UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The Ware Course: Architecture as a Useful, Liberal, and Fine Art Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5sh8m1pk Author Block, Kevin Publication Date 2019 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California The Ware Course: Architecture as a Useful, Liberal, and Fine Art By Kevin P. Block A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Pheng Cheah, Co-Chair Professor Andrew Shanken, Co-Chair Professor David Henkin Associate Professor Winnie Wong Fall 2019 Copyright Page Abstract The Ware Course: Architecture as a Useful, Liberal, and Fine Art by Kevin P. Block Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric University of California, Berkeley Professor Pheng Cheah, Co-Chair Professor Andrew Shanken, Co-Chair This dissertation examines the academic career of William Robert Ware (1832-1915), an American architect who became the leading architectural educator in the late nineteenth century. Previous accounts of Ware have focused either on his work as a practicing architect or his role as a department builder at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Columbia University, where he imported the Beaux-Arts system of design instruction to the United States. This dissertation, in contrast, interprets archival documents and nineteenth-century architectural theory to situate Ware in relation to a number of core questions and concepts in the broader history of architectural expertise, including the construction of professional authority, the meaning of culture, the use of judgment, and the tension between creative expression and information processing. In addressing these core questions and concepts as a pedagogue, Ware helped to embed architectural education within the institutional setting of the modern research university and—for a brief historicist moment near the turn of the century—transform the discipline from a useful art into a liberal art. Part I covers the first half of Ware’s career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) and the relationship of architectural education to drawing reform in the 1860s and 1870s. In the Introduction to Part I, I explain how Ware’s involvement with the 1870 Drawing Act helped to expand the relevancy of architectural expertise from its traditional concerns with the construction and design of buildings to the general problem of producing and coordinating skillful labor. The public supported M.I.T. and M.I.T. supported Ware’s architecture department because they recognized in architectural education a source of technical rather than artisanal or aesthetic competency. Architectural education received institutional support in New England not because of professional lobbying, but because the discipline became associated with economic development and the useful arts tradition. In Chapter One, I consider why the legislators of the 1870 Drawing Act would have sought out Ware’s involvement, or what constituted Ware’s professional persona given his limited experience as an architect. I argue that Ware’s credibility derived from his institutional affiliation with M.I.T. and from his travels in Europe, where he studied 1 different methods of drawing instruction in art academies and polytechnics. In Chapter Two, I argue that art and education reformers like Walter Smith, Charles Eliot, and John Runkle set the groundwork for the incorporation of architecture within the university. This chapter proceeds over four sections. First, I briefly review literature in economic history on the collapse of the American apprenticeship system. In the next section, I describe how skill emerged as an abstract category of economic thought as work shifted from artisanal to industrial production and how abstraction changed the meaning of skill. These two sections constitute what one might call the social problematic that drawing education attempted to address. Then in the third section, I describe the desire for managers and workers with technical drawing skills as part of a system of industrial remote control. Most advocates of the 1870 Drawing Act supported drawing education for this reason, as part of a technological system that was dependent on precise interactions between workers and machines. In the fourth section, I describe drawing education as the subject of a broad institutional critique, one that was supported by new theories of mind that made the university more receptive to visual disciplines like architecture. Part II covers Ware’s move to Columbia and the architecture program that he created there between 1881 and 1902. In the Introduction to Part II, I argue that Ware’s move to Columbia was motivated by his objective to make the discipline of architecture a liberal art and I suggest what “liberality” meant to him in relation to how he understood terms like culture and judgment. Chapter Three focuses on the disciplinary legitimation of architecture within the modern research university. I argue that Ware’s liberal course in architectural education, with its heavy emphasis on the study of architectural history, was meant to demonstrate to administrators and colleagues in other academic disciplines that architecture conformed both to the university’s culture of professionalism, which was based on the study of precedent, and to its culture of classicism, which was defined by the interpretive methods of philology. In conforming the discipline to these two cultures, Ware’s program secured an institutional order that would help American architects avoid the perils of eclecticism. Chapter Four describes the key instrument that Ware and his successor, A.D.F. Hamlin, used to institutionalize his historicist model of architectural education at Columbia: the Avery Architecture Library. In the early 1890s, architecture students in New York could study the history of architecture in museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with its extensive collections of plaster casts, and in universities like Columbia, with its collection of casts and architectural books. By the turn of the century, however, it was clear that the future of architectural education would be in the university and textual, not in the object-oriented environment of the museum. This chapter therefore considers the growth of the Avery Library and its impact on the architecture curriculum at Columbia. I conclude the dissertation with a discussion of Ware’s dismissal from Columbia in 1902 and the growing division of architectural labor around the turn of the century. While celebrated architects like Charles McKim after the turn of the century tried to enclose the collegiate system of architectural education to produce an elite cadre of fine artists, 2 Ware tried to make this system more accessible by collaborating with the International Correspondence School to create a series of rudimentary architecture courses that could be completed through the postal system. Ware’s dismissal was indicative of a cultural hierarchy in modern America that made a university education a barrier rather than a gateway to the pursuit of architecture as a fine art. As a figure who determined much of what constituted expertise for American architects around the turn of the century, Ware’s legacy was ambiguous. While the university grounded the discipline within an institutional order and provided instruments like the Avery Library that were necessary for producing liberal architectural subjects, access to this institutional order and these resources remained severely constrained. 3 Table of Contents Dedication ii List of Figures iii Acknowledgements x Introduction 1 Part I: Architecture as a Useful Art 13 Introduction to Part I: The 1870 Drawing Act Chapter One: 21 Professional Self-Fashioning: Building Credibility, Becoming Expert Chapter Two: 36 After Apprenticeship: Drawing and the Need for Skill in the 1870s Part II: Architecture as a Liberal Art 59 Introduction to Part II: Ware’s Move to Columbia Chapter Three: 86 Architecture in the Age of University Reform: Professionalism, Classicism, and the Study of Architectural History at Columbia Chapter Four: 123 Schooling Design: The Avery Library and the Bibliographic Order of Collegiate Architecture Part III: Architecture as a Fine Art 161 Conclusion: Captains of Erudition and the Collar Line Bibliography 173 Visual Appendix 204 i Dedication I dedicate this dissertation to my whole family, especially my parents, for their constant love and support. ii List of Figures Introduction Figure 1. William Robert Ware circa 1865. M.I.T. Special Collections. Introduction to Part I Figure 2. Walter Smith. From Green (1966), p. 8. Figure 3. Cover-page to Walter Smith’s American Text Books of Art Education: Geometrical Drawing (James R. Osgood & Co., 1873). Figure 4. Learning to draw models, from Smith’s American Text Books of Art Education (1873). Chapter One Figure 5. Ware’s first large project: Harvard’s Memorial Hall, final exterior perspective. The building would not be completed until the late 1870s. Courtesy of Harvard University Archives (Collection #166). Figure 6 The original seal for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Courtesy of MIT Institute Archives and Special Collections. Figure 7. Rogers Building (1866), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Courtesy of MIT Institute Archives and Special Collections. Figure 8.