Thank you for that lovely welcome.
I want to give our camera technician
a moment to confirm whether
sound is working [LAUGHTER] before I share these jewels.
In terms of slides,
I tend towards minimalism.
I hope you will enjoy these fairly minimal of slides,
but I have a lot of information
I wanted to share with you.
Also, refer to some notes.
First, thank you again
to Sharon for the kind introduction,
and welcome all of you back to
Virginia Tech if you're
returning or if you're here for the first time.
We hope that this is
a really memorable visit and experience for you.
To all of our students who've had
an opportunity to join us,
it's a thrill every time we get to work with you.
As you likely know,
the IAWA was established in 1985 as a joint partnership
between the College of Architecture and Urban Studies
here and the university libraries,
which has multiple branches of
which this is one of our favorites.
We have this ambitious goal to document
women's contributions to
the built environment around the world.
This joint initiative has become, to our estimation,
what is the largest and
longest continually operating institution
of its kind in the world.
I am here on behalf of
the Special Collections Department and as
a representative now to you of the archival profession,
I want to take some time to explain what we do and
encourage you to join us in our work.
This would be behind
the scenes discussion of
the things that we do in our field.
What do archivists do?
Why do people confuse us with architects?
I don't know if you know how common that is
when I tell people on a train that I'm an archivist,
they go, "Oh, an architect.
That's great. Oh, an anarchist?"
[LAUGHTER] Maybe.
[LAUGHTER] Archival science is a global profession.
We manage documentary history,
electronic records,
and other materials of enduring historical value.
We're sort of cousins to librarians and museum curators.
We document and preserve evidence of
historic events in institutions and people.
We work mostly with evidentiary history,
sometimes material and visual history as well.
But our primary job is to protect, and preserve,
and provide access to
these materials for future generations.
Our materials in the IAWA
used for a multitude of purposes.
We work, as I mentioned,
in conjunction with some related fields: librarians,
museum curators, historians, records managers.
But our expertise is rather
unique because we tend to be tied to documents,
and we have accordingly
some advanced degrees of
practice and certifications that we pursue.
The terminal degree in
the United States and many other countries in
the Western world is a master's degree
in library science with an archive specialization.
When we're in school, similar to
what you did in your programs,
we study a broad range of topics on theory
and application related to information ethics,
intellectual property concerns, preservation,
chemical conservation of paper and film materials,
digital forensics,
where if you accidentally erase your hard drive,
we can sometimes help you find
the things that aren't really erased,
and technology at writ large.
We also generally have subject expertise in other fields.
My personal background is actually in
public policy and international relations.
Prior to that, when I began my college career,
I was actually in engineering school.
I went through several years of mathematics.
I love science and drafting classes and got mysteriously
diverted into history and public policy,
much to the frustration of my family,
which is all engineers for many generations back.
My work with the IAWA is particularly satisfying to
me because I can combine this important work in archives,
which is really essential in the realization of
our human rights and our shared history
with my early passion for design.
I know that those drafting classes I
took are not in vain entirely.
I connect with IAWA on another personnel level.
I was very fortunate as a child to have
an abundance of educated women role models in my family.
My great aunt, for example,
was one of the first women licensed to
practice engineering in the state of Texas.
She is still working in her 90s
because she's very stubborn and likes to work,
which I'm sure is familiar to some of you.
As I grow up with all these women around me,
I really did believe that I could be
anything that I wanted to be, including an architect.
Although, ultimately, my career
took me in a different direction.
But that was not the case for a lot
of the women who preceded me.
My grandmother, she was raised in Texas.
She postponed her college education and
her training as a classical pianist to be a homemaker,
which is, again, a common tale.
My grandparents divorce 20 years after that,
as my mother was entering high school.
My grandmother started entering the workforce.
She owned a business. She worked as
a drafter for NASA in Houston.
My mother's family is from Houston,
friends with Clear Lake area,
and she loved drafting.
She had a brilliant, creative mind.
She was very spatially oriented.
She did this for years.
I'm sure she was one of many uncredited women drafters
and mathematicians working at
NASA in these early days, in the early '60s.
She never believed that she could be an architect.
It was not an option that even crossed her mind,
and I'm not sure at the time there were
schools in Texas that would've accepted
her into their programs in the early '40s.
Suddenly, she did not
have the support of the men in our family.
My mother, in turn,
she dreamed of being an architect her entire childhood.
She is actually obsessed with
Buckminster Fuller and geodesic domes,
and was constantly doodling them on everything,
and she still does, many years later.
[LAUGHTER] One day, when she was a junior in high school,
a guidance counselor told her,
"Nobody will hire a woman as an architect.
You can maybe be a drafter,
but not an architect."
She said, "Okay, I understand," and she
went to University of Washington
and got her degree in oceanography.
Now, she is a teacher
and instructor in science education,
and she still designs,
and draws, and doodles,
and makes art, makes textiles, makes pottery.
She has a photography business on the side,
so that expression is still part of her life.
But that was actually not a story I
heard until I started working here.
I didn't know my grandmother had been a drafter for
NASA until I started working here, which is typical.
I think there are so many hidden stories in our lives
that aren't uncovered until
someone knows that we want to hear them.
Today, and every day,
and my work with IAWA,
I have this phenomenal good fortune to be surrounded with
these global role models and
collaborators who proved that
women can not only be architects,
they can be exceptional architects,
they can contribute something really
essential to their communities,
to the practice, and endure hardships that
are very difficult for me as
a woman in my 30s to imagine.
That's a little bit of my personal background.
Let's talk about how architectural records are unique.
When I'm talking about records,
I'm speaking of the documentary or
material evidence of your practice.
So the kinds of things that architects produce from
the very beginning design concept
through their communication
with clients and patrons
until the model is actually finalized,
and sometimes even to the point of a contract document.
Although typically your contract document should
stay with your lawyers or your records managers.
They would not come to the archives until say
that document was superseded or the building came down.
We collect materials of
historical significance that are not actively in use,
but how something essential to teach
to historians and to writers,
to students of gender history,
labor history, architectural history.
These are what we consider
the core functions of archives in
our field and our professional standards to appraise,
preserve, arrange, and describe.
An archives unlike other professions,
to appraise means to assess something's historical value.
We don't worry as much about monetary value,
so we're not appraising things like antiques,
but trying to assess how
likely it is that this will be of interests
to historians in the future and what it
means in the context of
the other materials it comes to us with.
Basically everything we have we want to be used,
so we don't collect things that are unlikely to be used.
To preserve something in our context means to physically
stabilize the materials on a chemical compound level,
keeping them safe from damage and daft,
and water, fire, rain, pests.
We arrange materials both physically and
intellectually to reflect how they were originally used,
and we bring out these natural relationships
between the materials for the benefits of researchers.
If you imagine a box of recipes,
for example, that's passed down in your family,
the way that the cook may order her recipes tells
us something about how she
uses them and the significance they have.
For example, family recipes she
inherited might be together in
one section and magazine clippings that
her sister sent her might be in another section,
perhaps her favorite recipes are in the very front.
They might be alphabetized.
They might be arranged by ingredients.
They might be tossed into a box in no particular order
and she just finds them via
serendipity when she reaches her hand on.
With some system exist,
we try to preserve that original order
and create some guide for researchers to follow.
Sometimes multiple arrangements exist.
The physical order of
the materials in their preservation boxes
is in contrast to
a separate intellectual order presented online,
and this is particularly common as I'll tell you
more in a few minutes with digital materials.
There might be a way functionally that you
work with the files on your hard drive.
The way we point
researchers to it might be a little different.
For example, we might have
all of the records for one project
intellectually grouped together so that
if a researcher says,
I want to look at this house, all the connections,
all the materials related to this house,
they don't have to go search through
your entire hard drive file structure,
we can tell them where everything is.
It's analogous to the relationship between
a traditional topographical map
and a schematic transit map.
These are just two ways of presenting
information to users with different needs,
and presenting information to users with
different needs is the core of our profession.
When we talk about describing archives,
we mean we're providing
specific and detailed information about
a collection to help researchers
find what they're looking for,
but we do not do interpretation.
Our job is to create just enough breadcrumbs to help you,
the researcher, feel interested
and help you find what you're looking for.
We use something called a finding aid,
which is a mixture between an inventory and
a manual and a map to
all the information contained in the files.
They describe who created the collection,
when it was created in time,
what kinds of items it contains,
whether it's maybe audio visual materials,
newspaper clippings, project records,
maybe it has some models,
how the collection relates to the real-world events,
people, and institutions around it.
These are the kinds of breadcrumbs that
you'll find if you open a finding aid.
Architectural records present
several unique challenges to archivists,
which I'm sure you may have experienced if you ever
go back to look in some of your old project files,
especially if you've been in
the profession in the time that we
have advanced from analog to primarily digital practices.
The anecdote I often share here is,
when I was in school,
we still used the 2002 edition of AutoCAD,
which meant that you could only open
the files that I created in
a 2002 edition of
AutoCAD on a computer with a floppy drive.
This is a very common dilemma for us in archives.
Architects also use
highly technical and specific terminology
to describe their work,
and an individual architect
has a rich and vast network of
relationship with colleagues and
mentors and clients and firms.
For physical materials,
the largest challenge for us are the,
first of all, physical formats.
So the size of your architectural drawings
and reproductions
and the diverse kinds of media
that a design project might produce.
All of these require special preservation expectations,
expertise, and storage technology.
In addition to these challenges,
when we get into the electronic records,
it becomes even more complex.
The privacy issues that might come up with
your client records oftentimes,
as you have probably seen in your CAD and BIM programs,
there are multiple reference files that vendors provide,
which may be linked into
your residential designs, for example.
That file in and of itself
can prizes not only your design,
but all the references to
these other systems and programs,
which are of course proprietary,
which means that the company that
made the windows that you used in
your design doesn't want to share with
us necessarily their specifications.
So to provide a complete picture to the researchers,
we have to get a little created.
Also, of course, there's the issue of
outdated hardware and proprietary software.
Almost everything that architects have
traditionally used for
design analysis is either homegrown.
They've made it inside their own firm and
may or may not have documented that code,
or it is a proprietary system
like something produced by Autodesk.
We are working, many of us in my profession,
with these companies to create some kind of
standards that will allow us to
make these records open access.
We've not succeeded yet.
They are, as you can understand,
really hesitant to release
their creative control on some of these programs.
This is an area where my field
and your field can hopefully partner in the future.
How do our professions work together?
We rely on architects to learn how
you describe and arrange your own work.
As I mentioned before,
what does your recipe box look like?
If you're still living,
if you're able to talk to us and willing,
what can you tell us about
the significance of these items and how you arrange them?
We especially want to know
how architects use these materials.
Not only the materials that you created in
the course of your career,
but how you might use or reference
visual materials that other people have created.
How do you find meaning in
the work of other professionals,
in the connections that they leave traces out in
their correspondence or in
the evolution of their creative process.
This information helps us to establish
best practices for describing these materials.
We have standardized vocabularies and tools.
For example, the Getty
Museum's Art & Architecture Thesaurus,
which come from the practice of artists and architects.
Because at the end of the day,
we want to make sure that the words we use to describe
things are the words you would use to search for them.
It also helps us in speaking with
you to arrange architectural materials
and formats that make sense to form
our architects and architectural researchers.
One strategy that makes
architectural records unique is that we tend to
group project records according to a single project.
In a traditional, say, historians collection,
we might have all of their correspondence together,
all of their class notes together,
all of their book manuscripts together back to back.
But in the course of a single project,
many different types and formats of records are created.
It's less common for a researcher to say,
I would love to see all of your audio cassette tapes.
It's more likely they'll say,
I would love to see and hear all of
the presentations someone made
about this particular project,
because there may be writing
a monograph on that house or on that building.
Let's see. As I mentioned also a moment ago,
an area of great potential for future collaboration is in
the preservation of computer aided
drafting and building information modeling,
materials programs, deliverables, outcomes.
This is an area where archivists need to speak more with
architects and listen to you and hear how you're
using these different programs
in the course of your design.
Because of course we understand
that something might start in Revit,
and then the next phase it gets passed on to
another designer who was working in AutoCAD,
and the next phase it gets passed on to
another designer who's working in Grasshopper,
and these are all in multiple countries.
How are these interacting and
what is the final product you have at the end,
not only for your firm or
for your practice to look back on,
but for the client.
This is a really exciting venture
for us to work on in the future
because we have great company,
where we're working alongside a lot
of aerospace engineers and
other manufacturing groups who used
similar design practices in the creation of these works.
Just maybe if we work together,
one from the preservation access a new
from the production side,
we can create better programs
that will serve both of our purposes.
What happens to a collection in
the archives and what do we mean by collection?
Our field is based on
a profession of documentary history
that comes out of France,
and Holland, and England,
So we use a concept called the fonds.
F-O-N-D-S, fonds.
This means the corpus of records that you create,
that one entity whether it's a person,
a family, or a firm,
or an office on campus department,
one author, one collection.
If, for example, Paula wanted to donate
her collection and then
Chiron donated to us the Paula fan club collection,
we would not put those together.
They're two separate authors, two separate sources.
We would of course point researchers back and
forth to say if you are interested in Paula,
you probably want to know more about her fan club.
[LAUGHTER] But we keep them apart by author.
That is one of the core principles of archives.
The other one, as I mentioned in passing earlier,
is respecting the original arrangement of the creator.
It was not always the case.
Archivists, historians sometimes like
to cherry-pick records and
arrange them in a way they find most beautiful,
which is great for them,
but also really deconstructs
that entire corpus of
records from its natural environment,
which is also something we're very concerned about.
Collection, a single corpus of materials from
a single source that documents the course of your career,
or the course of a project,
or the course of a department's history.
We're usually looking in
aggregate at a pretty large scale.
So if you had multiple projects and you
sent all of your project files to us project by project,
we probably would combine them
for researchers to be able to view across.
We collect historically significant materials
that document the process of creation.
These are things like drawings and sketches,
project files, clip files, presentation boards,
photographs, correspondence, maybe some
school assignments that were very meaningful to you,
office records, research files.
The things we don't collect generally are
things that are protected by law,
so please don't send your tax returns.
Those are things we would generally return to you
unless you had a compelling reason why they
were a compelling part of
your history that researchers must absolutely see.
Historical significance in our context
does not always mean big each historical.
We're not idolizing the
Frank Lloyd Wright's of the world.
There are already institutions that do that.
We are concerned with
history as it's written in the lives of individuals.
We do have many women reflected in our collections,
who have one major academic and architectural prizes,
who have worked in
their country as the first woman with a license,
or who have broken ground in some way,
pioneering women architects who were neglected for, say,
the first 100 years of the professions history
in the United States especially.
But that does not mean that you
individually even students don't
have something historical to contribute.
We're thinking 50, 60, 100,
500 years in the future when people want to know how did
design thinking evolve in 2019 or in the early 2000s.
They won't necessarily learn that
just from looking at the projects of star architects,
but from looking at the conversations
happening in little eddies all throughout the field.
That's why one of the reasons the women in
our collection are not
necessarily women whose name you know.
The other reason is that of course as in many,
many disciplines, women have been marginalized,
women, people of color,
other minority groups from
the telling of our architectural history.
That is one of the things that this
collective was created to overcome.
Here's a typical path or experience.
A woman will contact
us or maybe her family will contact us.
Maybe the board has heard
about her or some of her colleagues will say
this woman is just incredible and she
needs to be part of this permanent documentary history.
We'll have a conversation with her about
the process of donating her materials,
which sometimes means we
literally drive to her house and we tour
her studio and we pack
everything up in boxes and we drive it home.
Sometimes we contact professionals directly
to say you may not have known that we exist,
but your history is really
important and we want you to know that
your history and your legacy has a home at Virginia Tech.
Once a donor has expressed
interest in sending her materials,
we will hold interviews with them to
basically assess what kinds of things they have,
what kind of preservation or
conservation needs there might be,
what kind of legal questions or
intellectual property questions might emerge,
and we'll form a common agreement.
We'll sign a contract with them to transfer
the materials physically to
Virginia Tech and where
possible to intellectual property,
which is very, very complicated question in this field.
We'll document exactly how
everything is arranged at the moment we receive it and
what kind of condition it is
in and where rights issues might emerge.
Then once we have all this information,
everything has been transferred.
We've confirmed, yes, you sent us 20 boxes,
we received 20 boxes.
We will start to
arrange and preserve and describe these materials.
At this point, some donors choose to include
a financial contribution to
support the processing of their collections.
We are very fortunate at Virginia Tech
in the university libraries to be rather well-funded.
We have a good staff.
I'm the only full-time staff
that works with IAWA materials.
A lot of the people I have helping
me are students and graduate students.
If any students or
graduate students in here are looking for jobs,
then please let your instructors
know and they will pass you my way.
Advisors often are a key part of this.
This is our board of directors,
the IAWA center advisors who have
a broad network of colleagues across the world
and who also have a great grasp on which
women are really making waves right now on the field.
When we go through this collection for the first review,
the things we're looking for are bugs and pests,
are there a lot of
personal documents that got left in this box?
Especially if it's the transition
where someone clears out
their practice office by just dumping things in a box
and shipping it so they
never have to think about it again.
We'll make sure that we catch things like
social security numbers and
other legal documents so that
we can return or shred them.
Then we'll take the information
from that initial assessment,
and sometimes in conversation with the donor,
we'll say this is the
organizational structure we're seeing,
the trends and the information.
Does that translate to the way you
understood that you use these materials?
We'll create some roadmap along
those guidelines for researchers to find.
Then we'll write a finding aid,
which is very minimal.
Our contribution might be 1,000-2,000 words.
Just a brief biographical sketch,
something to catch the eye of
the researchers as they're browsing through,
and then usually a folder level
inventory of the materials.
This is something we have available online.
It's searched in Google.
It's Google indexed,
and that's our most people find a way
to the IAWA in
the course of their international research.
We are also working to digitize a lot of our materials,
and that is in hopes to make
the IAWA more accessible to people around the world.
As you have likely experienced recently,
Blacksburg is not the easiest place to travel to and we
don't want that to be the limiting factor and
who gets to see these incredible records.
Just to recap here.
We speak with you,
we appraise your work,
we sign a contract with you,
the materials come to us,
and the fun starts from there.
Fun for us. How can you be involved in this work?
You can follow us on Facebook
for updates from the archives team.
We post a lot of photographs from
digitization projects that are underway, events.
Sometimes we find new stories of interests.
You can follow the IAWA research team,
which is comprised of
undergraduate and graduate students on the Instagram,
which is fantastic account that I highly recommend.
Absolutely beautiful work.
You can write your own articles about the archives.
You can come to us to do research or
contact us remotely with all kinds of questions.
You can donate your collections to
us or you can speak with me or
any of the board members about people
that you recommend that we contact.
It is an endeavor that has been
underway now for almost 35 years.
It started with one or two small boxes,
and now we have over 2,000 cubic feet of materials.
We grow about 50 cubic feet every year.
It is a really phenomenal enterprise.
I hope that you will leave here,
knowing that Virginia Tech is
very much a leader and cause is
very much a leader in
the documentation of women's contributions to design.
We work with researchers from truly all around the world,
which is reflected in part by
some of our panelists who are here.
I like to think this is rather a hidden jewel,
not just in the academic archives,
but in women's collections in general.
It is an absolute honor to be
here speaking with you about
some processes that may seem really
arcane and baffling and maybe boring.
I hope that you have now some seed of
interest that will bring you to me for questions.
We love working with students and
researchers and want to take a moment
also to thank the IAWA award
for putting this great symposium together.
That's it. [APPLAUSE]
Thanks.
You don't have to get that on.
Okay [NOISE] .
Stick. Yeah. [NOISE] There we go.
Okay.
Perfect.
That's fine.
I'll use that.
Thank you.
Our guest speaker is Dr. Danielle Wilkens who is
assistant professor at She
has practice experience in
design field and public installations in Virginia,
North Carolina, and London.
She was the 2016,
2017 recipient of
The Society of Architectural Historians [inaudible]
That's fine. It wasn't too bad.
[LAUGHTER]
In her fellowship, she explored Iceland,
the Faroe Islands, Cuba,
and Japan to research the impact of
tourism on cultural heritage sites.
Please join me in welcoming Dr. Willkens.
Thank you. Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE] Thank
you very much for the invitation and for your attendance.
I won't be speaking on Iceland and the Faroe Islands,
Cuba, Japan, sorry. Maybe some other time.
But it's a different vein of
research that is based on uncovering the stories
behind two of arguably
the most famous architects for
the respective countries in particular eras.
It's what I've termed the Transatlantic Design Network.
This idea of collaborative networks of patriots, orators,
farmers, lawyers and botanists
fueled the foundation of the United States.
However, little research has
actually been conducted on how
those networks and interdisciplinary circles
were shaping the built environment.
My hope was to move away from this vast separation.
It was known as the Western Ocean at that point of time,
really giving you a sense of
this Eurocentric view and that
everything that America was doing was a copyist
approach to architecture, and also moving away from
the concept of the autonomous, miraculous inventor.
This concept is based on an evaluation of
Monticello by Thomas Jefferson and Sir
John Soane's Museum in London.
The first question was
whether Jefferson and Soane ever met,
which to spoil the surprise right away,
so far is a no.
They were only separated by a decade,
so fairly close contemporaries,
but they were only in the same country
for very brief period of time.
That's when Jefferson took
a very short trip to London when he was serving as
Minister to France between 1784 and 1789,
so just a two month window.
Soane wasn't quite up to speed on his practice.
He had not yet started his
house museum at that point in time.
But there were some similarities
within their theories and
their practice and their approach to
education that I was really interested in pursuing.
Even though the research supports this claim
that Jefferson and Soane never met,
it started to reveal
a previously unexplored network
of globally interconnected figures,
many of which were previously overlooked women.
They were at the helm helping
these designers and serving as
their eyes on Continental Europe.
This can be a new way of understanding the homes and also
understanding these
very uniquely preserved house museums,
from something beyond just the lens
of the finished product,
which we tend to get a bit obsessed about.
These are things that only ended
with the death of the respective architect.
They were 40 years long in process for
both homes in terms of adding, deleting,
deconstructing and rearranging their collections
and their architectural armatures for those collections.
The person of correspondence actually between them and
of very close correspondence was Maria Hadfield Cosway.
Cosway was not a trained architect.
She did not possess
a prolific built or theoretical legacy,
but she was an artist and the patron and
an educator with very tangible links to Jefferson,
Soane, and many others in this particular era.
She had a 40-year long correspondence with
both of them and over this period,
they exchanged not just letters,
but also material objects such as drawings,
books, artifacts, personal contacts.
Through this, they cultivated
a distinct set of shared aesthetic,
political, and social concerns.
Through this correspondence, it also facilitated
an international network that
sidestepped aristocratic ones,
gave agency to women and advanced
professional and stylistic developments
of architecture on both sides of the Atlantic.
What's pretty fascinating with the connection is
that many of these letters between them
still survive but there really hasn't
been much effort made to publicize these
or to dig deeper into anything more than what
people may or may not know about
Cosway being a supposed paramour of Jefferson.
But when they're studied in conjunction,
Cosway certainly made a significant contribution to
the aesthetic and architectural thinking
of both Jefferson and
Soane that I think should be acknowledged.
There's a few ways that we can study that.
Cosway becomes this main connective figure
and the way of tracing the connections between,
in many ways, different sides of the Atlantic,
but then also Jefferson and Soane and
their respective legacies comes
down through looking at
their interpersonal networks, so people,
but the physical objects
that were going back and forth across
the ocean and within the continent,
the buildings that are left behind and then
the conceptual legacies that are left as well,
primarily related to educational institutions.
Looking at this, Maria,
who is Hadfield Cosway,
so original, her birth name is Hadfield,
was born to an Italian mother and an English father.
She was one of five children who survived adulthood.
Her family ran a series very popular inns in Florence.
She grew up in
a very dynamic atmosphere where she was
continually exposed to travelers on the grand tour.
By the age of 13, she was making
copies in Florentine galleries.
At 15, she wrote to
a friend to say
that she had this pretty amazing schedule.
She said, "I go every
morning to copy pictures until 1:00.
After lunch, I study, as usual,
architecture until half-past four."
It's probably more than
our studio students, unfortunately.
[LAUGHTER] "My singing teacher comes at 5:00, at 6:00,
I go back to drawing until 9:00,
and in the evenings of the Opera,
I go to listen to you the latest Prima Donna."
By 18, she was a selected member of
the Florentine Disegno Academy,
so pretty high elevation for such a young woman.
Contemporaries predicted that she would become
the next Angelica Kaufman and even surpass
the success of this continental artist who was one of
the only two founding members of the Royal Academy.
The idea of mapping the network came
down to studying a number of
letters from a larger sampling.
It came down to about 2,000 letters that
were being examined to try to trace
the relationships and the conversations that are
happening but also examining
things like sketchbooks and
the libraries of the key figures
such as the triumvirate of Cosway, Jefferson, and Soane.
This illustration represents some of
this epistolary sampling and
from that shows us that number 1,
Washington was a hub of activity,
even though it was very much a developing city.
But that's where we had a lot
of conversations going on about architecture,
given the new Federal Capital, and London, of course,
being a hub of connections because of all of
the royal sponsorship in
the schools that were occurring at that period in time.
Through the Transatlantic Network,
I started to come up with this idea
of more figures connected,
so Jefferson, Soane, and Cosway as this core
expanding out to about 200 other figures.
Just to keep it straight in my own head,
I grabbed a lot of tracing paper and
ended up making this diagram on my wall.
It was about 10 feet by six feet.
It was just a way of me trying to
see and think through what was going on.
Trying to translate that into something a little less
Clockwork Orange was pulling it into a vector map;
an active network diagram that would start to identify
certain figures and how they were
connected through things like
the Royal Academy of the Arts,
the Royal Society,
personal relationships, familial relationships.
Did someone read what someone else was writing?
All of these different ways
of connecting different figures.
There was a generative nodes of
Jefferson and Soane and Cosway,
but it ended up bringing
into the network other architects,
artists, doctors, lawyers, statesmen, scientists,
farmers, and writers through
these various strands of association.
Many of them crossing the Atlantic in different ways,
which is starting to represent
these vertical striations of who
was on which side of the Atlantic
and did they ever go back and forth?
This also led to concepts
that I would call geographic timelines,
so trying to trace who was where and when and why.
These geographic timelines were ways to
also start to look at the first connections between,
for example, Cosway and Soane,
which happens when Soane was on
his grand tour sponsored by the Royal Academy.
He was the son of a bricklayer,
so he was not coming from a substantial background.
It was only his award through
the Royal Academy that provided that opportunity
to take that necessary tour
for learning and seeing and sketching.
They met in 1778 when Soane was in Rome.
This is before Soane actually added the E to the end of
his name because he thought that
added a bit more gravitas for some reason.
The two actually explored Rome, the Appian Way,
the newly excavated ruins of Pompeii,
where you're actually forbidden to sketch.
But then nearly 10 years later,
we have the first meeting of Jefferson,
and now it would be Maria Hadfield Cosway.
She had married painter Richard Cosway,
and the pair had met in
Paris beneath the glass dome of the Halle aux Bleds.
They explored Versailles and Saint-Cloud,
and then went to the famous
ruined house of Desert de Retz,
which you can see here,
which is interestingly about 10 minutes
away from Villa Savoye,
so it's a funny pairing of houses.
These connections bloomed and
allowed to explore this fruitful network.
For Cosway, this connection was actually really
beneficial for others within her particular sphere.
For example, through John Trumbull,
so the American painter who happened to be
living with Jefferson at the time he was in Paris,
she was able to start to make
some initial connections with
her brother, George Hadfield,
who was an architect and would actually become
the first internationally commissioned
federal architect for the US government.
He came over on his first and only trip
across the Atlantic in 1795 to
serve as the superintendent architect of the Capitol
under Thornton, who's ever argumentative.
It was a very problematic job
that he resigned from a few years later,
but he would stay in the United States,
eventually become a US citizen,
work on more than 30 projects
in the DC and metropolitan area,
and most of you know his work from Arlington House.
George would actually be interesting that he would
use this network to stay in touch with his sister.
Through Jefferson, he actually sent his letters to
Maria and vice versa because
Jefferson received diplomatic pouches.
It was a way for them to stay in touch.
Jefferson was a little critical but also
quite thoughtful in response to George when
Maria asked how he was doing in the United States.
Jefferson's response was that he was much respected.
Since the death of Latrobe, our first architect,
I consider him foremost in the correct principles of art,
so hold him in quite high esteem.
Now within the other connections
of how Maria is serving as
a conduit between the two for
concepts and visual references,
we certainly can turn to the house that she
shared with her husband, Richard Cosway,
at Schomberg House and Stratford Place,
both in London, not too far apart from each other.
They were structures that blurred
inside and outside in terms of
the space for collections and
exhibitions as we can see through this engraving.
They were dynamic and experimental,
certainly more so than
the lost house museums of people like
Thomas Hope or John Nash.
But unfortunately, the Cosways houses would
both be lost to history.
Cosway was also significant in the fact that
she introduced a visual image of Napoleon to England.
So this Francesco Goma portrait of Napoleon,
which shows the 29-year-old general
during his Italian campaign just outside of Lodi.
Remember that name because it comes back.
This was actually the earliest known
portrait of the general.
It was gifted to Soane by Cosway in
1820 after the dispersal sales
following her husband's death.
It now hangs, if you recognize the image,
within the famous number 13 breakfast room
of Sir John Soane's Museum.
She would gift Soane her own work.
The painting you see on the left-hand side
was a gift to Soane.
It actually come back too other time.
She'd gifted it to other friends, they passed away,
came back to Cosway in her will,
so third time was a charm.
She knew it would stay at Soane's museum
because at this point in time he was setting
up the idea of permanence of the house museum.
She noted when she sent it to Soane that it
received its value from its token of friendship.
So not necessarily from the art itself,
but from the story behind it.
This would be a lasting friendship
between Cosway and Soane.
He would actually serve as the executor of her will
until he was forced to resign
the position when his eyesight was failing.
She would [NOISE] send him one as well some of
the first Egyptian objects
that would show up within his collection.
You're seeing the two in the center between there.
She wrote in a letter for this 1822 gift that she,
"took of her vast collection
the liberty to add a drop of water."
So basically giving him something very
small to add to the collection.
She said that she received
these two small sculptures from a friend in Paris,
who just returned from an excavation,
and like many others was coming
back to the continent with their pockets full.
She sent the figures with
another friend who was traveling to England.
She said she, "Even left the Egyptian dust on
them," in hopes that they would be
able to take up a place at Soane's museum.
What's, I think, significant about this
even though they're size-wise
very small is that this predates the study of
the first sarcophagus that would
show up at Soane's museum,
which was also excavated by Belzoni,
who we think got these figures.
Soane purchased that sarcophagus two years later and
knocked down a huge portion of the house in
order to bring it in through
the north wall and put it beneath
that prized museum dome and as
one does had a three-day candlelight party to celebrate.
[LAUGHTER] But this idea of
moving walls and changing your collections based on
new objects coming into play was something
very familiar to Cosway because
they actually did this at Stratford place and she
wrote in a letter to Soane about one of
the walls failing in the house after they had
moved something that structurally shouldn't have been.
This 40-year correspondence had
some wider consequences beyond
just the museums themselves but in terms of
the conversations that happened around these places.
They facilitated these networks.
As I said, they started to give
agency to women and started to open
up conversations outside
of particular aristocratic networks.
Direct examples of these come down to publications.
Cosway was responsible for the dissemination of
privately published texts for both Jefferson and Soane.
Jefferson's notes on the state of Virginia,
which was published in 1785,
was printed in London.
But through a friend of Maria,
he was able to get a French translator
and publisher that was able to
open up that text to another country.
For Soane, he sent her an edition of his descriptions.
This is a later edition
but gives you a sense of what it looks like.
Soane would eventually produce
three different editions of
the description of the house and
museum on the north side of Lincoln's Inn Fields.
So essentially him setting
forth a prescriptive idea of how the museum
was to be interpreted and explored after his passing.
But the 1830 edition,
the very first one,
he sent one of only 150 copies to Cosway,
who at this point in time was in Italy,
and she shared it with friends
and noted that "Your beautiful
book has been admired all over Milan
and architects have taken
translations of great parts of it."
Within the legacy of Jefferson, Soane, and Cosway,
they were all very interested in
creating an educational institution
that would take their ideas forward.
Having localized education,
especially cognizant of the fact that not
everyone would have the opportunity
to travel and take advantage of some of
the opportunities that they had as
younger students and even travelers
in the middle of their careers,
so each sought to create
this educational institution in situ.
We all know one right down the road,
Jefferson's University of Virginia.
Soane was opening up his house museum to
students from about 1813 moving forward.
At this very same time, Cosway,
who had moved down to Italy in Lodi,
so if you remember Napoleon,
it was a Roman town just southeast of Milan,
she'd spent the last 17 years of her life here.
She would begin by adapting
a 15th-century monastery adjacent to
Lodi's medieval walls into
an educational institution from
1811 and expanded its charter in 1833,
so a few years before she passed away.
It was founded exclusively for female students.
Cosway's curriculum specified subjects
in drawing and music,
which is pretty common but also had
an unprecedented series of topics in science and math.
The institution is still in operation but
now operates as a co-ed primary school.
You're seeing an image of the adapted monastery and
a view of Cosway talking to some of
those students in the last year of her life.
The archive is a really rich project for someone else.
It is a closed archive,
strangely, and it has very limited access.
There's only been a handful of scholars who have really
gotten in to see what's there.
It's suspected a number of things had been destroyed.
It's been moved, it's not properly conditioned.
I think our archivist friend would be a little
horrified by what's happening in Lodi right now.
But there's this rich trove to be discovered.
This concept of adding a drop of water,
which I hope is what some of my research is starting to
do in terms of opening up
the dialogue between these two gentlemen,
and then some of the figures
that were significant between them,
Cosway being that linchpin within the triumvirate.
It's important to note that this is
not the first time people have tried to
establish a network of sorts for this era.
The bicentennial administration, held at
the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in 1975,
focused on Benjamin Franklin as
a critical conduit between political figures,
revolutionary officers and writers.
This was actually conceived as
an object-based endeavor with
dynamic graphics and architects
Charles and Ray Eames were the ones who actually designed
the exhibit and the catalog which was
called The World, Franklin and Jefferson.
They also produced an accompanying 28 minute film.
You can find all this on
the digital archive for the Eames.
The bicentennial project mark
the final exhibition for the Eames office,
and opened in Paris before traveling to Warsaw, London,
New York City, Chicago,
LA, and Mexico City.
The catalog labeled Jefferson and
Franklin as architects of independence,
but it unfortunately bypass
connections to other architects and
sites as well as this concept of
any transatlantic network of the arts.
Additionally, of the 29 individuals
featured within the exhibit,
all were male, with
the exception of first lady Abigail Adams.
In the nearly four decades since the exhibit,
I think it's pretty safe to say the women of
the transatlantic design network
have yet to receive their due.
I'll leave you with two folks
that again are rich projects to move forward
for hopefully other scholars to take
up this question of their influence and agency.
Out of the figures, I was looking at
the one number that were women,
both from France and England and America.
One of which saw a transatlantic woman in many regards,
which many people probably just know from Hamilton,
is Angelica Schuyler Church.
Church was the daughter of a revolutionary general.
She was the half sister
of a number of other famous founding fathers.
But also what's important is that she
was the sister in law of Alexander Hamilton.
They have a pretty interesting record
of correspondence that are pretty funny.
But what's fascinating about her,
which has never really been explode is that
she was the architectural agent for her family.
So people like Gouverneur Morris would actually consult
her for review of plans
for the house that he would work on in London.
She would be someone to receive folks at Down Place.
So this is just outside of Windsor.
Unfortunately, a site that is in
a little bit of preservation turmoil at the moment.
Down Place was a site where women of
the transatlantic design network as well
as figures like Trumbull and Soane,
would go to visit
a country house and get away from the city for a bit.
We know at this particular place that Cosway actually
designed a little emblem
that would go in a folly that Church,
supposedly, was the author.
It was never built, but
the two women were collaborating on
this little intervention for the residents
of Down Place along the Thames.
Later when she returned to America,
Angelica would be the primary one
who was in consultation with
Benjamin La Trobe to have
their residents built up in the Hudson.
Our secondary figure, closer familiar figure,
is Ellen Wayles Randolph Coolidge,
who was Jefferson's granddaughter.
I would say in many regards,
was his architectural and scientific surrogate.
She provides one other really interesting connection
between Jefferson and Soane.
Because it was in March 1839 that she actually visited
Soane's museum and wrote us
a description of what it was like to see that site.
She saw Cosway's paintings,
her gifts to Soane as well,
and wrote a pretty interesting description
that can be found in her diary,
which was recently transcribed by
two scholars at
the International Center for Jefferson Studies.
You can find Ellen's Victorian diary,
it was pretty a hefty tone,
but she gives us amazing lens on
traveling at that particular period.
So with these examples,
I hope it opened up a conversation about some
of the women who start to
draw some of the light away perhaps from
the autonomous inventor and shed
some interesting perspective on
the conversations that are happening at the time.
Thank you. [APPLAUSE] [BACKGROUND]
Our next speaker shall be Shelby Doyle [inaudible] , architecture
of Iowa State's College of Design.
She is also the co-founder of
the Iowa State University
Computation and Construction Lab
which works to connect developments in
computation to challenges of construction.
The lab does some teaching, research.
Shelby Doyle has received
a Fulbright fellowship to Cambodia,
has a Master of Architecture from
Harvard GSE and a
Bachelor of Science in
Architecture from University of Virginia.
[inaudible] Welcome
Thank you. Well, thank you for having me and
for all of the wonderful presentations we've seen today.
The title of my talk is Computational Feminism:
Attributing future histories of
the digital in architecture.
Sorry, I'm trying to do this between two.
If we accept Maria Carpus dating
of the digital turn in architecture as
1992 then there are barely 25 years of
digital and computational pedagogy upon which to reflect.
It's well documented that women
are under-represented in architecture,
not only in professional practice,
but also in its archives and history.
Part of the reason we're here today.
My question is, is the exclusion
being replicated and extended
into future archives of
digital and computational architecture?
As this being a [inaudible] rights,
history is not as simple meritocracy,
it is a narrative of the past,
written and revised or not written at all,
by people with agendas.
My questions have come out of
the last years of work or about how we,
as architects and designers collectively create
the archive that will now
become the histories of the future.
That's where the title of this talk came from.
I come to you with many more questions than I do answers.
I am not a historian.
I do not typically conduct archival research,
but some of the work I've been doing during
the past three years has led me to the archive
and to question of how archives are changed by
the availability of digital and computational records.
This is not to say that
the digital lept into existence in 1992.
We can have long conversations about
tracing computations history and
beginnings to
perhaps 16th century logic systems or Ada Lovelace's,
early algorithms, or the mark one during World War II.
But for this case I'm focusing on
the present because it's something we have agency over.
These questions emerged from a selection
of work from my first three years of teaching,
research and outreach at
the ISU Computation and Construction Lab,
which I co-founded in 2016.
I won't present this work today,
but I will introduce it as a framework that led to
the questioning of
computational archives and their attribution.