Chapter 1: Prologue: Before 1800

EUROPEln 1772, Thomas-Germain-Joseph Duvivier of France depicted what is now the lost world of the architect in a painting housed at present in the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California. 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 Simeon 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.4Now 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. Previous images of European or British architects most often include one or more drafting tools to signify the sitter's profession. A visual survey of the hundreds of prints created from painted portraits of Western architects found in such important collections as those at the Canadian Centre for in Montreal or in the Lawrence Hall Fowler Collection of portrait prints of architects at the Baltimore Museum of Art, demonstrates that a pair of dividers, often held by the sitter, at times shown idle on the drafting table, most frequently appear as emblems of the architect's profession. 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. 3). Yenn holds the requisite pair of dividers with its points down on a finished drawing. Just above his right hand, the one holding the dividers, are volumes on civil architecture by William Chambers, his mentor, surmounted by an open instrument case. Above that looms a sculpture of giant acanthus leaves.7 As we shall see, the combination of instruments and books became the default position for the iconography of some architects' portraits well into the nineteenth century.We must distinguish between compasses and dividers. The former have interchangeable legs that can hold pencils, pens, charcoal, or chalk used in making lines on paper or parchment; the latter have two pointed legs not used to draw lines but to measure (often) an existing drawing, as the important nineteenth-century English architect, Practical Builder, and influential teacher of stair building, Peter Nicholson, demonstrates in his portrait by William Derby by holding a pair of dividers to a ruler, not to a sheet of drafting paper. …

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