The Architect's Library: Notable Books on Architectural Themes in the Vassar College Library

摘要

Over the past several years a combination of serendipitous discoveries and systematic searching has revealed that Vassar College has an extraordinary collection of rare architectural books from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries. It includes early editions of canonical works by Vignola, Alberti, Palladio, Piranesi, and other Italian Renaissance and baroque architects, theorists, and printmakers; a rich collection of titles from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including a full set on the Gothic Revival with the major works of Augustus Pugin (Figure 1), John Ruskin, William Morris, Eugene Viollet-le-Duc, and many other lesser-known figures; nineteenth-century American treatises and pattern books, including works on domestic and landscape architecture by A. J. Downing, Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Calvert Vaux, and Gervase Wheeler; and a wealth of original editions of canonical works of the modern movement, including books by Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and Walter Gropius, among many others. This unusually rich collection derives from a series of donations going back to those of the college's founder, Matthew Vassar, and extending through the gifts of Professor John McAndrew, who taught at Vassar from 1931 to 1937 before becoming director of the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art. This exhibition displayed a selection of these holdings in four locations on the Vassar campus: the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, the Thompson Library's main gallery and Special Collections room, and the Art Library. A beautifully designed and generously illustrated catalog includes helpful interpretive essays by the exhibition's curator, Professor Nicholas Adams, and his colleague Professor Brian Lukacher, detailed entries by Vassar faculty, students, and alumni on more than ninety authors, and an expanded list of almost four hundred titles in the college's holdings.