![Sample our Arts journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110799/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Arts.jpg"})
Abstract
Traditionally the architectural historian studies buildings; she or he does not design them. In the history of modern architecture, the role of “auteur” is reserved for the designer and that of interpreter for the historian. With the introduction of sophisticated three‐dimensional modeling software in recent years, that distinction is not as clear as it once was. As a case study of the New York Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) building of 1869 suggests, historians can now “construct” a highly realistic model and render compelling representations themselves with only limited reliance on the architect’s personal vision. Using programs like Rhinoceros, developed by Robert McNeel and Associates, the historian can shape period photographs, fire‐insurance maps, and written descriptions into a fully dimensional and convincing digital building. This article explores how the new technology may be applied to historical analysis and questions its impact on the established practice of architectural reconstruction.
Acknowledgments
I would like to give special acknowledgment to my partner in this project, Marisa Miller, who modeled the YMCA for me, and to architects Laura Antonacos Berwind and Eric Cesal for their generous assistance and support in the production of additional plans and renderings.
Notes
1 Paula Lupkin, Manhood Factories: YMCA Architecture and the Making of Modern Urban Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming January 2010).
2 Pam Cooper, ed., The Cinema Book, 3rd ed. (London: British Film Institute, 2007), 385–403; Alison Trope, “The Real, the Really Real, and the Relinquished Real: Rethinking Authorship Theory in a Postmodern Continuum,” Spectator 14 (Spring 1994): 11–21.
3 Howard Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), 34–35.
4 Lawrence Locke Doggett, Life of Robert R. McBurney (Cleveland: F. M. Barton, 1902), 87.
5 Joseph Thompson, “The Association in Architecture,” Association Monthly 1 (January 1870): 3–4.
6 William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, “The Association a National Defense,” Association Men 26 (May 1901): 269–70.
7 On the applications of the Panopticon, see: Robin Evans, “Bentham’s Panopticon: An Incident in the Social History of Architecture,” Architectural Association Quarterly 3 (Spring 1971): 21–37 and Anthony Vidler, “Architecture, Management, and Morals,” Lotus International 14 (March 1977): 4–20.
8 On the attitude of businessmen toward the YMCA and the role of its buildings, see Paula Lupkin, “Manhood Factories: Architecture, Business, and the Evolving Urban Role of the YMCA, 1865–1925,” in Men and Women Adrift: The YMCA and YWCA in the City, ed. Nina Mjakij and Margaret Spratt (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 41–46.
9 Doggett, Life, 85.
10 Louis Jallade, The Association Building (New York: Association Press, 1915), 15.
11 In recent years there has been increasing interdisciplinary interest in the history of the American built environment, a “spatial turn” that has broadened the scope of the field, but what continues to distinguish the architectural historian from scholars in American studies, history, geography and other related fields is dedication to the buildings as the primary historical document. On the interdisciplinarity in architectural history and the spatial turn in related disciplines, see Karen Haltunnen, “Groundwork: American Studies in Place; Presidential Address,” American Quarterly 58 (March 2005): 1–15, and the review essays in September 2005 and March 2006 issues of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, especially Daniel Abramson, “The Long Eighteenth Century,” JSAH 64 (September 2005): 420. He emphasizes the distinctive role of architectural historians as “reading history through buildings.”
12 On the continuum between historical techniques of representation and new digital technologies, see Mario Carpo and Frederique Lemerle, introduction to Perspectives, Projections, and Design: Technologies of Architectural Representation, ed. Mario Carpo and Frederique Lemerle (London: Routledge, 2007), 1–5.
13 Auguste Choisy, Histoire de l’architecture, 2 vols. (Paris: Gauthier‐Villars, 1899), 1:474.
14 Thierry Mandoul, “From Rationality to Utopia: Auguste Choisy and Axonometric Projection,” in Perspectives, Projections, and Design (see note 12), 151–62.
15 Ferenc Traser, “Resemblance of the Long Existing: The Virtual Reconstruction of the Cistercian Monastery at Pilis, Hungary” (master’s thesis, College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning, University of Cincinnati, 2007), 17.
16 Takehiko Nagakura, “A visualization project: Danteum’s Paradise,” A + U: architecture and urbanism (February 2000): 116–125. Even before Nagakura took up the Danteum project, others had speculated about the application of new technology to its realization. See Edward Yan‐Yung Ng, “Reinventing the Danteum Project,” Transactions on Information and Communications Technologies 5 (1993): 447–56.
17 Mark Burry, “Gaudi and Information Technology: An Architecture of Real Absence and Virtual Presence,” in Gaudi 2002: Miscellania, ed. Antoni Gaudi and Oriol Bohigas (Barcelona: Editorial Planeta, 2002), 200–15; Mark Burry, “Parametric Design and the Sagrada Familia,” arq: Architectural Research Quarterly 1 (1996): 70–81.
18 “Modeling for Designers,” http://www.rhino3d.com/ (accessed 15 June 2009).
19 These measurements had to be hand‐corrected to offset camera lens distortion, which skews the perspectival accuracy of photographs.
20 Doggett, Life, facing 86.
21 Frank Ballard to Robert McBurney, 15 February 1864, YMCA of Greater New York Collection, McBurney correspondence, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
22 Thomas Markus, Buildings and Power: The Origins of Modern Building Types (London: Routledge, 1993), 13–18.
23 Doggett, Life, 74.
24 Doggett, Life, 74.