NEW PENCIL POINTS
January 1943
Kenneth Reid [Editor]
Kenneth Reid [Editor]: NEW PENCIL POINTS. East Stroudsburg, PA: Reinhold Publishing Compan y [Volume 24, Number 1] January 1943. Original edition. Slim quarto. Side stitched printed wrappers. 84 pp. Illustrated articles and advertisments. Wrappers rubbed and soiled with mild spine wear. Interior unmarked and very clean. Cover design, layout and typography by Bernard Rudofsky. A very good copy.
8.75 x 11.75 original magazine with 84 pages and numerous illustrations. "Pencil Points," the forerunner of "Progressive Architecture" embraced the streamline moderne aesthetic in the arts.
- Xanti Schawinsky illustration from his Faces Of War series!
- Planning for Housing: NAHO-CHC Conference, reported by William Lescaze
- Action on Employment: Correpondence proposing a program for retraining and placing architects in war production
- Architects Today: First installment of results of the New Pencil Points survey on the architect today
- Plan: Editorial by Kenneth Reid
- House in Austin, TX, Chester E. Nagel, Architect [12 pages with 22 b/w illustrations]. " . . . It is excellent indeed that Pencil Points gave you so much space (12 pages). But, you deserve it because . . . it is really a lovely design," -- Walter Gropius, March 31, 1943.
- Materials for Tomorrow
- Today We Produce to Destroy, But Tomorrow We produce to Build by Charles M. A. Stine
- Chemistry by F. J. Van Antwerpen
- The New World of Plastics by Raymond L. Dickey
- Concrete by Carl Zeigler
- After the War . . . Wood by Roderic Olzendam
- Furniture, A Symposium: 4 illustrated pages including work by Arne Kartworld, Chicago School of Design, Gilbert Rohde and the Paul Bry Shop.
- Brazilian Architecture: Living and Building Below the Equator; material collected by Philip L. Goodwin on his recent trip sponsored jointly by MoMA and the AIA [11 pages with 25 b/w illustrations including work by Oscar Niemeyer, Marcelo and Mitlon Roberto, Correa Lima, Alvaro Vital Brazil and Adhemar Marinho and Carlos Porto]
- Departments include Manufacturer's Literature and Books and Periodicals
- General Advertising: an excellent assortment of vintage trade advertisments
”Chester [Emil] Nagel (American, 1911- 2007 ) was among the first architects to bring the International Style to Texas. Born in Fredericksburg in 1911, he studied architecture at the University of Texas, graduating in 1934. From 1935 to 1938 he worked as an architect for the National Parks Service, helping to design facilities for Bastrop and Palo Duro state parks.
"In 1939 Nagel received a scholarship to study at the Harvard Graduate School of Design where he came in contact with Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. After receiving his Master's degree from Harvard in 1940 he returned to Austin and, inspired by Gropius' ideas, designed one of the first International Style structures in the state, a house for himself and his wife on Churchill Drive.
During the war years, Nagel was assigned to the Army Corps of Engineers in Bastrop, and from 1943 to 1945 he worked as a test engineer on the new Convair B-36 bomber in Ft. Worth. After the war he returned to Austin and collaborated with Dan J. Driscoll on the Barton Springs Bathhouse (1945). In 1946 he was called back to Harvard to be Gropius' assistant and later became an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Design. He gave up his teaching position in 1951 to join The Architect's Collaborative (TAC) and from 1951 to 1953 he headed the TAC offices in Washington. Nagel's designs, many of which were collaborative ventures with Gropius, included the Valley House in Lexington, Massachusetts (1940), the Overholt Thoracic Clinic in Boston (1955), and the American Embassy in Athens (1956). In 1958 he opened his own practice in Massachusetts and during the course of the next decade designed a series of projects in Florida, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands as well as several buildings for the Harvard medical and dental schools."
Quoted from Christopher Long, n.d., from the Alexander Architectural Archive, The University of Texas at Austin.