PENCIL POINTS, August 1936
Architects of Europe Today 11 – Walter Gropius, Germany by George Nelson
Russell F. Whitehead [Editor]: PENCIL POINTS [GREENBELT TOWNS]. Stamford, CT: Reinhold Publishing Company, Volume 17, Number 8, August 1936. Original Edition. Slim quarto. Printed wrappers. 112 pages. Illustrated articles and advertising. Wrappers rubbed and worn. Dampstain to spine that translates to lower corner of a few early and late textblock leaves, otherwise a very good copy.
8.75 x 11.75 original magazine with 112 pages of vintage content and advertising. "Pencil Points," the forerunner of "Progressive Architecture" embraced the streamline moderne aesthetic in the arts.
- Greenbelt Planning: Resettlement Administration Goes to Town by John Dreier [20 pages w/ 34 black and white illustrations]
- Automatic Writing by Ralph Walker
- Architects of Europe Today: 11 – Walter Gropius, Germany by George Nelson [11 pages w/ 19 black and white illustrations]. Architect, designer and architectural critic, George Nelson (1908-1986) who was a graduate of Yale College in 1928 and Yale School of Architecture in 1932 was a Fellow of the American Academy of Rome when he wrote a series of articles for Pencil Points in 1935 and 1936 about the state of European architects and their architecture during the politically and artistically crucial years that he lived in Europe. A feat for the young aspiring architect, Nelson wrote twelve essays on the architects Marcello Piacentini, Italy; Helweg-Moeller, Denmark; Luckhardt Brothers, Germany; Gio Ponti, Italy; Le Corbusier, France; Ivar Tengbom, Sweden; Mies Van der Rohe, Germany; Giuseppe Vaccaro, Italy; Eugene Beaudouin, France; Raymond McGrath, England; Walter Gropius, Germany, and Tecton, England. These essays are a significant contribution to the scholarship of modern architecture as while it includes three well-know architects Le Corbusier, Mies Van der Rohe, and Waler Gropius Nelson wrote about the work of many lesser-known architects in the turbulent wartime, when many lives and thus careers were cut short. It brings to light the period from the perspective of an outsider who worked to bring to the fore European modern architecture to an American audience, while at the same time influencing the editorial direction of Pencil Points.
- Guptill's Corner by Arthur L. Guptill
- THE MONOGRAPH SERIES: The Houses of Bristol, Rhode Island, Part II by William J. Burleigh [16 pages w/ 19 black and white illustrations]
- COMPARATIVE DETAILS [Group 29] – Garden Shelters: includes the work of Godwin, Thompson & Patterson, Mary Deptuy Lamson, James W. O'Connor, Edgar and Verna Cook Salomonsky, Prentice Sanger, Treanor and Fatio, Leroy P. Ward, and John Walter Wood
- Data Sheets -- prepared by Don Graf include horizontal dimensions for brickwork, 4 sheets
- Departments include Letters from Readers and News from the Field
- General Advertising: an excellent assortment of vintage trade advertisments that espouse the depression moderne streamline aesthetic quite nicely.
Between 1911, when he started the Functionalist movement with his design of the Fagus Factory to his directorship of the Bauhaus (in Weimar and Dessau), to his brief adventures in England to his founding of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, Walter Gropius (1883-1969) has been at the epicenter of the modern movement. As the founding director of the Bauhaus, Gropius made inestimable contributions to his field, to the point that knowing his work is crucial to understanding Modernism. His early buildings, such Fagus Boot-Last Factory and the Bauhaus Building in Dessau, with their use of glass and industrial features, are still indispensable points of reference. After his emigration to the United States, he influenced the education of architects there and became, along with Mies van der Rohe, a leading proponent of the International Style.