Description
- Abstract:
- This project examines drawings as a means of historicizing the professionalization of architecture in the United States around the turn of the twentieth century. I use drawings to frame the sociology of knowledge and social psychology of a certain genre of labor in what is often recognized as a crucial period of professionalization in American architecture. Rather than treating sketches and drawings as creative tools of iterative design, I look to working and construction drawings—the context of their production, their content, and, especially, the discourse around them—to trace the shifting professional role, status, and self-conception of the architect. The three chapters analyze different agents in their historical context operating at a variety of levels and scales. The first chapter looks at Construction Details (1892) and its place in the architecture curriculum at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This publication by Francis Ward Chandler reveals the aspirations and assumptions of an instructor who sought to locate a certain kind of technical knowledge and intellectual control in the architect and his drawings. The second chapter looks to the photoduplication of drawings by the blueprint process. This was not only a method of increasing efficiency in copying, but it also was a means of cementing and extending an architect’s authority over various workforces. The final chapter looks to lettering on drawings as a vehicle through which creativity and artistic expertise could be expressed by architects. Executed on otherwise highly mechanical drawings, architects valued lettering for its self-expressive capacity and as means to convey their position as creative professionals. In following the agency of an individual, a technology, and a practice in the process of professionalization, I aim to highlight certain kinds of intellectual work and knowledge production in architecture rooted in a particular category of material artifact. Ultimately, architects did not distinguish themselves most strongly from engineers, builders, and others through construction drawings themselves, but rather through the ways they understood and positioned themselves as individuals in relation to those drawings.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2025
Citation
Duval, Jonathan R.,
"Drafting a Profession: Drawings and Architects in the United States, 1880–1920"
(2025).
History of Art and Architecture Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/71tv-9p05
Relations
Collection:
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History of Art and Architecture Theses and Dissertations
Theses and Dissertations for the History of Art and Architecture department....