- Title Information
- Title
- Drafting a Profession: Drawings and Architects in the United States, 1880–1920
- Type of Resource (primo)
- dissertations
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Duval, Jonathan R.
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- creator
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Neumann, Dietrich
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- Director
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Nickel, Douglas R.
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- Reader
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Osman, Michael
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- Reader
- Name:
Corporate
- Name Part
- Brown University. Department of History of Art and Architecture
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- sponsor
- Origin Information
- Copyright Date
- 2025
- Physical Description
- Extent
- IX, 325 p.
- digitalOrigin
- born digital
- Note:
thesis
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2025
- Genre (aat)
- theses
- 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.
- Subject (fast)
(authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/00813346")
- Topic
- Architecture
- Subject (Local)
- Topic
- Architectural drawings
- Subject (Local)
- Topic
- Mechanical drawing
- Subject (Local)
- Topic
- Architecture, American
- Subject (Local)
- Topic
- Architecture
- Subject (Local)
- Topic
- Professions--Sociological aspects
- Subject (Local)
- Topic
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology. School of Architecture and Planning
- Subject (Local)
- Topic
- Blueprints
- Subject (Local)
- Topic
- Chandler, F. W. (Francis Ward), 1844-1926
- Subject (Local)
- Topic
- Architectural drawing--Detailing
- Subject (Local)
- Topic
- Copying processes
- Subject (Local)
- Topic
- Lettering
- Subject (Local)
- Topic
- Graphology
- Language
- Language Term (ISO639-2B)
- English
- Record Information
- Record Content Source (marcorg)
- RPB
- Record Creation Date
(encoding="iso8601")
- 20251201
- Identifier:
DOI
- 10.26300/71tv-9p05