CU Library receives grant to conserve historic architectural photographs

A $40,000 grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation will help Cornell University Library conserve and catalog some 15,000 historic architectural photographs in the Andrew Dickson White Photograph Collection.

White, Cornell's first president, began the collection before the university's founding in 1868. It documents a wide range of 19th- and early 20th-century architecture of Europe and the United States, including structures, city streets and habitats that have vanished due to wars and urban development. For more than 70 years the collection has served as a primary instructional and research tool for students and scholars in Cornell's College of Architecture, Art, and Planning and in other fields. However, from the time of their arrival, the photographs and many of the albums in which they are kept were highly vulnerable to the influence of atmospheric conditions and frequent usage.

In 1998 the collection was transferred to the university's Kroch Library, where it is now housed in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections. Staff in the library's conservation and preservation department already are at work documenting and analyzing the collection and will soon begin the painstaking process of treating and restoring each photograph. The Delmas grant will provide funding to advance the processing and conservation of this invaluable asset.

White amassed photographs of mainly French and Italian architecture, but included Egyptian, Middle Eastern, Greek, Roman, English and German structures. Willard Fiske, Cornell's first librarian, made substantial additions to the collection, as did other scholars and faculty members in later years. The European photographs document buildings from the early medieval to the Renaissance, and in many cases illustrate buildings lost in the two World Wars.

American architecture also is well represented, with photographs of Colonial architecture, as well as buildings designed by Richard Morris Hunt, A.B. Mullet, T.U. Walter, Henry Vaughn, Louis Sullivan, Holabird and Roche, Frank Lloyd Wright, Solon Beman and the Office of the Supervising Architect of the U.S. Treasury. The collection also documents almost all of H.H. Richardson's buildings. Gilmore Clarke, dean of the college from 1938 to 1950 and a faculty member through 1963, contributed large numbers of photographs relating to his work on the Commission of Fine Arts and the development of the New York state parkway system.

Many of the photographs are valuable because they represent the work of important photographers, including William James Stillman, three albums of oriental works by Bonfils and a photogravure album of Edouard-Denis Baldus.

For more information, contact Elaine Engst, director, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, at 255-3530, or email ee11@cornell.edu.