The architecture profession and the public: Leopold Eidlitz's "discourses between two t-squares"

Journal of Architectural Education

Volumn 61, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 32-43

  Holliday, Kate ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT ARLINGTON   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61049088166     PISSN: 10464883     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1531-314X.2007.00126.x     Document Type: Review

References (36)

1. "Blueprint for America Abstracts," http://www.aia150.com/ SiteObjects/files/bl150-abstracts.pdf (accessed March 14, 2007)
2. Julie V. Iovine, "Architecture: 2005 - A User's Manual," New York Times (January 6, 2005), F1
3. James Early provides an overview of antebellum architectural writing in "American Architectural Writing in the Earlier Nineteenth Century," JAE 12 (1957): 23-25
4. The role of architectural writing in practice is also discussed throughout W. Barksdale Maynard, Architecture in the United States, 1800-1850 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002)
5. The fullest treatment of the drive to professionalize architecture is Mary N. Woods, From Craft to Profession: The Practice of Architecture in Nineteenth Century America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999)
6. See also Henry Saylor, The AIA's First Hundred Years (Washington: Octagon, 1957)
7. and, for a social sciences perspective, David Brain, "Practical Knowledge and Occupational Control: The Professionalization of Architecture in the United States," Sociological Forum 6 (1991): 239-68
8. On Eidlitz, Kathryn E. Holliday, Leopold Eidlitz: Architecture and Idealism in the Gilded Age (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008)
9. as well as the passages on Eidlitz in Robert A. M. Stern, Patrick Gilmartin, et al., New York 1880: Architecture and Urbanism in the Gilded Age (New York: Monacelli Press, 1999), pp. 18ff
10. Kenneth Jacobs, "Leopold Eidlitz: Becoming an American Architect" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2005) catalogs Eidlitz's buildings
11. For a discussion of the journal, see The Crayon and the American Landscape (Montclair, NJ: Montclair Art Museum, 1993)
12. Though it was a serious art journal, The Crayon did occasionally publish humorous pieces besides Eidlitz's "Discourses." The successful portrait painter Daniel Huntington, for example, submitted satirical letters signed by the character "Flake White." Wendy Greenhouse, "The Crayon's 'Flake White' Identified," American Art Journal 18 (1986): 77-78
13. Leopold Eidlitz, "The T-Squares: No. 1 - Philologus Brown," Crayon 5 (February 1858): 48
14. Eidlitz, "T-Squares: Philologus Brown (continued)," Crayon 5 (March 1858): 79
15. Emerson wrote, "Whatever events in progress shall go to disgust men with cities, and infuse into them the passion for country life, and country pleasures, will render a service to the whole face of this continent, and will further the most poetic of all the occupations of real life, the bringing out by art the native but hidden graces of the landscape." Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Young American" (1844), in The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston, MA: Osgood, 1875), p. 200
16. Horatio Greenough, "American Architecture," United States Magazine and Democratic Review 13 (August 1843): 206-210
17. reprinted in Greenough, Form and Function: Remarks on Art, Design, and Architecture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1966), p. 51
18. Elizabeth Moulton, St. George's Church, New York (New York: St. George's Church, 1964), p. 42
19. Eidlitz, "The T-Squares: Cute Green - The Building Committee (concluded)," 349
20. Mary Woods, in From Craft to Profession, p. 34, uses Eidlitz's dismissive attitude toward Philologus Brown as evidence that he was "far from progressive" and was hostile to builders. As I argue in this article, I believe that his position is nuanced and complex and that Eidlitz's use of irony makes it easy to misinterpret the pan-professional hierarchy he envisioned
21. Eidlitz, "T-Squares: Philologus Brown (continued)," Crayon 5 (March 1858): 78, 79
22. Eidlitz, "On Aesthetics," p. 89 and "On Aesthetics, II," p. 111
23. Eidlitz, "On Aesthetics, II" p. 111
24. For a discussion of the reception of Eidlitz's philosophy by his fellow AIA members in the 1850s and 1860s, see Holliday, Leopold Eidlitz, Chapter 4
25. Washington Irving, William Irving, and James Kirke Paulding, Salmagundi, or, The Whim-Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq. and Others, reprinted (New York: Putnam, 1889), pp. 13-14
26. Allison Byerly, "Effortless Art: The Sketch in Nineteenth-Century Painting and Literature," Criticism 41 (Summer 1999): 349-64
27. For a thorough discussion of popular fiction in nineteenth-century America and its relationship to "higher" forms of literature, see David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York: Knopf, 1988)
28. Washington Irving, "The Mutability of Literature," in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories, or The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (New York: The Modern Library, 2001), p. 106
29. For a brief account of the development of the T-Square, see Maya Hambly, Drawing Instruments, 1580-1980 (London: Sotheby's, 1988), p. 113
30. Nina Laden, Roberto the Insect Architect (San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, 2000)
31. Eidlitz, "The T-Squares: Cute Green - The Building Committee," 262. This particular essay in the series is the best example of a Socratic dialogue, with fairly rapid exchange of questions and answers
32. Eidlitz, "The T-Squares: Cute Green - The Building Committee," 287
33. Eidlitz, "[Plymouth Church]," Crayon 6 (1859): 150-51
34. On the Kindergarten Chats, see in particular Narciso G. Menocal, Architecture as Nature: The Transcendentalist Ideas of Louis Sullivan (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), pp. 86-93
35. and Robert Twombly, Louis Sullivan: His Life and Work (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 372-76. Both conclude that Sullivan's abstruse, verbose Chats had none of the impact he had hoped
36. The literature on the topic is, of course, copious, but see Reinhold Martin, "Architecture's Image Problem: Have We Ever Been Postmodern?" Grey Room 22 (Winter 2006): 6-29, for a recent reevaluation