Introduction During the colonial era and the emergence of the new United States, aspiring North American designers had limited educational and experiential opportunities in comparison to their European counterparts. Typical studies of the early American built environment state that North American occupants could only acquire architectural knowledge by travelling across the ‘Western Ocean’, engaging in the extremely limited field of architectural apprenticeship, and studying architectural pattern books and treatises. These limited, yet commonly held views of American architectural development in the Early Republic fail to acknowledge the presence of a larger and highly influential transatlantic network of relationships that activated the exchange of design ideas and books while shaping careers in the built environment: an architectural Republic of Letters. A study of the Transatlantic Design Network aims to bridge this gap by tracing how the letters, material objects such as drawings, books, artefacts, and personal contacts cultivated a distinct set of shared aesthetic, political and social concerns among an international pool of architects, artists, collectors and educators.
The analysis of this dynamic community proves that architects, artists, and patrons fluidly traversed the Atlantic Ocean through many means: the exchange of letters, drawings and publications, personal travels, and international recruitment for architectural projects. An analysis of the Transatlantic Design Network, a shared and active network of people, sites, texts and objects that transcended nationalistic concerns, offers an alternative approach to late eighteenth and early nineteenth Anglo-American architecture where the ambitions and sensibilities of architectural design in America and Europe were not at odds, where Americans were not naïve hobbyists and nor were Europeans alone in cultivating architectural professionals. Rather, Europe and America were intrinsically linked through the shared interests and travels of interconnected figures such as lawyer-architect-statesman Thomas Jefferson, architect Sir John Soane, artist Maria Cosway, and several others. Scholarship on Jefferson and Soane is plentiful, but these texts study the designers only within nationa contexts and this, consequentially, has imposed a monograph-driven silo effect that fails to identify or properly attribute the existence of a ‘Transatlantic Design Network’
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Danielle Willkens
Author’s collage of the Transatlantic Design Network, 1768-1838, with letters from Jefferson and Cosway overlaid charts of the Atlantic Ocean, currents, temperatures, and trade routes.
The Transatlantic Design Network, 1768-1838 There is an interesting lexical gap in the English language: unlike Romance languages, it does not make a distinction in the use of the verb ‘to know’ between the knowledge of a fact and knowledge of a person. The Italian verbs sapere and conoscere and the French verbs savoir and connaître linguistically recognise the differences between familiarity with a object or concept and familiarity with a person, thereby revealing a vein of epistemology that recognises the importance of personal interaction in the formation and dissemination of knowledge. Architects like Thomas Jefferson and Sir John Soane learned their discipline from books, on-site investigations, and in the case of Soane, formal academic training and apprenticeship. However, for both men, their understanding of art, architecture, and culture was very much shaped by the interests, observations and talents of their personal acquaintances. By reading letters, diary entries and account books of Jefferson and Soane, it is possible to trace how conversations in coffeehouses and salons, as well as casual journeys undertaken with friends, influenced their architectural theories and design goals.
This brief foray into linguistics provides the background for the importance of analysing how knowledge is acquired and formed through personal connections, often referred to as actor-network theory. Network theory is frequently referenced in contemporary popular culture as ‘six degrees of separation’ and in terms of scholarly analysis, is typically deployed in twentieth-century studies, viz. the work of Latour (2005), Fraser (2007) and Yaneva (2009). Yet, important circles of interpersonal exchange have operated for centuries and personal influences and conversations, not just pattern books and transplanted designers, were responsible for America’s architectural development in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
1 Further exploration of this topic may be found in several sources — Cook, 1996; Hindley, 2013; Shuffelton, Baridon, & Chevignard, 1988
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