discourse at the turn of the twentieth century, as well as the beginnings of an unraveling of perceived photographic objectivity.5 Cast as the academicist archconservative in his clash with Wright’s emerging modernist

1 Russell Sturgis, A History of European Architecture: A Historical Study (New York: MacMillan, 1896): vi. 2 Russell Sturgis, “The Larkin Building in Buffalo,”The Architectural Record 23 (April 1908): 312. 3 Frank Lloyd Wright, “Reply to Mr. Sturgis’ Criticism” (1909). Originally published by the Larkin Company, reprinted in Jack Quinan, “Frank Lloyd Wright’s Reply to Russell Sturgis,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 41, no. 3 (October 1982): 238-244. 4 Wright scholar Jack Quinan associates these errors with Sturgis’ use of photographs rather than a site visit. Quinan: 239. 5 For more on the construction and concordant skepticism of this novel and historically specific value, see: Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison,Objectivity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).

Thresholds 46 Scatter! Maura Lucking

“Seeing Clearly What Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00029/1611514/thld_a_00029.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021

is Good”: Russell SturgisFigure 1. Sturgis’ “murderous wide angle slander” of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Building (1904-1906) published in Architectural Record. and the Didactic Imagesensibilities, Sturgis nonetheless masterfully deployed newly available photographic evidence in order to form, in his own words, architectural judgments.6 69 Although there is scant evidence that Sturgis so much as owned a camera, he became deeply associated with the medium through his vast collection of prints and their use in his lectures and writings, remarkable in their breadth and influence.7 For a figure little-remembered in architectural history, it will come as a surprise that Sturgis was so intimately connected to many of the discipline’s enduring institutions.8 After abandoning a modestly successful design career, he became critical actor in the early years of Architectural Record, the Architectural League, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Avery Library. Sturgis’s employ- ment of photographs in his work in amateur art societies and universities, museum study collections, and popular magazines each map against a set of

6 Sturgis, “The Larkin Building in Buffalo”: 311. 7 Sturgis’ personal collection of 16,323 photographic prints are currently held by Washington University, who purchased them shortly after his death. David R. Hanlon, “Inventory of the Sturgis Photographic Collection: A Complete Listing of Mounted Photographs, Loose Prints, and the Contents of Travel Albums Collected by Russell Sturgis” (St. Louis, MO: Washington University at St. Louis, 1997). 8 This was a point of humor within Sturgis’ own time: at the time of his death, the seventy- three-year-old was ostensibly “actively working with no less than the Architectural League, New York branch of the Archaeological Institute, National Sculpture Society, Numismatic Society, Municipal Art Society and Grolier Club.” Peter Wight, “Reminiscences of Russell Sturgis,” Architectural Record 26 (August 1909): 123. Maura Lucking “Seeing Clearly What is Good”:discrete Russell material Sturgis practices that include the lantern slide, the enlarged mounted and thephoto Didactic print, and the Image architectural advertisement. The influence of all three tech- niques synthesize in the critic’s late-career publication of hugely popular architectural textbooks. Close analysis of these reproductions and their relationship with textual content reveals a model of image consumption overlooked by much educational and architectural historiography, and distinct from the then-prevalent

Beaux-Arts drawing set of plan, elevation, and perspective as well as the relent- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00029/1611514/thld_a_00029.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 less commercial iconicity of International Style Modernism to come, often seen as predicated on the singular doctored photograph.9

A generation apart from the immediate technical, optical, and epistemological upheaval of the emergent medium, intellectuals of the late nineteenth century were faced with navigating a new image culture–one where the realization of inexpensive photographic reproduction gave the photograph new material heft and allowed for its expansion into ever more spheres of modern life.10 This involved not only established aesthetic traditions, but also the rapid proliferation of different media formats carrying photographs to new institutional sites. Architectural interest in the United States was at a historic apex during the period, in both commissioned buildings and the establishment of new schools, professional associations, art societies, and museums. A proliferation of books 70 and popular magazines for the general, rather than professional, reader accompanied this growth.11

This profusion of images differed in at least two important ways from the previous fifteenth-century print revolution, the first material and the second social.12 Photographic reproduction was a diffuse, multimedia affair, first utilized widely as

9 Photographic iconicity was a mainstay of modernism’s reassessment in the 1990s, includ- ing the work of Beatriz Colomina, George Dodds and Claire Zimmerman; this methodologi- cal interest was in part given a name in the 2002 exhibition Iconoclash, co-curated by Bruno Latour, Peter Galison and Peter Weibel at ZKM | Karlsruhe. 10 This builds upon a robust historiography of early architectural photography focused primarily on issues of representation and image-making. Noteworthy here is the work of Barry Bergdoll, Neil Levine, Anne de Monenard, and Richard Pare. 11 American building rates were at their highest in 1890 until the post-war era; nineteen new titles on architectural history were published that year, followed by the establishment of two major monthly magazines the following year. Cecil D. Elliott,The American Architect from the Colonial Era to the Present (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2002): 60 12 For more on the early modern print revolution: Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). For its role in architectural knowledge production: Mario Carpo, Architecture in the Age of Printing: Orality, Writing, Typography, and Printed Images in the History of Architectural Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).

Thresholds 46 Scatter! a drawing tool and model for engraving before assuming a more forthright aesthetic position–projected, enlarged, mounted, bound and otherwise employed, purchased and circulated in differing formats.13 While engaging the fullness of that literature is beyond the scope of this essay, other scholars have argued that these practices refigured more durable print media in organizational logic as well as appearance.14 In a social regard, an expanded definition of a public audience

to differently classed, raced, and gendered subjects was among the hallmarks Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00029/1611514/thld_a_00029.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 of nineteenth-century educational reform, often explicitly moving away from traditional rhetorical models towards a focus on optics as a more egalitarian form of knowledge transmission.15 That is to say that visual literacy, while still perceived as a cultivated skill, did not necessitate the protracted and privileged study of Latin and Greek, only the comparatively inexpensive technologies of the eye and printed image.16

When Sturgis died in 1909 he was eulogized as the first to write “a history of architecture which should go over the entire field with the modern appliances.”17 It was in his last years that he accomplished his greatest achievements as a public pedagogue: in 1896 he published his first book, part of a series of short histories of European architecture that would be among the first required textbooks for the Princeton Department of Art History.18 It was not until How to Judge 71 Architecture: A Popular Guide to the Appreciation of Buildings (1903), however,

13 Many saw photography as architecture’s natural ally for its impartial documentation and ability to remain immobile for interminably long exposure times. 14 For more on side-by-side slide projection and the development of the comparative method, see Trevor Fawcett, “Visual Facts and the Nineteenth-Century Art Lecture,”Art History 6 (December 1983): 442-460 and Robert S. Nelson, “The Slide Lecture, or the Work of Art ‘History’ in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 3 (Spring 2000): 414-434. 15 The move away from rhetorical education was certainly not synonymous, however, with a move towards visual education; as literary historian John Guillory has shown, language itself was reshaped with a focus on brevity and clarity in the format of the business-friendly memo. John Guillory, “The Memo and Modernity,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 1 (Autumn 2004): 108-132. 16 While changes in the university model certainly held sway in larger pedagogical shifts, many visual teaching strategies beyond the slide lecture were initiated outside the academy. These were often categorized as art appreciation, focused on sustained “picture study.” See Diana Korzenik, Objects of American Art Education: Highlights from the Diana Korzenik Collection (Pasadena, CA: Huntington Library Press, 2005). 17 Montgomery Schuyler, “Review: A History of Architecture. Volume II. Romanesque and Oriental,” Art and Progress 1, no. 6 (April 1910): 174. 18 Sturgis would go on to publish an astonishing twenty-five books, edited sections, or entire volumes of seven dictionaries and encyclopedias in the last twelve years of his life. “Russell Sturgis,” Dictionary of Art Historians, accessed 12 September, 2017. http://www.dictionary- ofarthistorians.org/sturgisr. Maura Lucking “Seeing Clearly What is Good”:that Russell he fulfilled Sturgishis memorial commendation: eighty-three photographic plates, and thereproducing Didactic not onlyImage the build environment but maps, architectural models and drawings. With a single exception, buildings were depicted without any of the traditional architectural representations of plan, section, or elevation. The text would be reprinted in ten successive editions over twenty-five years, winning praise and reading-list inclusion from the likes of Vogue and The New York Times.19 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00029/1611514/thld_a_00029.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 The book’s title drew on the colloquial name for the kind of supposedly-amateur learning taking place in the societies, clubs, libraries and museums where Sturgis honed his craft: art appreciation. In it, he sets out to establish, “not a history of architecture, but in a sense a history of the modern way of judging architecture.”20 Although what precisely he means by judgement, a deeply loaded term in the Judeo-Christian sense as well as one loaded by Victorian taste-cultures and Kantian aesthetic critiques in their broader intellectual and cultural con- text, Sturgis seems to couch the book’s ambitions in vaguely moral rather than scholarly terms, suggesting that taste might itself be an ethical issue.21 His goal is to allow the individual to reach gradual and independent conclusions about the quality of a work of architecture, free from “anxiety [as to] whether he is right or wrong” and rather by “seeing clearly what is good and the causes of its goodness, and also the not-so good which is there, inevitably there, as a part of the 72 goodness itself.”22 In short, by looking at photographs, Sturgis hoped to produce skills in his readers rather than knowledge as such.

Before he could produce a photographic history, Sturgis had to amass a personal photographic archive. He began collecting as did most wealthy Americans: by purchasing souvenirs in Europe. Unlike the majority of architectural students who traveled to study in Parisian ateliers, Sturgis was persuaded by his time as

19 “What they Read: How to Judge Architecture,” Vogue 22, no. 22 (November 26, 1903), 687 and “Judging Architecture,” The New York Times (May 7, 1904): BR 320. 20 Russell Sturgis, How to Judge Architecture: A Popular Guide to the Appreciation of Buildings (New York: Baker & Taylor, 1903): 55. 21 This seems informed by the Ruskinian tradition. More broadly, educational reformers had begun to see the study of fine art as a tool for inoculating society against various ethical dis- eases using such pathological language. The impact of social conservativism on the formal study of art objects is outlined in Charles Robert Jansen, “Scenarios of Art Appreciation: An Analysis of Texts.” (PhD Diss., University of Georgia, 1991). 22 Sturgis, How to Judge: 12-13.

Thresholds 46 Scatter! an apprentice to the German architect Leopold Eidlitz to study in Munich.23 He found himself immersed there in a skills-based polytechnical program, as well as the emerging art historical ‘science’ of Kunstwissenschaft which involved the formal study of paintings as images.24 Only afterwards did he visit the European capitals, purchasing mounted albumen prints and bound travel albums from major commercial firms such asÉdouard Baldus and Leopoldo Alinari. While he kept no

record of the photographer, his collection featured a noteworthy geographical Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00029/1611514/thld_a_00029.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 and project-specific depth, often depicting the same building from different positions and by seemingly different image-makers.25 The scientific precision of his German education was not lost on him; rather than aide-mémoires or reposito- ries, his prints held value for their own didactic possibilities.

Photographs Institutionalized By the 1880s, Sturgis had begun to use photographic slides routinely to accom- pany his lectures, a kind of educational entertainment couched somewhere between the university classroom and the theaters of the Lyceum Movement, where adult education reached much of exurban America on stages shared by vaudeville and minstrel shows.26 The projected slide image predicated an embodied viewing experience enhanced by the sequentially choreographed 73 tours through the sites in question. Sturgis rarely taught formal courses; he gave semi-public talks at colleges and universities or was commissioned to speak at

23 Sturgis studied at the Technische Hochschule München and Akademie der Bildenden Künste from 1858-1860. Eidlitz’s own educational philosophy fits into a larger narrative of reticence against the dominance of the French Académies in American universities at that time. Kate Holliday, “’Build More and Draw Less’: The AIA and Leopold Eidlitz’s Grand Central School of Architecture,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 65, no. 3 (September 2006): 378-401. 24 For more on the relationship between the new art history and broader image cultures, see Horst Bredekamp, “A Neglected Tradition? Art History as Bildwissenschaft,”Critical Inquiry, Vol. 29, No. 3 (Spring 2003): 418-428. 25 This lack of authorial attribution would not have been unusual. Sturgis’ writing, however, belied a savvy about issues of intellectual property. Of the French Commission nationale des monuments historiques, he remarked: “Each print bears the prettily designed seal of the Commission, and also the words Robert Mieusement, Editor, Paris. Many of them bear the date of the making of the negative; an excellent precaution.” Russell Sturgis, “Historical Monuments of France,” Architectural Record 4, No. 4 (January-March 1894): 310. 26 This practice dates to his inaugural 1871 lecture at the newly opened Metropolitan Museum of Art. Winifred E. Howe, A History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a Chapter on the Early Institutions of Art in New York (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1913): 150. For more on the lyceum, see Tom F. Wright, The Cosmopolitan Lyceum: Lecture Culture and the Globe in Nineteenth Century America (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013). Maura Lucking “Seeing Clearly What is Good”: Russell Sturgis and the Didactic Image Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00029/1611514/thld_a_00029.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021

74 Figure 2. Hand-colored print of St. Mark’s in Sturgis’ collection, Giovanni Battista Brusa, undated Image courtesy 19th Century Architectural Photography Collection, University of Washington at St. Louis.

private social or institutional gatherings that might as easily meet in a residential salon as a lecture hall.27 His lecture notes include anthropological speculation over ancient societies, detailed descriptions of the sumptuous material and social histories as well as philosophical excursuses about the failures of contemporary design education. He describes the columns of the Hagia Sophia one by one as artefacts from “the dowry of a certain Roman lady,” while a wildly inaccurate but phantasmagoric hand-colored façade photograph of St. Mark’s is schematized

27 Excepting two years as professor in the history of art and architecture at his own alma mater, the College of the City of New York (formerly the Free Academy) from 1878-1880, for the majority of his career Sturgis was informally affiliated with the Columbia College School of Mines, one of the country’s first schools of architecture. There is a strong affinity between his non-comprehensive, primarily visual teaching style and the emergence of the Columbia Art Humanities core curriculum in 1941, a course “devoted to looking and to visual literacy” with a minimum of reading assignments required of all university students on “masterpieces of Western Art.” “Art Humanities,” Department of Art History and Archaeology, accessed 12 September, 2017. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/arthistory/courses/art-humanities.

Thresholds 46 Scatter! in a three-part exegesis on the use of color in design to assist form, as surface decoration, and to generate representation (Figures 2 and 3).28

What is remarkable is the relative uniformity of his slides when addressing what seem like distinctly different audiences: the professional draughtsman given free or reduced entry to the Columbia College School of Mines’ Thursday Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00029/1611514/thld_a_00029.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021

Figure 3. Sturgis’ lecture notes on color in design Image courtesy Dept. of Drawings & Archives, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York, NY.

28 Untitled lecture manuscript, Series 1: Lectures, Russell Sturgis architectural drawings and papers, Dept. of Drawings & Archives, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York, NY. Maura Lucking “Seeing Clearly What is Good”: Russell Sturgis and the Didactic Image Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00029/1611514/thld_a_00029.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021

Figure 4. Chartres Cathedral, multiple views, part of a travel album in Sturgis’ collection Image courtesy 19th Century Architectural Photography Collection, University of Washington at St. Louis.

Thresholds 46 Scatter! lectures looked at the same images of Venetian palazzos and French hôtels as the wealthy collectors and amateur artists who frequented art associations and private women’s clubs.29 Slide lists dating from the early 1890s typically include at least five and as many as fifteen of these “views” of a single project, much like the contact sheets available from commercial studios (Figure 4). Often drawn from different time periods and photographers, the photographs reconstruct a site

from different vantage points before examining particular building details with Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00029/1611514/thld_a_00029.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 cropped or close-up images. This capability for spatialization was a phenome- nological effect unique to architectural photographs. Amateurs were also privy to questions of design; a bed from Lievre, shown in a lecture on applied embroi- dery, for example, was intended to spur a “discussion of ‘good drawing,’” in Sturgis’ view a lost skill in contemporary American work that must be legible and pleasing “at all distances” whether “enlarged or diminished,” a test administered by the lantern slide itself.30

In addition to his private collection, Sturgis regularly made copies from the holdings of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which began purchasing photographic prints in earnest in 1900 at his urging as trustee.31 Following the British model, he supported all pedagogical tools that might illustrate the application of art to man- ufactures.32 Moreover, prolonging the museum visit, he argued, would supple- 77 ment a gallery visit with practical instruction and taste cultivation, neither of which could be accomplished with painting and sculpture alone.33 The museum’s photographic collection was, therefore, an integral part of the encyclopedic mission of the Metropolitan Museum to cover the entire history of the fine and decorative arts throughout the world; by 1907, their photographic study collection held

29 The “special students” program, as it was called by dean William Ware, followed the tradition of opening architectural education to the public traceable to Jacques-François Blondel’s professorship at the Académe Royale d’Architecture in the late seventeenth century, but with the distinct nineteenth-century focus on members of the working class engaged in technical work. Those with experience but no academic degree were allowed to attend lectures for an annual fee of fifteen dollars. William Robert Ware Papers, 1826-1914, Institute Archives and Special Collections, MIT Libraries, Cambridge, MA. 30 Lecture 20th February, 1890, Series 1: Lectures, Russell Sturgis architectural drawings and papers. 31 William Clifford, “The Study Collection of Photographs,”The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 5, no. 12 (December 1910): 280. 32 The Department of Science and Art’s founding of the South Kensington Museum following the Great Exhibition of 1851 was explicitly intended to spur economic development around mass-produced consumer goods, a model emulated widely in the latter part of the 19th century. 33 In addition to photographs, he repeatedly asked the acquisitions committee to consider mechanical drawing, casts, architectural models, historical portraits and any “other speci- mens.” Howe: 115-117. Maura Lucking “Seeing Clearly What is Good”: Russell Sturgis and the Didactic Image

Figure 5. Small print cases with hinged doors atop flat files and viewing tripods, Photo Study Room, Metropolitan Museum Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00029/1611514/thld_a_00029.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 of Art, c. 1904-1906. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.

14,000 prints.34 Significantly, collection holdings and the encouraged methods of engagement de-emphasized the singularity of museum objects.

The Photo Study Room was open without appointment six days a week, with reservations available for educators at all levels to bring groups for collective study–one might visit after the exhibition, to learn more about the material intro- duced in a lecture, or to browse for reproductions that might be purchased for 78 one’s own collection or private club. If the museum library was the space for the scholar, the photo collection became a site of enthusiastic amateur explo- ration. The possibility of learning comparatively was stressed and materially encouraged. Specially-designed cases sat atop the larger flat files, with hinged doors that could remain open on the viewing tables (Figure 5).35 This allowed students to pull more than one image at once, supplementing the permanent collection by “offering for observation a number of works similar to the one that is being examined by the visitor…for further elucidation.”36 As the acces- sibility of reproductions increased, a certain fungibility developed between these individual prints and book plate illustrations. By 1908, librarian and curator Florence Nightingale Levy had instituted a “Plate Catalog” that included particularly strong illustrations taken from various books and periodicals in the library

34 Kelly Wilder, “Photographic Cataloging,” Documenting the World: Film, Photography, and the Scientific Record, ed. Greg Mitman and Kelly Wilder (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 203. 35 Clifford: 281. 36 L.O.P., “On the Use of a Collection of Photographs,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 3, no. 8 (August 1908): 163.

Thresholds 46 Scatter! and cross-indexed by the name of the artist, school, title of the work, subject represented, nationality and institution of ownership.37

When the Architectural Record began publication in 1891, its first issue opened with a democratizing mission: it would “form an untechnical popular history of architecture, intended to interest chiefly the laymen in the several historic styles.”38 Most 39

importantly, “It will be profusely illustrated.” Sturgis’ first contribution, “Monuments Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00029/1611514/thld_a_00029.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 of France,” exposed American audiences to the mission and practices of the French Commission nationale des monuments historiques, the governmental organization charged with documenting extant buildings deemed of value to state patrimony.40 Most importantly, the quality photographs produced were available for purchase, so that his readers, too, might “know [the] areas outside the cities and outside iconic buildings.”41 He urged readers to collect images of these less known buildings almost like playing cards, prizing their rarity as well as their aesthetic value. While Sturgis would go on to cover largely contemporary design, it was this early encouragement of image collecting that most closely spoke to the goals of magazine founder Clinton Sweet, a construction and real estate entrepreneur (whose later Sweet’s Catalog would collect product specifications and manufacturer information for design and building in a single reference publication). Architects and consumers alike had taken to a rigorous practice of clipping from magazines, 79 newspapers, and consumer mailings for their private libraries.42 Engravings and inset photographs might be saved for later design reference (what Charles McKim called “going fishing”) while architects, material suppliers and manufacturers typically advertised their services in text-based advertisements formatted more like classifieds at the back of nineteenth century weeklies.43

Like the construction materials themselves, an impetus developed to standardize these clippings for their future storage and retrieval, and Architectural Record was among the first wave of magazines to increase the scale of advertisements to a full

37 Marian Comings, “Art Reference Round Table,” Bulletin of the American Library Association 25, no. 9 (September 1931): 494. 38 “During the Coming Year,” Architectural Record 1 (1891): xi. 39 Ibid. 40 For this reason, Sturgis applauds France as a site of more still-extant classical monuments than either Italy or Greece. Sturgis, “Historical Monuments of France.” 41 Ibid. 42 Anke te Heesen argues this practice became widespread as a form of knowledge production in the late 19th century due to the relative low price and ephemerality of these new media. Anke te Heesen, The Newspaper Clipping: A Modern Paper Object (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 43 Elliott,The American Architect from the Colonial Era to the Present: 62. Maura Lucking “Seeing Clearly What is Good”: Russell Sturgis and the Didactic Image Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00029/1611514/thld_a_00029.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021

Figure 6. Advertisement for The Winslow Bros. Company Figure 7. Decorative ironwork on façade of Ornamental Iron and Bronze featuring New Amsterdam New Amsterdam Theatre, “Individualism in 80 Theatre in Architectural Record 15 (1904). Architecture,” Architectural Record 15 (1904).

page and place them within the text itself. The advertisements now, significantly, included photographs at near full page scale that mimicked the layout of photographic content, and often like would be matched with like, as in an advertisement for ironwork following a similarly illustrated article on the new ornamental style (Figures 6 & 7).44 Much as historical knowledge required total organization in the form of architectural encyclopedias and stacks of photographic reproductions, the contemporary project needed to be visually contextualized at the moment of its making, often eroding distinctions between content and advertising.

Seeing Architecture, Judging Architecture Given Sturgis’ relationship with a broad spectrum of photographic media, how did he visually structure his popular textbook, How to Judge Architecture (1903),

44 The advertorial power of photographs was expanded that same year, when the magazine began advertising that their own art department might be hired out for private photo shoots of façades and interiors. Architectural Record 15 (1904).

Thresholds 46 Scatter! to address the particular skills of architectural judgment? The critic’s late-career writing shows the presence of material practices and educational values from his other institutional projects, synthesized into book format that feels distinctly modern despite its traditional stylistic organization. The book spans the major western movements across national boundaries before focusing on the design of the nineteenth century, uncategorical with “no architectural style peculiar.”45

Returning to the axiom that opened this paper, how are armchair critics with Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00029/1611514/thld_a_00029.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 their stacks of photographs to determine “what architecture truly means” and in what ways were those readings allowed or even encouraged to diverge? The book’s plates, on glossy coated stock within the primary folios, enjoy a dialogical relationship with the text, not directly illustrative of an individual point but rather acting as a repeated point of reference for the reader. Often mentioned recur- rently, reproductions might be removed from the book entirely for sustained looking or at the very least would necessitate an active reading experience, flipping repeatedly backward and forward through the text. Assessing this practice against other texts of the time not only provides a clearer understanding of Sturgis’ own pedagogy, but also helps establish what it was like, as a reader, to become inundated by repeating architectural images.

One of the most immediately recognizable plates in How to Judge Architecture is 81 a Sebah & Joaillier photograph of the interior of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, the use of which appears tied to the strategies of Sturgis’ slide lectures. Sebah’s photographs became the building’s best-known representation, capturing the entirety of the nave’s colonnades, the radiating demi-lune vaulting of the sanctuary, and the punctuated central dome, from an elevated viewpoint. Its established reading as one of the world’s most beautiful churches is exemplified through the photograph’s near simultaneous appearance in Gladys Wynne’s Architecture Shown to the Children, where reference to the building in the text situates the photograph as evidence of the “huge dome of glittering gold,” its sumptuous materiality “producing a marvelous effect.”46 The image is reproduced with an extremely high white balance, seeming to intentionally wash out detail for an all over decorative appearance. In How to Judge Architecture, by contrast, the photograph is sandwiched between comparative plates (a rare floorplan and façade photograph of the Church of St. Theodore in Athens),

45 Sturgis, How to Judge: 191. 46 The book was part of the British Board of Education-endorsed Chisholm Readers collection, which focused on different subjects of study explained in clear and simple language, which accompanied the “Told to the Children,” abridged and illustrated versions of literary masterpieces published between 1905 and 1935. Gladys Wynne, Architecture Shown to the Children (London/Edinburgh: T.C. & E.C. Jack, 1913): 36-37. Maura Lucking “Seeing Clearly What is Good”: Russell Sturgis and the Didactic Image Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00029/1611514/thld_a_00029.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021

Figure 8. Reproduction of Sebah & Joaillier’s photograph of the Hagia Sophia, in Sturgis, How to 82 Judge Architecture.

which render its performative powers relatively mute (Figures 8, 9 and 10). The plates connect the composition of the lavish basilica with the latter’s modest square plan, their shared demur exteriors, central massing, and Persian vaulting thereby rendering the Hagia Sophia anti-iconic but immediately recognizable as a “typical Byzantine building.”47

Sturgis’ references often overlapped with those of classicists, who approached art objects as explicative of entire civilizations. Allan Marquand was one such scholar, embodying this hermeneutic model in his role as professor and curator of the Princeton University Art Museum.48 This makes his connoisseur’s use of photographs a particularly useful counterpoint to Sturgis’ encyclopedic strategies, gleaned from the practices of the photo study collection. Marquand’s 1909

47 Sturgis: 90. 48 Marquand studied both Latin and early computational logic before shifting to classical art and archaeology. Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, The Eye of the Tiger: The Founding and Development of the Department of Art and Archaeology, 1883-1923 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Department of Art and Archaeology and Art Museum, 1983): 8-9.

Thresholds 46 Scatter! book, Greek Architecture, includes a Félix Bonfils photograph of a doorjamb from the Erechtheion.49 Reproduced at full-page scale, it stands in for Vitruvius’s discovery of purely ornamental projecting lintels in Asia Minor, every bead and reel molding, rosette series and acanthus dart described as evidence of cultural change. The reproduction’s shallowness of field and framing are such that the visual transparency of the temple’s open door is denied, however, suggesting 50

examination within a gallery rather than in situ. In How to Judge Architecture, the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00029/1611514/thld_a_00029.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 incomplete nature of the ornamentation is emphasized by its combination on a crowded plate with other ionic fragments from different sites. Though unrefer- enced in the text, they establish a visual correlation between their shared elegant lines (Figure 11). Sturgis’ had a complicated relationship with the architecture of

Figure 9. Hagia Sophia plan with comparisons Figure 10. Hagia Sophia facade with compar- to the Church of St. Theodore, in Sturgis, ison to the Church of St. Theodore, in Sturgis, How to Judge Architecture. How to Judge Architecture.

49 Allan Marquand, Greek Architecture (New York: MacMillan, 1909): 175. 50 Älois Riegl differentiates between haptic “near view” and subjective “distant view” as characteristics of his theory of kunstwollen, a method of visual analysis he developed in an 1897-1898 manuscript while working as a textile curator. Älois Reigl, The Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts, trans. Jacqueline E. Jung (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2004). Maura Lucking “Seeing Clearly What is Good”: Russell Sturgis and the Didactic Image Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00029/1611514/thld_a_00029.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021

Figure 11. Félix Bonfils photograph of architectural ornament from the Erectheion reproduced 84 with other ionic fragments, in Sturgis, How to Judge Architecture.

the ancient world, as it relied on the knowledge of specialists. Their subjective hypotheses, he argued, irresponsibly encouraged “romantic association” in modern viewers.51 Instead, Sturgis recommended a form of educated collage led by visual associations regardless of their origin: “What one temple cannot give, another supplies.”52

How to Judge Architecture concludes with several contemporary buildings, highlights of a long nineteenth century that Sturgis felt and often repeated in his magazine criticism, offered a paucity of original work. The closing image, an office building in St. Paul, is much livelier than the preceding historical photographs, if somewhat visually awkward. The composition mimics neither an elevation nor a perspective, and includes unsightly electrical lines, open windows, and

51 Sturgis, How to Judge: 13, 15. 52 Ibid.

Thresholds 46 Scatter! Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00029/1611514/thld_a_00029.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021

Figure 12. Contemporary photograph of the New York Life Insurance Company in St. Paul, MN by Babb, Cook & Willis, in Sturgis, How to Judge Architecture.

trash in the street (Figure 12).53 In American Architecture, by contrast, by his good friend, the incipient modernist Montgomery Schuyler, the photographic engraving is liberally cropped and dissolves into the white field of the page. Despite its use of the older technology, the smaller inset reproduction focuses attention on the building’s gabled ornament; Schuyler pronounces it “capricious,” something of a dig on the building’s excessive historical eclecticism.54 Schuyler’s caption, however, reveals important information missing from How to Judge Architecture: Sturgis’ former partner George F. Babb designed the building. In Sturgis’ seeming remove, the building represents the best of recent modern design: he praises the architects’ tasteful negotiation with the challenges of the high-rise, requiring

53 This spoke in part to alternative economies of photography emerging for contemporary architecture. Beginning in the 1860s with Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera, architects began hiring photographers to document the construction and use of their buildings, as much for office documentation as promotional purposes. Sturgis: 208. 54 Montgomery Schuyler, American Architecture 1 (New York: Harper & Brothers, [1892]1961): 316. Maura Lucking “Seeing Clearly What is Good”:many Russell stories and Sturgis monotonous windows.55 In the moment of contemporary and theproduction, Didactic the distinction Image between Sturgis the critic and Sturgis the pedagogue collapses. The photograph’s compositional density synthesizes the previous three-hundred pages of exemplars: broken gable walls, an abnormally steep roof, a single course of rounded arches, sculptural details and Italianate flourishes have been mobilized as evidence for the architect’s erudition in reference and creativ-

ity in composition. The photograph does not stand alone as a didactic instrument Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00029/1611514/thld_a_00029.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 but as an indexical repository to be cross-referenced against the whole of the Western canon.

Inventing Skills Sturgis’ practices provide just one proposal for the invention of what might constitute the emerging concept of visual literacy. Constituted in part as con- tingent on and emergent from new technologies of image reproduction, the finely calibrated web of his institutional affiliations also suggests that the image cultures that qualified these skills may have been more diverse than previously understood. Not only does this point to issues that extend beyond the formally recognized policies of the university and underscore the already acknowledged educational role that museums, private clubs, public lectures, and mass media are 86 understood to have played, but this also demonstrates the ways in which their pedagogues, practices, and audiences often intermingled. Sturgis was a vehe- ment critic of art and design education within the academy, writing that university education had only to do with what “can be taught in words,” while “a manual art has nothing to do with thoughts which are expressible in words; by it thoughts are expressed wholly otherwise.”56

The question of audience lingers large over these forms of informal architectural “appreciation.” Though often tied to issues of class and socioeconomic access, aesthetics was quickly being relegated to a female interest, particularly the decorative details of ornament and color that most interested Sturgis. As the example of Architectural Record demonstrates, even the professional audience was no longer separate from amateurs but privy to their tastes and desires as potential consumers. If the ceremonial acts of purchasing and consuming print materials exposed something like a collective taste-culture to the turn of the century reader, the visual materials therein–their selection, layout, and familiar

55 Sturgis, How to Judge: 208. 56 Russell Sturgis, “Study of Art in the University,” Brush and Pencil 10, no. 6 (September 1902): 330-332.

Thresholds 46 Scatter! repetition–also produced new hierarchies of expertise at the scale of the individual. Such a conjecture upsets the then-prevailing Kantian assumption that judgment is derived from a universal ethics of taste, and implies, rather, the Gramscian reading of sensus communis as one of capitalism’s most pernicious binding appa- ratuses.57 To judge architecture, then, is ultimately to reify its commodity value.

The same acts of looking that promised the social elevation of the trained eye Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/thld/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/thld_a_00029/1611514/thld_a_00029.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 and eventual rhetorical acumen also anchored them, incontrovertibly, to a nascent consumer economy predicated on the recognition of “good” images. Sturgis’ aesthetic cultivation of the eye promised freedom from the stultifying didacticism and excessive ideologies of textuality, yet proved more directly connected to architecture’s economic rather than purely intellectual consumption. Rather than passively absorbing the lessons of good taste, the educated eye might itself contribute to the formation and dissemination of image culture as an instrument of cultural hegemony and its own social ascendancy. Returning to Sturgis’ engagement with Frank Lloyd Wright, the more nuanced argument of Sturgis’ opening criticism is often lost in the salaciousness of his broader opening remarks, in which he sympathizes with Wright and the ingenuity of his structural and programmatic responses to what Sturgis perceived as a challenging commission. Sturgis spends the better part of the review excitedly reenacting the 87 building’s façade design and offering other potential resolutions to Wright’s treat- ment of brickwork, color modulation, and window placement, offering further alternatives for his readership’s approval. The incensed Wright temporarily forgot his adversary: “I recognize what Mr. Sturgis evidently does not…that is that ugliness exists in the eye of the beholder rather than inheres in the thing.”58 How thrilled Sturgis must have been to read it.

57 For an overview of this significant twentieth-century change in the historiography of the sensus communis, see Kate Crehan, Gramsci’s Common Sense: Inequality and Its Narratives (Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). 58 Wright: 242.