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A Field Guide to Architectural Sculpture in America Scope, Shape, Contents |
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Scope In geographic scope the Field Guide will cover the United States. As you'd expect, most architectural sculpture appears in New York and Washington D.C., but there is significant and valuable regional work, and the Nebraska samples on this website demonstrate great stuff in apparently-unlikely places. Most, but not all, of the work happens between 1870 and 1940. |
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Shape The Field Guide will serve two basic markets. For architectural tourists and general readers, it will tell the stories of specific buildings in Nashville, or Denver, or Cleveland, for those planning trips, and also put those buildings into a broader national context and a better understanding of who did this work, when, and why. So it must be engagingly written, easy to navigate, and designed for easy cross-referencing. For people in the architectural field, ranging from architectural historians and critics to students and local preservationists, it will be the first-ever survey of its kind, with the potential to become a standard reference. So it must be sourced, indexed, written in a balanced way, teachable, and academically valuable.
To serve both of these markets, we expecte the Field Guide to take this shape: - An interpretive introduction, providing an overview of the whole field, a guide to stylistic development by decade, a description of the day-to-day workings of this vanished industry, and how architectural and sculpture fits together (and sometimes doesn't) - The body of the book, arranged geographically, with entries for individual buildings, similar to the samples here - Miniature biographies of the sculptors (see the list below) with their work cross-referenced - Above everything, it has to be well illustrated |
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Contents We have too much material to fit into one volume. We've gotten the advice, good advice we think, that the publisher will guide the final contents of the book. So this is one alternative: A book of about 110,000 words. The introduction would be about 12,000 words, 10% to 12% of the total. We've identified about 700 buildings coast-to-coast for individual entries. Assuming we pare this number to the 250 best-and-most-entertaining buildings across the country, and budget 80,000 words for the bulk of the book, that's 320 words per entry. Some would need fewer. Some, like the U.S. Custom House in New York City, would need more. For instance, this description of the Woodmens Accident Building in Omaha comes in just at 324. Obviously there's a balance to be struck between depth and breadth. This leaves another 18,000 words for the biographies of the sculptors and, importantly, the lists of their major commissions. |
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Illustrations We have over 1000 original documentary photographs at our disposal for this project, with other sources at hand. There's also room for diagrams that explain some of the design decisions, the entertaining terminology (spandrels, tympani, tondi, acroteria, pediments, friezes, caryatids, telemons, finials), and images like this one, for the LeVeque Tower in Columbus, Ohio:
We'd like to consider a Bonus CD, tucked into a sleeve in the back cover, to allow including more photographs and illustrations than can be economically printed in color. Our legal research tells us all these photographs are derivative works of publically accessible artwork. Even if the sculptural works are copyrighted, which was not common practice until the 1960s or 1970s, their photographic depiction in a scholarly work is covered under the fair use exception. Such reproduction will tend to promote, not undermine, the value of the sculptural artwork. |
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Sculptors
This is a partial list of the architectural sculptors and carvers whose work we discuss. Only a few of these names are well-known. Maybe five. But our Field Guide will show which of these names were important architectural sculptors, and where their work can be found. Robert Aitken Rene Paul Chambellan
Pompeo Coppini John Donoghue Ellin and Kitson Leo Friedlander Robert Garrison
Charles Grafly Walker Hancock Alfonso Iannelli Albert Jaegers Isidore Konti Gaston Lachaise Alvin Meyer
Domingo Mora Charles Niehaus Andrew O'Connor Attilio Piccirilli Edmond Quinn J. Massey Rhind Albert Stewart Lorado Taft Adolph Alexander Weinman William Zorach |
