The Temple Hoyne
Buell Center
for the Study of
American Architecture
at Columbia University

The Catherine Hoover Voorsanger Writing Prizes were generously endowed by Voorsanger and Associates, Architects. Each prize was given at the end of the academic year for an outstanding paper on a subject in American architecture, landscape or urbanism written during the academic year. One prize was awarded to a student in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation; the other was to awarded to a graduate student in the Department of Art History or to an undergraduate at Columbia or Barnard College for a senior thesis. Each prize carried an honorarium of $250.

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Recipient: Karen Kubey, M. Arch '09

The Irrigable Desert and the City on a Stream: The Utopian Socialist Visions of Job Harriman and Alice Constance Austin

Written for Prof. Mary McLeod’s course, Urbanism and Utopia

In 1914, forty‐five miles north of Los Angeles in Antelope Valley, Job Harriman founded Llano del Rio on a faith in the land and a belief in the collective. The colony grew out a distinctly Californian brand of Socialism that focused on individual expression within a communal framework. Alice Constance Austin, an architect and intellectual member of the colony, put forth a plan in 1916 for Llano to develop into “A Socialist City”; later she expanded on her plans in a 1935 book,The Next Step. Where Harriman organized Llano to reflect his colonists’ focus on community, Austin developed introverted housing designs to emphasize residents’ individual privacy. The colonists of Llano invested everything into Antelope Valley’s “irrigable desert” counting on the land to deliver food, shelter, and power beyond what it could ultimately provide; the colony would disband just three years after its birth. Austin understood the importance of working with the natural landscape; she used her designs to argue that adapting to the land and investing in the collective would lead to great benefits for the individual.

Austin presented her plans for the development of Llano to colonists on May 1, 1916, the two-year anniversary of the colony. In October of the same year, she wrote in the Western Comrade of her vision for the Socialist City. Her city plan was never to be built, as the colony folded before her designs could take root. In 1935, had the opportunity to convey her ideas to a larger audience, with the publication of The Next Step . . . Decentralization . . . How It Will Assure Comfort for the Family – Reduce Expense – and Provide for Future Development.

Like her predecessor, Leonard A. Cooke, the author of the 1913 Llano city plan, Austin created a plan for Llano based on spokes emanating from the town’s public center. Her plan established a level of uniformity in its radial blocks and an intelligence in the architecture’s relationship to the Southern Californian climate. “When we say that the Socialist city must be beautiful we wish to draw attention to the fact that we cannot follow the ordinary individualistic plan of allowing each person to build to suit his own fancy. … There is the wider application of fitness, that the situation, climatic conditions and even a certain psychic quality, the purpose for which the town exists, should be taken into consideration in deciding upon its constructive ideals.”1 Within these productive constraints, she focused her design intentions on the individual.

1. Austin, Alice Constance. October, 1916. Building a Socialist City. Western Comrade. 17.

Image 1: Alice Constance Austin, plan of a sector of the Llano townsite, showing community center, parks, educational buildings, streets with row houses, “track for automobiles,” c. 1916. Dolores Hayden, Seven American Utopias: the Architecture of Communitarian Socialism, 1790-1975. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1976). 299.

Image 2: Alice Constance Austin showing model of house and renderings of civic center and school to Llano colonists, May 1, 1916. Hayden, 304.

The Catherine Hoover Voorsanger Writing Prizes were generously endowed by Voorsanger and Associates, Architects. Each prize was given at the end of the academic year for an outstanding paper on a subject in American architecture, landscape or urbanism written during the academic year. One prize was awarded to a student in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation; the other was awarded to a graduate student in the Department of Art History or to an undergraduate at Columbia or Barnard College for a senior these. Each prize carried an honorarium of $250.

Recipients: Yuma Terada, Jeffrey Taras 

Yuma Terada, Columbia College '05

Reassessing Context: Frederick Kiesler and the Myths of Modernism

Nine months before his death, Frederick Kiesler (1890-1965) published “Second Manifesto of Correalism,” in which he declared that “l’art pour l’art of seventy-five years ago and the period of art for the artist’s sake of the last twenty five years are over … Estheticism as a sole criterion for the validity of a work is evaporating.”[1] With this statement, Kiesler challenged two central characteristics of modernism: the treatment of art as autonomous, and the privileging of the artist as the unique source of the meaning of an artwork. In short, Kiesler shifted the focus away from the artwork and towards its context. Read on its own, the manifesto appears to attest to Kiesler’s visionary foresight for what would later be theorized as postmodernism. Indeed, Kiesler’s statements seem to echo Brian O’Doherty’s seminal 1979 critique, which declares that “as modernism gets older, context becomes content.”[2]           

Nevertheless, we cannot simply characterize Kiesler’s attention to the context as a visionary precursor to postmodernism. Postmodern art practice is often traced back to minimalism, which shifted the viewer’s attention away from the artwork and towards the gallery, and showed that the meaning of an artwork is a function of spatial context. Postmodernism then evolved to practices like the institutional critique, which focused on not only the spatial but also the social context of the artwork. To situate Kiesler’s career in relation to such practices, we must evaluate the “Second Manifesto” with reference to “Correalism”—Kiesler’s theory on the correlation of artwork, people, and space—which he conceived in the 1930s and developed through a series of writings leading up to the manifesto. Analysis of Kiesler’s theory, as well as his architectural works, shows that Kiesler’s understanding of the context does not necessarily correspond to the postmodern attention to context.

1            2 

1. Frederick Kiesler, Surrealist Gallery, Art of This Century, New York, 1942

2. Frederick Kiesler, illustration from "On Correalism and Biotechnique: A Definition and Test of a New Approach to Building Design" Architectural Record, September1939, p62

[1] Frederick Kiesler, “Second Manifesto of Correalism,” Art International 9 (March 1965): 16.

[2] Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, expanded edition. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 15.

Jefferey Taras, Masters of Architecture '05

Seeing Modernism

Can we ever see Modernism for ourselves? Or is our understanding of Modernism, and indeed our ability to truly see the buildings of its canon, forever mediated (manipulated?) by the antecedent gaze of the photographer?

This paper critically investigates the photography of Julius Shulman and Ezra Stoller and its use in capturing, disseminating and defining the Modern architectural movement of the mid-twentieth century – architecture rendered principally in steel and glass.

If Modernism wanted official PR men, it could do no better than Julius Shulman and Ezra Stoller. Both began their photographic careers in the mid-1930s as Modernism was crossing the Atlantic, Shulman on the west coast and Stoller in the east. Both may have been chronicling the building and buildings of the Modern movement, but they were photographing two very different sorts of modernism. For Shulman that meant houses, specifically in suburban Los Angeles, while Stoller photographed the glass skyscrapers rising in Manhattan.

It wasn’t merely difference in subject types that set the pictures of Shulman apart from those of Stoller. What is of more interest, is the divergent interpretations of modernism – and the rich narrative each developed through his images.  This paper investigates these narratives by closely examining a selection of the most representative and recognizable images by each photographer.

The Catherine Hoover Voorsanger Writing Prizes were generously endowed by Voorsanger and Associates, Architects. Each prize was given at the end of the academic year for an outstanding paper on a subject in American architecture, landscape or urbanism written during the academic year. One prize was awarded to a student in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation; the other was awarded to a graduate student in the Department of Art History or to an undergraduate at Columbia or Barnard College for a senior these. Each prize carried an honorarium of $250.

Recipients: Inderbir Riar, Gideon Fink Shapiro, Brian Tochterman

Inderbir Riar, PhD Architecture '14

The Fountain of Technological Culture': Architectural Design and America, 1965-1969

Essay on Architectural Design magazine and its look at the United States in the 1960s. Related research was presented at the conference Architectural Periodicals in the 1960s and 1970s organized by the Canadian Center for Architecture and the Institut de Recherche en Histoire de l'Architecture (a Montreal consortium). IRHA later published the book Architectural Periodicals in the 1960s and 1970s: Towards a Factual, Intellectual, and Material History (2008), which included my essay "'The Fountain of Technological Culture': Architectural Design and America, 1965-1969".

Gideon Fink Shapiro, Columbia College '04

Landscape of Contradictions: Constructing New Amsterdam, 1626-1664

Senior thesis project, Department of Urban Studies

Advisor: David Smiley

This study traces the built environment of New Amsterdam, the Dutch colonial port that became New York in 1664. Social and economic struggles as well as topographical and ecological conditions are investigated as sometimes contradictory motives for building structures, canals, and streets. Initial development of lower Manhattan only loosely followed the plans of the Dutch West India Company as it strained without success to earn profits from New Amsterdam and to maintain control over the colony. Lenape Indians resisted colonial expansion and, along with rival Indian groups, simultaneously furnished the means for the colony's sustenance. Buildings such as the dilapidated fort and the tavern-turned-statehouse help narrate the frustration of the company's authority and the political ascendancy of the merchants unaffiliated with the company. Visual and written chronicles offer crucial clues to the port's geography, and also reveal the ideological justification for the colonists' appropriation of occupied lands. From the volatile environment of the colonial encounter there emerged a set of streets in lower Manhattan that have survived into the present.

Redraft of the Castello Plan New Amsterdam in 1660. 1916. John Wolcott Adams and I.N. Phelps Stokes. New-York Historical Society Library, Maps Collection.

Brian Tochterman, Masters in Urban Planning '05

A Cry and a Demand: The Working Class Tavern and the Crisis of Place, Space and Community

This thesis offers both a celebration and defense of the working class tavern. It represents a “cry and demand” for its preservation and proliferation in twenty-first century American urban form. The American tavern has been a vital seed in revolutionary change throughout our country’s short history. It possesses unique characteristics when compared to similar social spaces, and features the most vital of public personalities.

Over the course of five chapters I consider the role of third places in abating the concurrent crisis of community, examine the historical relationship between tavern sociability and revolutionary movements in the U.S., France and England, analyze tavern ethnographies within American sociology, and theorize the function of public space in relation to original observations on tavern culture. Based on this analysis I conclude with several recommendations to enhance the viability of tavern preservation and development, and thus, tavern life in the 21st Century.

Ultimately, I argue that working class taverns represent one of the last bastions of Gemeinshaft – spontaneously arising social relationships – in an increasingly individualistic U.S. society.  Working class neighborhoods, where they exist, are threatened by gentrification and developers’ emphasis on encouraging spaces where members of an elite “creative class” comes together to hatch brilliant innovative schemes. In the end, I theorize a more vibrant and democratic public sphere modeled on the life and culture of the working class tavern, a time-tested nurturer of the sense of community and diversity that so many prize in an ironic era defined by unabashed individualism and consumption-driven conformity.

The Catherine Hoover Voorsanger Writing Prizes were generously endowed by Voorsanger and Associates, Architects. Each prize was given at the end of the academic year for an outstanding paper on a subject in American architecture, landscape or urbanism written during the academic year. One prize was awarded to a student in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation; the other was awarded to a graduate student in the Department of Art History or to an undergraduate at Columbia or Barnard College for a senior these. Each prize carried an honorarium of $250.

Recipients: Daniel Immerwahr, Michael Dimitrios Caratzas 

Daniel Immerwahr, Columbia College '02

Shallow Consensus: Political Culture in Levittown, 1947-1963

This undergraduate thesis, written for the history department with the advice of Professor Gwen Wright on the GSAPP faculty, discusses the iconic postwar mass-produced suburb of Levittown, Long Island. Although the popular image of Levittown is a bastion of suburban political quietism, archival research and oral histories uncovered a few surprises. Strikes, integration campaigns, and renters' movements all touched Levittown. The thesis considers the ways in which these forms of political strife were swept under the rug as Levittown was presented to the nation as a place of political consensus.

Michael Dimitrios Caratzas, '02

Cross-Bronx, Trans-Manhattan: Preserving a Significant Urban Expressway and Its Megastructure

The Catherine Hoover Voorsanger Writing Prizes were generously endowed by Voorsanger and Associates, Architects. Each prize was given at the end of the academic year for an outstanding paper on a subject in American architecture, landscape or urbanism written during the academic year. One prize was awarded to a student in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation; the other was awarded to a graduate student in the Department of Art History or to an undergraduate at Columbia or Barnard College for a senior these. Each prize carried an honorarium of $250.

Recipients: Christopher Girr, MS Historic Preservation '96

Mastery in Masonry:  Norcross Brothers, Contractors and Builders 1864-1924

In our admiration of the physical qualities of architecture, we often recognize the materials and workmanship of the builder as much as the designs of the architect.  While a traditional art-historical approach often credits a single individual with the creation of a work of architecture, by the end of the nineteenth century a great building was the product of a complex relationship between the architect, the client, the engineer, and the builder. 

The building firm of Norcross Brothers was among the largest and most influential builders of the period following the American Civil War.  Through a sixty-year existence, the firm constructed hundreds of significant buildings built of the finest materials for many of America’s most prominent architects, including H.H. Richardson, McKim, Mead and White, W.A. Potter, Peabody and Stearns, Carrere and Hastings, Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge, John Russell Pope, Hartwell and Richardson, and York and Sawyer. 

From their origins in the carpentry and masonry trades through their evolution to masters of the construction process, Norcross Brothers contributions included pioneering a large scale, vertically-integrated approach to building while advancing traditional building technology and offering an exceptionally high level of service to architects.  Norcross not only functioned as a general contractor and builder, but also as a firsthand supplier of a wide range of building materials utilized in their work.  They operated some of the nation’s finest stone quarries, as well as ran extensive brickmaking, iron and wood-working shops to become the largest and most extensive building concern in America.

Through an examination of the history, resources and technologies of Norcross Brothers, Contractors and Builders, as well as the evolving role of the architect, this thesis explores the builder’s influence on architectural practice, the construction industry, and the buildings themselves in the years between the Civil War and World War I.