Chapter 1: Prologue: Before 1800

• Published in: Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 2013-07, Vol.103 (4), p.1
• Main Author: O'Gorman, James F
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Architects; Architecture; Design; Drafting
• ISSN: 0065-9746; 2325-9264

Le table de l'architecte contains items, clearly used, that we associate with the work of the precomputer-aided designer of buildings and other structures, especially hand-crafted drawings and draftsman's needs, such as straightedge, ink, pens, reference books, and a pair of compasses placed front and center (Figure l.l).1 Duvivier was a pupil of Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin, whose Les attributs de l'architecte of about 1725-30, now in the Art Museum at Princeton University, also shows drawings, books, a case of drafting instruments, rule, protractor, and a pair of dividers in the lower left corner.2 Although the young architect of today would probably not recognize such obsolete tools, these instruments, as these paintings attest, once commonly functioned as extensions of the architect's hand in the drafting rooms of the Western world.5 Among the implements shown, pairs of compasses or dividers, less often a scale, a porte-crayon, or a ruler traditionally identified the sitter as an architect, although not always, as we shall see.4 Now we often think of the T-square as the emblem of the past draftsman-designer, but, although used much earlier,5 the T-square did not become commonly associated with the architect until the latter part of the nineteenth century. From portraits such as that by Nicolaes van Helt Stockade of the seventeenth-century Dutchman Simon Bosboom, architect, mason, and author of a work on the five orders taken from Vicenzo Scamozzi's treatise, who seems about to impale himself with his pair of dividers (Figure 1.2); through Henry Hornbostel's use of a quick-setting compass with legs spread to form the letter A for "Architecture" on the exterior of his College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh (1912-13); to Spiro Kostof s The Architect, published in 1977 during the advent of the computer, for which the dust jacket, designed by Egon Lauterberg, shows a pair of isolated wing dividers, this drafting tool retained its power to represent the profession.6 Often added to the display of an instrument were depictions of reference books, as in John Francis Rigaud's portrait from before 1785 of the Englishman John Yenn now at the Royal Academy of Arts in London (Figure 1.