(Opinion has proclaimed that a preface should introduce th...)
Opinion has proclaimed that a preface should introduce the author to his audience. I should add and prepare that audience for the work itself. Architectural Rendering in Wash presents its author in the diverse capacities of architect, draftsman, painter, and writer. I ncidentally, it suggests other qualifications of this many-sided personality. It presents its subject from the view-points of architect and draftsman, and harmonizes them. It solves a host of difficult problems and answers many trying questions. It is the architectural draftsman who will be the greatest beneficiary, who will find his work has been made easier and his output improved by the acquisition of this new and engaging text book and authority. The architect will benefit in that his work will be better presented, and possibly he may, himself, be better able to appreciate what architectural presentation means. Posterity will come in for a great acquisition in that through this work there will be recorded what otherwise might one day join the lost arts, for architectural rendering is to-day at its zenith, indisputably an art in itself, and a great one. I foresee for this book a widespread and lasting influence for the betterment of artistic appreciation, architectural draftsmanship, and last, but not least, architecture itself; and I commend it to all whose interests embrace these subjects, and to that great group of discerning men and women, the public on whom by the very nature of things the future of all art must depend. Thos. R. Kimball, F. A. I. A.
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Harold Van Buren Magonigle was an American architect, sculptor, and critic.
Background
Harold Van Buren Magonigle was born on October 17, 1867, in Bergen Heights, New Jersey, and was the son of John Henry and Katherine Celestine (Devlin) Magonigle. His paternal grandfather migrated to America from Greenock-on-Clyde, Scotland.
His father had been for many years business manager for Edwin Booth, and his mother was the sister of Booth's wife. Owing to family reverses, young Magonigle was forced to start work at the age of thirteen.
Education
Magonigle's mother had always wished him to become an architect, and he was therefore entered as student draftsman in the firm of Vaux & Radford.
Career
From 1882 to 1887, Magonigle was in the office of Charles C. Haight, who was then working on the Columbia College buildings at Forty-ninth Street, and in 1887, he entered the office of McKim, Mead & White, where he remained for five years. His talent was already recognized, and he was advised to broaden his experience by working elsewhere.
Accordingly, he went to Boston and was with Rotch & Tilden. During this period, he was also an instructor in decorative design at the Cowles Art School. In 1894, he won the Rotch traveling fellowship. Two years of European travel ensued, they were enormously fruitful, and the sketches and paintings that he brought back were evidence of his unusual talent not only as an architect but as a delineator.
On his return, he reentered the office of McKim, Mead & White, leaving it the following year to open his own office in partnership with Evarts Tracy. This partnership lasted until 1899, and for the next two years, he acted as head designer and head draftsman of the office of Schickel & Ditmars. From 1901 to 1904, he was in partnership with Henry W. Wilkinson; after that, he practiced by himself.
His first great opportunity came when he won the open two-stage competition for the McKinley Memorial in Canton, Ohio, in 1904, the first of a series of important memorials designed by him, for which he was most widely known.
Thus he was the architect of the Mason Monument in Detroit (1907), the Firemen's Memorial in New York (1911), the National Maine Monument, New York (1911), the Burritt Memorial in New Britain, Connecticut (1911), the Core Mausoleum at Norfolk, Virginia, the War Memorial at New Britain, Connecticut (of which he was also the sculptor), and the Schenley Memorial Fountain in Pittsburgh.
In addition, he won the competition for the proposed Robert Fulton Memorial Watergate on Riverside Drive, New York, in 1910, which was never built, and he climaxed his career as monument designer by winning the competition for the Liberty War Memorial in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1923. But his work was not limited to memorials.
In 1904, he designed Mrs. Dow's school at Briarcliff Manor, New York, and in 1915 the administration building of the Essex County Park Commission, Branch Brook Park, Newark, New Jersey. He was also the architect of the group including the embassy, chancellery, and consulate of the United States in Tokyo (1928), and of the Arsenal Technical Schools in Indianapolis, Indiana. (1919). He was a landscape painter in both oil and watercolor and exhibited widely.
He was also a skilled sculptor, and the great mourning sphinxes flanking the plaza of the Liberty Memorial were modeled by him. He also had a sensitive feeling for lettering and, in addition to many inscriptions, he created several designs for pamphlets and booklets, such as the cover of the Chickering Hall programs, the cover of A. H. Forbes's Architectural Gardens of Italy (1902), the cover and title-page of the Journal of the American Institute of Architects, and the great seal of the same organization.
Magonigle designed a great deal of important residential work, including the estate of Franklin Murphy, Mendham, New Jersey (1908 - 15), the lavish Fischer house at 7 East Seventy-ninth Street, New York (1914), and the Isaac Guggenheim house at Port Washington, New York (1916).
In 1929, he did the freely designed First Plymouth Congregational Church in Lincoln, Neb. In Victory Way, built in Park Avenue, New York, in connection with the Victory Loan Drive of 1918, Magonigle showed the same brilliance in arranging a temporary enclosure that should be dignified and beautiful which he had displayed in his monuments.
A Half Century of American Architecture" is an important and interesting source on the American architectural scene between 1884 and 1934; "The Upper Ground" contains his vividly expressed and definite opinions on the art and profession of architecture.
Magonigle suffered a stroke of apoplexy and died shortly afterward.
Magonigle wished American architecture to create new forms for itself and in the Liberty Memorial, the Lincoln, Nebraska, church, and his unsuccessful competition design for the Roosevelt Memorial in New York he definitely abandoned eclecticism in favor of creation.
He was deeply idealistic in his attitude toward the profession, upholding the highest professional standards in every way, and claiming that architecture was still and must always be an art as well as a science and a business; in both his writings and his work for various organizations he did much to strengthen the professional concept at a time when it was in great danger.
Membership
Magonigle was a member of the 1st Battery and battery adjutant of the 109th Regiment, National Guard of New York; a member of the American Institute of Architects from 1905 and fellow from 1907.
He was also a member of the alumni association of the American Academy in Rome, member and past president of the Architectural League, member, and director of the American Federation of Arts, member of the Society of Beaux-Arts Architects, of the Allied Artists of America, of the American Artists' Professional League.
Personality
Magonigle had the Renaissance artist's aim of being an artist and creator in all the arts. Thus he served as landscape architect for the Liberty Memorial at Kansas City.
Magonigle's wife was a painter, once president of the American Association of Women Painters and Sculptors. The continuous stimulation of her own talent was of the greatest value to him, and they were frequent collaborators. Thus, in connection with the Liberty Memorial, his wife had prepared designs for a great frieze to summarize the history of the world's religions; unfortunately, this was never executed. While on a vacation visit to Vergennes, Vermont.
Magonigle's talent lay chiefly in an imagination vivid and exuberant but disciplined by wide and profound knowledge. His work was always personal, original, and frequently unconventional to a marked degree.
As expressed in "The Upper Ground, " his ideal was essentially that of architecture as a living tradition, deeply rooted in the past but also sensitive to contemporary conditions and changes.
Connections
On April 24, 1900, Magonigle had married Edith Marion Day.