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 accom- panied this growth.11 This profusion of images differed in at least two important ways from the previ- ous 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 pri- marily 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 pro- duction: 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,

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