Paul Cret and the Landscape of War

Walking through the remote Greek mountain landscape is what I typically do this time of the year. For a variety of financial and institutional reasons, however, I must put a hold on project development for this summer, while I do my best to remotely contribute to the Lidoriki Project and the revival of the Morea Project (through the Parrhasian Heritage Park). My fieldwork this summer, has been entirely in archives. As colleagues post photos of their archaeological field seasons, I melt with jealousy. Bill Caraher's "Any Mediterranean Landscape"particularly compelled me to get out of my blogging hiatus and share a recent landscape discovery made in the Paul Cret Archives in Philadelphia.

I am curating an exhibit for Fall 2014 at the Phillips Museum of Art on the occasion of the 100 years since the eruption of the Great War. The show will explore how war experiences affected architecture among a sample of architects. Architecture was a unique American profession in that it stipulated a necessary research journey to Italy and Greece, according to Beaux Arts pedagogy (established at Columbia, MIT, and Penn). Once the war broke out, the pensionaire system was disrupted, while a number of American architects found themselves already in Europe.

A central figure in this discussion is, of course, Paul Cret, a central figure in American design and education. Cret, who was a French citizen, served his country through the war, while also trying to remotely manage the architectural program at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as ongoing projects. After the war, Cret's decorated war service earned him a special position in the American Battle Monument Commission, which erected memorials and cemeteries in France and Belgium. For my exhibit, I have decided to feature the Quentin Roosevelt memorial at Chamery that Cret designed for Theodore Roosevelt's youngest son, who was killed in an aerial battle. The other figure that the exhibit will examine is William Hough, Cret's student who was Rome Prize winner in 1914. Hough's case is fascinating; as a Quaker, he had to make some difficult decisions that, luckily for us, are documented in the letters that he sent back to his family in Philadelphia. Hough ended up finishing up his European education serving in the American Red Cross.

In order to reconstruct Cret's activities in the front, I have plowed through three archives at Penn (Van Pelt Special Collections, University Archives, Architectural Archives). Bill Whitaker, the curator and head of collections at Penn's Architectural Archives has had memorials in his mind, having just finished consulting on the new Louis Kahn Roosevelt Memorial in New York. Bill called to my attention a set five drawings in the Paul Cret archive, which is perfect for the exhibit. While fighting in the trenches of the Somme Valley, Cret used his architectural expertise to create panoramic drawings of the battle front. He would crawl into a camouflaged cabin and produce an annotated perspective of the landscape, as shown in Oct 1916 photo (left). In the evening, the strategists would take those drawings and plan the next day's offensive. The drawings are not only themselves beautiful but a rare document of landscape reconnaissance. Visible landmarks are noted on the upper and lower margins, while blue and red lines positioned the location of the enemy lines.

Although I would prefer to be producing documentation drawings myself, this summer's respite in the wilderness of the archive have been very enlightening. One thing that has become evident is the degree to which the Great War (and the preceding Balkan Wars) has cast a shadow over archaeological activities. Although little excavation took place by the American School in Greece between 1914 and 1925, it is difficult not to trace the war's shadow over the consequent years. To mention the most obvious, in 1931, Rhys Carpenter hired two engineers from the University of Zurich to fly over Acrocorinth and produce an aerial survey of the site. What we might today call "remote sensing" is the direct product of military experience. It was formalized in O.G.S. Crawford's landmark, Air Photography for Archaeologists (London, 1929) and used in Greece for the first time in Corinth.

The most evident consequence of the Great War in archaeology is in the human suffering that American archaeologists and architects confronted. I urge everyone to pick up this new volume to see how American archaeologists responded to the human crisis in Jack Davis' and Natalia Vogeikoff-Brogan's new volume, Philhellenism, Philanthropoy of Political Convenience (Princeton, 2013). Christopher Walker's The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (New York, 2013) is the first of what will surely prove to be flurry of new scholarship planned for 2014. Walker reminds us how central Greece and the "the Eastern Question" were in this first global confrontation.

As the excavation season of Summer 2013 unfolds, we must keep reminding ourselves. Every time we turn on our GPS, we are simply freeloading on our military's technology intended for drones rather than archaeological find spots.

John and Martha

Franklin and Marshall College has just installed two of its greatest possessions at the Phillips Museum. Go see them. My labels below:

Rev. John W. Nevin Jacob Eichholtz (American, 1776-1842)
Lancaster, Pennsylvania c. 1841
Oil on canvas
Recent Gift of Nancy Swart and Donald Ray Meredith

John Williamson Nevin (1803-1886) was a pioneering American theologian incorporating Hegelian philosophy into the armature of Protestantism. Centered at the foothills of the Blue Mountains, Nevin’s radical theology took its name from Mercersburg, where Marshall College was located before moving to Lancaster. Nevin’s Mercersburg Theology placed new attention on the sacramental and Christological foundation of the church and sought to incorporate a dialectical understanding of church history from its foundation to the present. At a time when American Protestantism was dominated by Scottish “common sense” disseminating from Princeton, or the Second Great Awakening’s “new measures,” popularized by Methodist camp meetings, Nevin offered a historicist alternative grounded in German idealist philosophy. Nevin was radical enough to be threatened with excommunication, while Ursinus College was founded as the conservative alternative to what seemed as a “radical” Marshall College. Nevin served as Franklin & Marshall College’s second president (1866-1876) and conceived of the amalgamated school as an extraordinary experiment in American education destined to integrate its extremes, the German character (endowed with philosophical idealism) and the English character (endowed with applied practicality). Such a dialectical synthesis, Nevin argued at the college’s inauguration on June 7, 1853, would awake Pennsylvania, “the Sleeping Giant.” Nevin, Philip Schaff and Friederich Augustus Rauch succeeded in creating a unique intellectual paradigm and positioned Franklin & Marshall College at the forefront of American Romanticism. Although it has ceased to command the attention of the College, Nevin’s Mercersburg Theology is still evident in Franklin & Marshall’s ideals of a liberal education.

Nevin was born in a rural Shippensburg, Pa. He attended Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., and Princeton Theological Seminary, where he received the finest Presbyterian education. In 1830, he moved to Pittsburgh as professor at Western Theological Seminary and, in 1849, he moved to Mercersburg, where he was appointed professor of theology and biblical literature at the Theological Seminary of the German Reformed Church (1840) and president of Marshall College (1841). Jacob Eichholtz was commissioned to paint Nevin’s portrait officiating as president and chairman of the board of trustees at Mercersburg; at the same time, he retouched the portrait of Mrs. Nevin (below). The paintings accompanied the Nevins from Mercersburg to Lancaster in 1855. In addition to his presidency, Nevin was an admired professor of philosophy, history and aesthetics at Franklin & Marshall. He was so loved by faculty and students, that the College became unofficially known as “Nevonia.” After his death, a stained glass window was commissioned for the chapel of Old Main, where it still stands today. Nevin’s legacy is cherished at the Lancaster Theological Seminary, which moved across College Avenue in 1893.

Lancaster’s painter Jacob Eichholtz became one of Pennsylvania’s leading artists, building his reputation on portraiture. Before the proliferation of photography, official portraits sought to capture the essence of the subject’s physical, intellectual and spiritual beauty, but they also disseminated a visual standard of the figure’s prominence in society. Thus, Eichholtz’s portrait captures Nevin’s intellectual depth in the spirit of European Romanticism, as well as his leadership at the helm of Marshall College.

Eichholtz produced four identical copies. We are not certain of where they initially hung or of their intended dissemination. The Phillips Museum owns two of the portraits (gifted in 1963 and in 2012); a third version belongs to the Western Theological Seminary; and the fourth version is lost.

Martha Jenkins Nevin

Bass Otis (American, 1784-1861)

Repainted by Jacob Eichholtz (American, 1776-1842)

Lancaster, Pennsylvania, before 1835 and 1841

Oil on canvas

Gift of Rev. John Nevin Sayre, #4699

John Williamson Nevin (above) met Martha Jenkins (1805-1890), while professor at Western Theological Seminary at Pittsburgh. Their marriage, on New Year’s Day of 1835, began a life-long partnership and presented an ideal model of family life to the students of Franklin & Marshall College. Martha Jenkins belonged to one of Pennsylvania’s oldest families, bestowing on Nevin social prestige and financial stability. The Jenkins family had emigrated from Wales in the 17th century and received a grant from William Penn to develop a large track of land along the Conestoga Creek in Chester County. Jenkintown in Philadelphia is named after the family. After the American Revolution, Martha’s grandfather purchased the Windsor Iron Works, an old English company, and developed a profitable industry. Martha’s father, Robert Jenkins, was a member the U.S. House of Representatives and the Pennsylvania State of Representatives; Martha’s mother, Catharine Carmichael, was the daughter of a prominent Presbyterian pastor at Brandywine Manor. Like Nevin’s youth, Martha’s upbringing was steeped into the elite institutions of the Presbyterian Church.

Martha grew up in Windsor Place, her family’s prominent estate in Churchtown, where the young couple lived for five years after their marriage. The home survives as a historical home. The Nevins moved to Mercersburg in 1840 and to Lancaster in 1855. Martha gave birth of seven children, William Wilberforce, Robert Jenkins, Alice, Blanche, Martha Finley, Cecil and John (who died young), and Herbert (who died as an infant). Although Martha devoted her life to the family, she was well versed in literature and occasionally contributed articles to the newspaper. “A lady with practical ideas,” Martha assisted Nevin in designing their new home, Caernarvon Place, a farm in Lancaster County. She outlived her husband by four years and died in 1890. The bronze pulpit at Old Main was dedicated to her memory and matches the memorial window.

Martha Jenkins’ portrait bears the hands of two painters. Esteemed Philadelphia artist Bass Otis first painted Martha soon before her marriage in 1835. Six years later, however, Lancaster painter Jacob Eichholtz was asked to repaint parts of Martha’s portrait. Eichholtz had painted Martha’s parents in 1836, and in 1841 he was called anew to paint her husbands official portrait. While working on Nevin’s four official portraits, Eichholtz touched up Otis’ original. A short-sleeved dress in the earlier painting, for instance, was changed to a long-sleeved dress, reflecting more appropriate attire for a pastor’s wife. Scientific analysis might shed further light in differentiating the hands of the two painters who were friends and collaborators at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. In its double chronology, the portrait of Martha Jenkins Nevin reveals a process of painterly transformation, a veritable artistic wedlock between an old and a new image. A similar artistic marriage takes place between another couple, Thomas Emlen and Serena Mayer Franklin, whose double portrait Eichholtz painted in 1838 (also exhibited in the Nissley Gallery). Closer analysis on such double paintings will shed invaluable light into the contribution that women made in the lives of Lancaster’s most prestigious men and the intellectual life of Franklin & Marshall College.

The painting of Martha Jenkins Nevin was gifted to Franklin & Marshall College in 1967.

Corinth Architects 06: W. Stuart Thompson

W. Stuart Thompson (1890-1968) held the fourth Fellowship in Architecture at the American School in 1912-1915. He is a unique figure for capitalizing on the possibilities of becoming the de facto School architect. Since the beginning of the architecture fellowship, the School capitalized on the availability of architects in residence to assist in the real estate development of the institution. It is interesting that the School during this period did not ever consider hiring local Greek architects for its buildings. W. Stuart Thompson received his A.B. at Columbia University in 1912 and spent two academic years in Athens. When he returned to the U.S. he built a successful private practice in partnership with Henry Churchill.

Thompson is a fascinating figure in maintaining a building career across the ocean. His designs for the School include Loring Hall, the Gennadeion Library, a proposed Benaki Museum (not built), and the Stoat of Attalos Reconstruction in Athens, Oakley House (with Richard Stillwell) and the New Museum in Corinth (picture left), the Museum at Mytilene. Outside of Greece, he designed the Farm School in Albania, the Morris Schinasi Memorial Hospital at Manisa, Turkey, and the American Hospital in Istanbul.

In the United States, he won a major award on the neighborhood planning competition of the 1939 World's Fair. In addition to houses, major American buildings include the State Tower Building in Syracuse, N.Y., the Crucible Steel Building in Chicago, Ill, the terminal of the Connecticut State Airport in Stamford, Conn., the Sterling-Winthrop research plant in Rennselaer, N.Y., academic buildings for Finch College, N.Y., the Greek Orthodox Church of the Archangels in Stamford, Conn. (modeled on the Holy Apostles in the Agora), and a proposed New York Academy of Sciences.

Unfortunately, there is very little scholarly work on W. Stuart Thompson. Interestingly enough, his building in Greece have received the greatest attention. See most notably the issue of New Griffon 7 )(2004) dedicated to the Gennadeion Library. The material evidence is ample for a Thompson research project, and we must wait for a major synthetic research project before making any important conclusions about Thompson's contribution to architecture more broadly. A casual overview of the extant material raises a number of pertinent questions outlined as follows:

• The F.L Wright Connection. During the 1930s, Churchill and Thompson was the New York office used by Frank Lloyd Wright. This relationship needs further exploration. An important collaborator in the firm was the engineer Howard Meier, who moved to Austin and began Texan modernism. 
• A Multi-National Firm. Why did a prominent New York firm seek out commissions in Greece and Turkey? After 1929, the office of Churchill and Thompson was severely out of work. Projects in Greece and Turkey offered an important life line to the economic survival of the firm. Thompson's role as the European agent of the operation needs investigation, as it forms a model of an early multi-national firm.
• Labor. Connected to the loss of projects by the Great Depression, interesting issues of labor organization arise in the work of Thompson. Running projects in both Greece and Turkey meant access to a multi-national labor force. When labor strikes interrupted the construction of the Gennadeion in Athens, Thompson made an interesting move. He imported a crew of Turkish workmen directly from Istanbul. Just as Thompson was capitalizing on the loss of jobs in the U.S. by seeking projects in the east, he was capitalizing on global capital to execute his projects.
• Historicism versus Modernism. Thompson's architectural language is interestingly poised between modernism and historicism. Looking at the houses that he designed in the U.S., we find the appropriation of the International Style as well as some conservative Georgian revival house types. Thompson & Churchill's apartment building at 137 E 57th St (demolished), for instance, is one of the earliest Bauhaus apartment buildings in New York. The New Museum in Corinth is another interesting building in this respect. The building is designed as a Byzantine monastery centered around a courtyard. Its arched openings are traditional, but it's overall language and detailing are quite modern. When completed, it was heralded by the American architectural press as a pioneering modern museum. With its modernist flair, the Corinth Museum could not be more different than the severely Neoclassical Gennadeion Library. Is Thompson's multi-lingualism in design a matter of convenience? Or is there something more to be said about seeking a synthesis. How could an architect who had dealings with Frank Lloyd Wright be responsible for the ultra-historicism of the Stoa of Attalos? Thompson was clearly educated in the Beaux Arts architectural model at Columbia University. But even his most historicist buildings are strangely severe and un-Beaux Arts. At the end of his life, Paul Cret initiated an interesting modernism arising from within the Beaux Arts, which he so successfully introduced. New scholarship on Paul Cret might elucidate Thompson's mindset.
• Design Interface Greece - America. Maintaining a parallel practice between the U.S. and Europe, the natural question would be if one influenced the other. The answer is obvious in some cases, where the Athenian Agora excavations provided the model for the Greek Orthodox Church of Stamford. A comprehensive overview of Thompson's production in the U.S. reveals a sophisticated understanding of historical models not limited to Greece. How does his Romanesque sensitivity or his Georgian houses fit into the interface between Greece and America? 
• Personal Links. Thompson would make a terrific case study on how friendships and professional associations were forged in the American School. Interesting members in his personal life include his wife Anna McCann, who taught art and archaeology at Swarthmore College. He seems to have been close to a number of archaeologists. What was the nature of their relationship? How was the American School's social circle maintained in the United States outside of the academic sphere? At the local level, how did Thompson's social circle congregate at Stamford, Conn., where he lived?

Select Bibliography 

Kalligas, Haris ed. 2004. Το Γεννάδειον. Δημιουργία και Μεταμόρφωσις, The New Griffon 7, Athens.

New York Times. 1968. “W Stuart Thompson, Architect, 78, Dead. Did Work in Greece,” The New York Times (April 3, 1968)

Thompson, W. Stuart. 1936. “Corinth Museum. Corinth, Greece,” The Architectural Record 80, no. 6, (Dec. 1936), pp. 465-470
Mitchell Johnson, J. and W. Mark Gunderson. 2011. A Well-Made Object: Conversations with Howard Meyer, film.

Thompson and Churchill. 1930. “Loft, Inc., 2465 Broadway, New York. Thompson and Churchill, Architects,” Architectural Record 67, no. 2 (Feb. 1930), pp. 135-137.
Thompson and Churchill. 1932. “137 East 57th Street Loft Building, New York City, Thompson and Churchill, Architects,” Architectural Record 71, no. 2 (Feb. 1932), pp. 106-110. “Charles Mayer, consulting engineer.”
Wright, Henry. 1930. “The Place of the Apartment Buidling in the Modern Community,” Architectural Record 67, no. 3 (Feb. 1930), pp. 206, 207, 295

For more Corinth Architects, see here

Corinth Architects 05: William Bell Dinsmoor

By far the most famous Fellow of Architecture at the American School was William Bell Dinsmoor (1886-1973). He was a fellow for three years, 1908-1912, but then became the first official architect of the American School. The son of an architect, Dinsmoor received his BS in Architecture from Harvard University in 1906. He became professor of architecture at Columbia University in 1935 and presided over the discipline of ancient architectural history for most of the 20th century. His Architecture of Ancient Greece (first ed. 1927), remains the foundational textbook on the field. His professional architectural practice was limited to a few years in New York (1906-1908) and the design of the concrete Parthenon in Nashville (1925-1931).

Since Dinsmoor has been well studied, I will not summarize his accomplishment but will defer to Natalia Vogeikoff-Brogan's catalog of  the Dinsmoor Papers, which provides the best starting point for further readings (and source of photo left).

For more Corinth Architects, see here

Corinth Architects 04: Henry Dunn Wood

Another obscure architect at the American School was Henry Dunn Wood (1882-1940), the third Fellow in Architecture in residence in 1906-1908. Wood received his B.S. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1904, winning the Gold Medal in Design. He was a member of the first class at Penn graduating  under Paul Cret. It was known as a great class and it included Henry Hibbs, Dave Allison, Walter Mellor, Leicester Holland (also Corinth Architect), Bill Gordon, and Frank Reynolds. He received his fellowship at the American School after two years of professional practice in Philadelphia. While in Greece he worked on the Propylaia of the Acropolis, where he laid the foundations for William Bell Dinsmoor's future studies, and at the excavations of the Forum in Corinth.

Upon his return to Philadelphia Wood made a spectacular display of his drawings from Corinth (and Athens) at the 1909 annual exhibition of the American Institute of Architects in Philadelphia, which took place at he Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Among the drawings that he exhibited were the plan for the excavations, a plan for the restoration of the North side of the Forum, along with five photographs: "Church of the Holy Preparation," "Temple of Apollo," "Excavations at Corinth, North Side of Market Place," "Courtyard of a House," and "Church of Saint George." The last photo was reproduced in the Year Book of the exhibition (see above). Although labeled "Saint George" it seems to be of the old Panagia Church, where Guy D. R. Sanders excavated in the 1990s. A copy of the North Market restoration drawing displayed in Philadelphia in 1909 is housed at the Corinth Excavation archive, and I thank James Herbst for finding it (Corinth Drawing No. 020-026).

Wood was an active member of the T Square Club and the Philadelphia chapter of the American Institute of Architects since 1903 and a lecturer at Penn in 1911-1912. Just as he was ready to embark on a private architectural practice, he was offered a position at Philadelphia's large utility company United Engineers, where he rose from draughtsman to head of his department. His temperament seems to have fitted such team work. As a result, he designed many industrial plans. When his mentor, Paul Cret, received the commission for the Central Heating Plant of Washington, D.C. (left), Wood designed the building's interior.

Wood lived on a 324 Earlham Terrace in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia. He died at the age of 58, on March 26, 1940, a few days before the German invasion of Denmark and the beginning of World War II. His obituary by Paul Cret appeared in Federal Architect, a Washington journal edited by a fellow Penn student.

Select Bibliography:

Cret, Paul. 1940. “Obituary: Wood, Henry Dunn (1882-1940),” Federal Architect 10 (April 1940), p. 39.
Dinsmoor, William B. and William B. Dinsmoor, Jr. 2004. The Propylaia to the Athenian Akropolis 2: The Classical Building, Princeton."Foreword" by Charles K. Williams II, p. xxvi.
Philadelphia Chapter American Institute of Architects and T Square Club. 1909. Year Book and Catalogue of the Fifteenth Annual Architectural Exhibition, Philadelphia [pages not numbered]
University of Pennsylvania. 1904. University of Pennsylvania Proceedings of Commencement, June 15, 1904, pp. 4, 16, Philadelphia.
University of Pennsylvania. 1913. Catalogue of the University of Pennsylvania 1912-1913, p. 91, Philadelphia.

And now on a personal note. While researching Henry Wood at the Fine Arts Library at the University of Pennsylvania, I consulted the Year Books of the annual architectural exhibition in Philadelphia (which my student Chelsea Troppauer introduced me to, while working on her Preservation Master's thesis). Browsing through the 1917 issue, a magical thing happened. The very same volume I was reading was once owned by Henry D Wood. See his signature at the beginning of the volume. What serendipity. The volume that Chelsea had showed me earlier, I realized was owned by Paul Cret. The crazy thing is that Chelsea learned all about Paul Cret in my seminar on 1930s architecture two years ago at F&M. Here is Wood's signature:

Corinth Architects 03: Gordon Allen

Gordon Allen was the second Fellow in Architecture at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Very little is known about him and he has been forgotten by the institutional history of the school. Allen graduated from Haverford College in 1898. His travel sketches were featured in the annual exhibit of the Boston Architecture Club. He was a fellow in Greece during the year 1905-1906. We have not yet determined what projects he worked on in Greece. Allen returned to the U.S. and practiced architecture in Boston. He was a member of the American Institute of Architects and served as secretary for the Boston Chapter. While in Athens, interestingly enough, he met King of Greece Constantine I and Queen Sophia, who in 1915 commissioned from him a series of buildings, most notably the suburban royal palace at Tatoi, a Home Economics School, and a Red Cross Hospital. Although raised in Germany, Queen Sophia was the grand-daughter of Queen Victoria and had met her husband during her grandmothers Jubilee in London. Sophia had an appreciation for American houses, their efficiency and sense of modernity. Allen was not in residence during the completion of the Palace in Tatoi, the project was managed by an American architect working in Istanbul. Soon after its completion, unfortunately, the Tatoi Palace was burned. It has thus receded in the architectural memory of Greece.

Select bibliography:

Adams, Frederick Johnstone. 1949. "The Plannign Schools," Town Planning Review 20 (July 1949) pp. 144-149.
American Contractor. 1915. "American Architect Builds Palace for King," The American Contractor 36 (May 8, 1915), p. 81j. (image above)
Architectural Record. 1933. "Small and Medium-Cost Houses," Architectural Record 74 (Aug. 1933), pp. 121-141.
Boston Architectural Club. 1902. "Travel Sketches," Catalogue of the Architectural Exhibition, Boston Architectural Club, p. 25, Boston.
Gordon, Allen. 1946. "A Cottage in Lancashire," The Builder 170, (Jan. 25, 1946), p. 93

Gordon, Allen. 1952. "The Vale," Old Time New England 42, no. 4, pp. 80-87.

Kardamitsi-Adami, Maro. 2009. Palaces in Greece, Athens

For more Corinth Architects, see here

Corinth Architects 02: Gorham Stevens

Gorham Stevens (1876-1963) was the first architecture fellow at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and one the most accomplished. Stevens was born in Staten Island and received his architectural education at the earliest bastion of Beaux Arts education in America, at M.I.T. After graduation in 1899, he spend a year at the Ecole de Beaux Arts in Paris and travelled through Europe. Upon his return to the U.S., he began working for McKim, Mead, and White, the premier Beaux Arts firm. After a year, he received the American School Architecture Fellowship and spent a year in Greece concentrating on the study of the Erechtheion and contributing a chapter on architecture in Howard Fowler and James Wheeler's Handbook of Greek Archaeology (1909). He returned to McKim, Mead, and White in 1905. In Greece, however, he had fallen in love with Annette Notara, whom he married in 1906. As far as I can tell, Stevens is the first American School member to marry a Greek, a tradition that continues with Alice Walker Kosmopoulos (1924). In 1912, Stevens became the natural choice as director of the American School of Architecture in Rome, which merged with the American School of Classical Studies in Rome. McKim had been the School's patrons and architects of its new building. After 20 years of service to the Academy, Stevens returned to Greece in 1932 and resumed his research on Athenian monuments. He served as director of the American School during the difficult years of World War II. He formally retired in 1947 but continued to be active in the School, including involvement in the restoration of the Stoa of Attalos. He died in Athens, leaving the School his archives, his car, and an endowed scholarship.

Stevens' architectural research was centered in Athens, on monuments of the Acropolis and the Agora. His contribution to Corinth include a study of Peirene Spring and some work at Isthmia. Stevens is an important figure in the precarious bridge between the Academy in Rome and the School in Athens. He also bolstered a personal connection to leading architectural firms in the U.S. (McKim, Mead, and White and their apprentices) and to the architecture program at M.I.T. Although removed from professional practice, Stevens was a powerful architectural force at the School. His reconstructions of ancient buildings (Peirene, Marathon Dam monument, Amphipolis Lion, Stoa of Attalos) had left their mark on the archaeological landscape.

Unfortunately, the scholarly literature on Gorham Stevens is limited. General biographical information is given in Lucy Shoe's obituary (American Journal of Archaeology 68 [1964], 189-190). His Papers reside at the American School Archive in Athens, see Finding Aid compiled by Natalia Vogeikoff. Additional material is found at the American Academy in Rome records housed at the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian. For Stevens' work in Corinth and reconstruction of Peirene, see Betsey Robinson, Histories of Peirene (2012), pp. 106-107. Gorhams Stevens needs a dissertation.

Photo of Stevens above, from American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Archives
Reconstruction of Peirene above, from Corinth I.6, pl. X

For more Corinth Architects, see here

Corinth Architects 01: Introduction

The American Schools of Classical Studies in Rome and in Athens were founded by common objectives, to promote classical scholarship. The School in Rome encountered a friendly partner, the American School of Architecture, established in 1895 to serve the needs of America's growing Beaux Arts educational programs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1865), the University of Pennsylvania (1868) and Columbia University (1881). Modeled on the 17th-century French "School of Fine Arts" from which it took its name, the American Beaux Arts system required pensionnaires, or sponsored residential fellows awarded on a competitive basis (the Prix de Rome) to study classical monuments in their archaeological setting. The merging of the American Schools of Classical Studies and Architecture in 1912 brought archaeology and architectural education under the same institutional framework. Thus, it was common for students of archaeology to interact with figures such as A. M. Robert Stern, Leon Krier, or Robert Venturi under one common roof.

In contrast to the American Academy, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens did not share the cross-fertilization between architects and classicists institutionally central to life in Rome. The School in Athens surpassed Rome, however, in archaeological activities and needed professional staff to manage the architectural complexity of its excavations. Rather than a coherent architectural system of study, the need for architectural staff ushered the architectural discipline into the School in Athens through the back door. An established program in Architectural Fellowships brought a crop of architects through the excavations in Corinth and Athens during the first three decades of the 20th century. Lacking the prestige of the Grand Prix de Rome, these architects have receded from the institutional memory of the American School with the exception of a few fellows who made themselves more permanent in Greece either by turning into professional archaeologists or monopolizing the School's architectural commissions. 

It is the lack of scholarship on the architects of the School that has led the beginnings of this research project. The meticulous organization of the Corinth architectural drawings by James Herbst (and their digitization) has further motivated a fresh look into the architects of Corinth. I will share the research on this blog, and attempt to synthesize some preliminary research. James Herbst and I hope that this study will ultimately create a more permanent expression, an article, book, or exhibit.

So, who are the Architects of Corinth and how did they end up in Corinth? As the excavations in Corinth proceeded at the turn of the 20th century, it became clear that the employment of a professional architect was necessary. A position of Fellow in Architecture was, thus, created in 1903. A grant from the Carnegie Corporation financed the fellowship during its early years (1904-1912). The Fellowship program terminated in 1933 after supporting a total of 12 architects:

Gorham Phillips Stevens, 1903-1906  (B. S. Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Gordon Allen, 1905-1906 (A.B. Harvard College)
Henry Dunn Wood, 1906-08 (B.S. University of Pennsylvania)
William Bell Dinsmoor, 1908-12  (B.S. Harvard College)
W. Stuart Thompson, 1913-15 (A.B. Columbia University)
Leicester Bodine Holland, 1920-21 (B.S. University of Pennsylvania)
Richard Stillwell, 1924-1926 (A.B. Princeton University)
William Vaughn Cash, 1925-1926 (B. S. Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Lyman C. Douglas, 1928-1930 (A.B. Haverford College)
Allen Squire, 1930-1931 (B.F.A. Yale University)
Julian H. Whittlesey, 1930-31(B.F.A. Yale University)
Joseph M. Shelley, 1931-1933 (Ph.D. Yale University)

In addition to the official architecture fellows, a number of other architects joined the excavations, unofficially contributing to the architectural culture of Corinth. Those were:

Henry Bacon, American architect (famous for Lincoln Memorial)
Wulf Schaefer, German architect (PhD on Nauplion, Technical University Danzig, 1936)

Piet de Jong, British architect

Georg Vinko von Peschke, Austrian artist

Youry Fomine, Russian-French artist
Dorothy Cox (B.Arch. Columbia University)
Marion Rawson (courses in Architecture, Columbia University)

In addition to documenting archaeological buildings, the fellows were also brought into the service of the School's own architectural projects in Athens, Corinth, and Samos (Loring Hall, Gennadeion Library, Samos Museum, Oakley House, Corinth Museum, etc.) Many of the fellows returned to architectural practice in the U.S. but little attention has been given to the relationship between their professional practice and their archaeological apprenticeship.

It is also interesting that after the 1930s, after World War II, the program of architectural fellowships terminates any organic interaction between America and Greece. One notable exception is Charles K. Williams II, who practiced architecture at the office of Philip Johnson before becoming director of excavations in Corinth. The American School turned almost entirely to Greek architects for its archaeological staff after the 1930s, and most notably to John Travlos. Some of them are obscure and warrant some research. Those post-war Greek architects are

John Travlos

Elias Scroubelos

S. L. Doukas

... and others

For a general introduction to American architecture education, archaeology and the culture of drafting, see the following:

Johnston, George Barnett. 2008. Drafting Culture: A Social History of Architectural Graphic Standards, Cambridge, Mass.

Neumann, Dietrich. 2002. “Teaching the History of Architecture in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland: ‘Architekturgeschichte’ vs. ‘Bauforschung’,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 61, pp. 370-380

Ockman, Joan. 2012. Architecture School: Three Centruies of Educating American Architects, Cambridge, Mass
Yegül, Fikret K. 1991. Gentlemen of Instinct and Breeding: Architecture at the American Academy in Rome 1894-1940, New York and Oxford

For more Corinth Architects, see here

Cézanne House with Cracked Walls

Plaster in Umbrella

Index of the "architectural plaster" motif in Will Self's novel Umbrella

Pigeon Tower

This is were it all begins for me. The French 19th-century tradition of depicting vernacular architecture (Corot, etc.) gets infused with a formal otherness. Cézanne's, The Bellevue Pigeon Tower moves beyond the uncanny sensibility in Victor Hugo's ruined house drawings. It pushes a representational envelope, becomes biomorphized, formalized, geometricized. The Pigeon Tower opens the obvious door to Cubism and a less obvious door to Deleuze.

“Cézanne has achieved Spartan simplicity only by stripping away everything inessential from the secene and allowing abstract considerations completely to override the vagaries of nature. AsD. H. Lawerence observed in 1929: ‘Sometimes Cézanne builds up a landscape essentially out of omissions.’ The ruthless simplification of form evident in the Bellevue Pigeon Tower calls to mind the advice Cézanne gave to the young painter Emile Bernard in 1904: ‘treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything brought into proper perspective so that each side of an object or a plane is directed towards a central point.’ Though this of-quoted statement has been seen as anticipating the advent of Cubism and abstract art, it is best understood as a prescription for reducing the imperfect forms of the natural world to essential shapes. Far from being a revolutionary idea, this was a standard method of creating order and harmony in painting. Long sanctioned by tradition and training, it was a method also advocated and practied by Poussin. (Verdi 1992, p. 147)

The fact that this work now resides in the Rust Belt (Cleveland Museum of Art) offers new possibilities of meaning-making.

Hans Herr House

Punk archaeology, John Ruskin aestheticism, and 1930s avant-gardes have put vernacular architecture in the back burner. Buried in a pile of papers, I saw my sketch plan for one of America's most amazing house, the Hans Herr House in Lancaster County. Built in 1719, it displays all the fabulous continental traditions that made German houses so different from British houses. And, yes, there is a family connection with Herr's potato chips.

I begin my Lancaster Architecture seminar with a visit to the Herr house. The sketch was intended to show the fresh students how to take visual notes. I apologize, my plan is a bit out of proportion (it should be a little more rectangular).



There are three places in the U.S. that bring German architecture to life for me. Visit them all:

1. The Hans Herr House, 1719 (click)
2. The Ephrata Cloisters, 1732 (click)
3. The German Collections at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, including a Küche from Milbach, 1752 (click)

Frank Miles Day's Byzantine Book

Byzantium's shadow is damn perplexing. So, you read about the profound influence that Byzantine architecture had on the late 19th-century. You can understand it theoretically, the moment you start reading John Ruskin or looking at H. H. Richardson. There is a Hegelian sensibility of process and becoming, there is a playfulness in the improper use of classicism, and there is lots of spiritual dazzle through color and surface. The 19th-century city is saturated with Byzantinizing dreams. But how did it actually work? How did architects with minimum exposure to the Byzantine world (even if they traveled to Europe) learn how to execute Byzantine details. Thinking about one of my favorite houses, Frank Miles Day's Francis Kennedy House (1888), I came with the following threads (see earlier thread here). This little house is full of medievalizing quotations from Germany (towering roof), Tudor England (bay window), to Byzantium (arched windows). Well traveled (see bio here) Day's sketchbooks and travel notebooks show multiple sources of inspiration that could be recombined with each commission. His most celebrated public buildings--Penn Museum, Baptist Publication Building, Art Club of Philadelphia--show no shortage of compositional freedom.

This is how Patricia L Heintzelman Keebler describes the configuring process, in what remains the definitive study of Frank Miles Day, her 1980 Delaware dissertation “The Life and Work of Frank Miles Day," (Wilmington, Del.), p. 135:

House of Edward R. Wood, commissioned Nov 1888. 245-47 S 17th St, four-story brick residence with English red sandstone trim. “As in the Arts Club, designed a few months earlier, there is a combination of eclectic references here rather than a simple model. In fact, the early Renaissance decorative motifs, were probably inspired by the Art Club. Elements from the large houses of Nuremberg and Regensburg are also present, especially in the dramatic shed-roof dormers that appeared so often in Day’s sketches. Other references to Tudor and Jacobean houses can be seen in the prominent chimneys, rectangular bays, and Gothic mullioned windows. There is probably a debt to the Norman Shaw Queen Anne style, as well, in the irregular size and picturesque variation of the windows and arched openings. Day was familiar with all of these eclectic styles, but he did no directly copy any of them.”

But what about elements that could not be reconfigured in some general mode. What about the details? the moldings? and the ornament? How did Frank Miles Day design the clearly Byzantine ornament on the sandstone block below the springing of the large arch of the first floor? The answer is simple, Arne Dehli's Selections of Byzantine Ornament, published in New York in 1890, and found in Frank Miles Day's library. It came in two volumes and it offered folio after folio of Byzantine ornament derived predominantly from Venice (vol. 1) and Ravenna (vol. 2). My sketch, below, copies Dehli's pl. 33 that illustrates the acanthus foliage in the hexagonal altar in the nave of St. Mark's in Venice. Without any words or interpretive histories, this volume offered over 100 possibilities from which the designer could innovate. Over 100 plates illustrate the tensions between grapes, acanthus leaves and flowers, infinite variations of twists and turns. This is why Ruskin loved Byzantium. As a civilization it had loosed up the Corinthian order and reconfigured it in an ever-ending number of combinations, precisely what the 19th-century architect needed to do for himself.

Hockley House W Window

Hidden Tension: Furness's Hockley House

Michael Lewis has shown us that the genius of Frank Furness was most provocatively unleashed in 1875 at the Thomas Hockley House (235 S 21st St). Lewis gives a brilliant reading of the significance of the house's corner porch in Architecture of the Violent Mind. I made a pilgrimage to the house and looked a bit more closely. It is an amazing composition, indeed. Looking closely at the juncture between the provocative tympanum and the columns, I noticed something that I haven't seen in the scholarly literature. The dramatic tympanum is raised above the springing of the supporting arch by a few inches. This gives it a sense of levitation that counterbalances the piece's heaviness. But if it does not rest on the springing, how is this massive block supported?

If one looks closely to the underside of the tympanum, one notices three grooves that seem like a tri-partite stone moulding. The middle groove, however, is just slightly darker. At closer inspection, it is clear that it is not stone at all, but rather an iron beam in tension inserted in the intrados of the arch. That's how the tympanum is supported. I returned with my camera to take a close up of that detail.

I include here a photo of the Hockley House porch for those that have never seen it.

In previous posts, I have been tracing the steel beam vernacular in Philadelphia (and in Greece) see here. The tension rod here adds another wonderful piece to the discussion. Soon after using exposed steel beams in his Broad Street Station, Furness used it in a house around the corner, which I will discuss later.

Futurism 1876: The Machine Gun

Believe it or not, FUTURISM began in Philadelphia on April 20, 1876, when the Reverend William Henry Furness gave the dedication speech for the opening of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, designed by his son Frank. The Unitarian Reverend Furness was an intellectual of great repute among figures like Emerson and Whitman. What is amazing about his speech is the notion of TERRIBLE BEAUTY emerging from the mechanical killing of the Civil War and articulated for the first time in his son's architecture. Michael J. Lewis discusses this important passage in, Frank Furness: Architecture and the Violent Mind (New York, 2001) p. 123. It was first published in the Philadelphia Inquirer (April 20, 1876).

"In popular speech we distinguish the beautiful arts from the useful. It is a distinction in hardly anything more than a name. What mortal thing is so useful as beauty? It is eternal joy. It feeds as instinctive insatiable hunger. And, on the other hand, how beautiful is use! Fitness is beauty. I was shown the other day, at Fortress Monroe, a Gatling gun, an instrument of death, discharging two hundred bullets a minute, and yet what a terrible beauty there was in the exquisite contrivance by which a man could sit at his ease, and by turning a crank, sweep away files of men."

Frank Miles Day Surprises

Michael Lewis' Frank Furness: Architecture and the Violent Mind has got to be one of the best written architectural biographies. I was engrossed in ch. 5, which reveals the big bang of the exposed steel frame, when it was time to walk home. On my way, I decided to swing by the Thomas Hockley House, which in ch. 5, revolutionizes American architecture.

But on my way to 21st St.,  I was captivated by a highly romantic row house on 1922 Spruce St. I had to quickly sketch it, if only to remember the salient elements. The same thing had happened to me a few weeks ago  on 17th and Latimer Sts, amidst of Christmas shopping. With freezing hands, I doodled the basic elements.

As it turns out, both were designed by Frank Miles Day, a major Philadelphia architect (mentor and later partner of Charles Klauder who designed half of my college). Both houses are blatantly medievalizing, but have smooth monochromatic fleshy surfaces with material variations of stone, brick and iron. Both work with slight asymmetrical compositions and contain objects of medieval curiosity, such as niches, sculpture, or grills. My gut had placed them in the 1920s, and I was thrilled to learn they were much earlier. A web search led me to one of Jeff Cohen's Bryn Mawr Cities classes, a site created by student Alexis Gorby. The scholarship on Frank Miles Day is not huge, unfortunately. He's very well known among the Philadelphia scholarly community. His drawings are well cataloged at the University of Pennsylvania Architectural Archives. Patricia Keebler's dissertation  is still the last word, see "The Life and Work of Frank Miles Day" (U Delaware, 1980). See also  Philadelphia Architects.

Polis Pectoral

Congratulations to Amy Papalexandrou and Bill Caraher for their essay on the Byzantine phases of  Polis, the Princeton excavation in Cyprus, just hot off the press. My favorite objects in the catalog are the three pectoral crosses found in the proximity of the chest of three buried individuals. Amazingly enough, they are not made of metal or ivory but are carved stone (ca. 2-3 cm in size). What I love about them is their formal inventiveness that take the objects away from a singular reading. Yes, they are crosses, but they are also a whole lot of other shapes, too. That multiplicity demotes the singularity of the symbol and opens associations with other realms. I suspect that some of the grooves may have had some intricate interaction with the leather or cloth chain that would have wrapped them and held them around the neck.

Amy Papalexandrou and William Caraher, "Arsinoe in Late Antiquity end the Middle Ages," in City of Gold: The Archaeology of Polis Chrysochous, Cyprus, ed. William A. P. Childs, Joanna S. Smith, and J. Michael Podgett (New Haven, 2012), pp. 267-282.

Two of the crosses have been already published by Amy in the Curcic Festshrift, see:
Amy Papalexandrou, "Polis/Arsinoe: A Cypriot Town and Its Sacred Sites," in Approaches to Byzantine Architecture and Its Decoration: Studies in Honor of Slobodan Curcic, ed. Mark J. Johnson, Robert Ousterhout, and Amy Papalexandrou (Farnham, 2012), pp. 27-41.

Campin Corner

Cavafy Came to Read

The year 2013 is dedicated to Cavafy. So, I dug up my Cavafy and, in the second volume of the standard Savides edition, a postcard dropped out, Robert Campin's Annunciation triptych at the Cloisters Museum. A little note in the book tells me that I bought in the summer of 1992 during my second season at the Morea Project, where my adult acquaintance with Greece began. Dated a year later, the card was sent by my dear friend Angela Volan, a fellow Greek American that also found herself soul-searching her Hellenism in the academic mountains. Angela had not yet decided to go to grad school in art history. After the Morea Project summer, she started working for a publishing house in New York. Angela in New York became my ambassador to the intense NYC rembetiko scene of the 1990s. Our conversations were filled with Greece and post-structuralist literary theory. It was then that Angela had her first heart surgery, the first reminder of her Marfan Syndrome, which  sadly struck again in 2006, but fatally. Sent 20 years ago, this card from the past hidden in the pages of Cavafty puts me in a Derridian revelry, and helps me remember dear Angela. Fred Cooper, the director of the Morea Project where we met, passed away this year, adding an extra dimension of loss.

I look at myself in a photo from a trip to Istanbul I took with Angela and Celina in 2001  and note my Cavafian glasses on my nose (see here). What does Cavafy mean to us? This question will get repeatedly raised during the next 12 months and it will be answered by all the requisite sub-categories of importance, a landmark in global Hellenism, the postmodernism of his alterity, his Anglo-American homosexual aesthetics and (probably to a lesser extent) his internalized colonialism towards the real Alexandria. But for me, he is only a crutch to occasionally pull from the library and navigate through the other sides of ordinary life, where boundaries are less defined, where there are no expectations of reason or clarity. It is friendships with Angela and, indirectly, with Cavafy that help us juxtapose Campin's sacred inferior domesticity with a 23 year-old reader in abandon.