Issue 32  April 30th 2024

Help Bring A Rare Photographic Collection Home

The OA+D Archives is an educational non-profit that prides itself on delivering results. Whether it’s continuously publishing a top-notch journal three times a year for over a decade, successfully fundraising to conserve and reproduce a large Eugene Masselink mural, or raising enough donations to cover the acquisition of the original Henry Fuermann & Sons glass plate negatives— there are not many goals our wonderful and generous supporters cannot help us accomplish.

Now, a new and exciting fundraising challenge is here that we’re eager to share with everyone!

The OA+D Archives is pleased to facilitate the return to Arizona of a major photographic collection documenting the work of Paolo Soleri – member of the Taliesin Fellowship (1947-48) and Arizona-based artist, designer, and author of note. 

The collection was produced by Annette Del Zoppo (1936-2001) a Southern California–based photographer, graphic designer, multimedia producer, business owner, and community activist. She was also associated with the office of Charles and Ray Eames from 1961-1970.  During that time period she would often travel to the Phoenix area and would meet Soleri and become enchanted with his ideas and work. As a result, she would make a point to return each summer for several years to document the work and events undertaken at Soleri’s studio. Her commitment to visually document Soleri’s work of years ultimately became the basis of a large collection of photos, slides, artifacts, and films that has been in storage for over 30 years and remained largely unknown and unstudied.

The importance of this collection to understanding the organic works of Paolo Soleri cannot be overstated. The collection contains over 9,000 35mm slides—over 200 of which show Arcosanti’s early construction. There are thirty 16mm film reels, 12 reel to reel audio tapes, and a large number of photographic prints.  In addition to this visual documentation, Del Zoppo collected a large quantity of Soleri-related publications, brochures, books, and other objects including bells, posters, and more.  Because Annette Del Zoppo spent so many years consistently visiting Soleri’s studios, a significant amount of this material is quite likely the only remaining documentation of lost or unknown Soleri work.

Thanks to the diligent efforts of The OA+D Archives in preserving important collections of organic architects and designers and the large amount of Paolo Soleri material already extant in our collections waiting to be processed, the Del Zoppo Collection has been offered to the organization. Our intention is to bring it home to Arizona, catalog it, digitize it, and make it available to scholars and anyone else interested in the increasingly relevant ideas of environmentally harmonious architecture.

But to do all this, we need your help. Our goal is to raise $25,000 in tax-deductible donations to cover the expenses related to acquiring, processing, and digitizing this important collection.

Please consider a tax-exempt donation of $500 or more to help us return this important architectural resource to Arizona and make it available to organic enthusiasts everywhere.

DONATE ONLINE HERE

NOTE: be sure to make mention that you're donating for the Soleri collection.

If you'd like to send a check, please make it out to "Organic Architecture and Design Archives" and mail to:

OA+D Archives 365 S. Arizona Ave. Chandler, AZ 85225

Please feel free to contact us at info@oadarchives.org with any additional questions and thanks!

From The Archives

OA+D Archives is pleased to announce a very important addition to our archival holdings related to the early history of organic architecture. Recently acquired is a 12 volume bound set of The Western Architect issues covering the years 1915 until publication ceased in 1931. In the first decades of the 20th century when organic architectural principles were first being brought forward to public attention, no monthly periodical was more significant for spreading the word than The Western Architect.

Starting in 1901, The Western Architect was sent forth into the world from a small printing facility in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota. Published by the civically minded Edward A. Purdy and edited by Robert Craik McLean--a man staunchly committed to progressive ideals—The Western Architect circulated widely in small but highly influential print runs carrying the subtitle “A national journal of architecture and allied arts”.

By 1906, The Western Architect began to evolve into the primary vehicle through which the design ideals and exemplary buildings of American organic architects were presented to a larger audience. Work by Frank Lloyd Wright, William Gray Purcell and George Grant Elmslie, George Washington Maher, Walter Burley and Marion Mahony Griffin, Robert C. Spencer, William Drummond, and many others like Tallmadge and Watson, were placed like jewels in a clean and spacious graphical setting with generous use of negative space to keep an undisturbed focus on what was at hand.

With input from professional connections across much of the continental United States, the pages of The Western Architect sometimes also presented the work of already famous regional architects, like Greene and Greene in California. Or, to show the spreading influence of organic design there appeared occasionally buildings from much lesser known designers striving for a progressive approach, such as the firms of Trost and Trost in El Paso, Texas, and Douglas and Hartman in Los Angeles.

The covers came to be standardized with a heavy neutral brown gray paper. To the eye this looked this functionally like a felt wrapper asking to be opened. With a plain font in black ink there appeared just the volume numbering with month and year above the banner name of the periodical. When issues were dedicated to the work of a single firm the name would also be shown. The simplicity of design—at a time when magazines could and often did wear the come on of lavish color illustrations--was a clean and tactile invitation to discover free of preconception what was being presented inside this visual doorway.

From early on, issues had the same structure. First, of course, there were the advertising sections, usually with same number of pages both in the front and the back of each issue. Quarter, half, or full page ads were purchased by companies whose products and services reflected the marketplace at the time for modern means to build. The pages were composed as slickly as every one that came further inside. That was how the bills got paid.

The next section contained editorial pages and short news reports. Here were documented the background events considered notable by organic thinkers at the time. Editorials pointed out what encouragements there might be that the organic principles were taking hold or discussed the contrary environment being encountered by the design community. Professional standards, legal issues with newly arising building codes, and advances in construction technology were frequently given consideration.

Following this introductory material, readers arrived at the meat of the presentation. An essay text presented a statement of design principles (usually authored by the architects for issues dedicated to a single firm) or an explicative account of the architectural work about to be introduced.

Then came the beating heart at the core of every number, the illustrative plates. These high quality reproductions matched broadly in page count with the advertising plates, a 50/50 declaration of real estate value between the aspiration of art and the necessity for money. Black and white exterior and interior photographs were the mainstay.

Quite often, though, images of drawings ran alongside. Sometimes these presented reductions of large scale presentation renderings and sometimes fully detailed working drawings from which furniture can still be replicated. Every once in a while, opening wide at the very heart with a two page spread, there would appear a sumptuous four color lithograph of an architectural rendering. These illustrations are now all the documentation that survives for the design of some unbuilt or long since vanished buildings and their furnishings.

Sadly, covers and advertising sections were almost always discarded for library bindings. Such is the case with the volumes now at OA+D Archives, which originated through the Spokane Public Library. An advantage making up for what we might now see as a material loss is that these annual bindings were sometimes given comprehensive indexes up at the front. The OA+D Archives volumes do have this helpful amenity.

A perusal of these indexes proves that neither the interest or the influence of The Western Architect was limited to progressive design in the United States or Canada. Minnesota-based architects like William Gray Purcell--a substantial contributor to both the content and the look of the periodical--had impressive longstanding European contacts. Further international connections came through a talented pool of immigrants from diverse parts of Europe associated with the professional design community in Minneapolis, most notably Carl B. Stravs and John Jager.

Well illustrated essays reported on organic design achievements abroad, and not in just the westernmost countries of Europe. Beyond Holland, beyond Germany, beyond Vienna, the publication exhibited designs—almost always shown built—by a sampling of Czech, Hungarian, and Slavic architects striving for principled progressive buildings.

Mailing lists that survive in archival collections (such as the William Gray Purcell Papers) show copies were sent regularly to people like vanguard Dutch architect Henrik P. Berlage and Swede Ferdinand Boberg. This remarkable exchange of thought between a small Midwestern journal and prominent architects in Europe is largely unexplored in detail by scholarship. The volumes of The Western Architect at OA+D Archives await their research needs.

Today surviving issues of The Western Architect are fragile to the point of crumbling and very rarely seen. Even institutional libraries that acquired copies through an original subscription often find that their holdings are fragmentary and sustained significant damage from over handling during subsequent decades.

Incomplete and sometimes marred runs of The Western Architect digitized by Google and Microsoft in the 1990s can be found on the Internet. Versions in an unsatisfactory reduced format made from those flawed 30 year old scanning projects can today be purchased online through print on demand. To have a substantial and fully meaningful encounter with the periodical, however, nothing substitutes for access to the original.

The volumes newly arrived at OA+D Archives do not constitute a complete run, but are in remarkably pristine condition. The search for the issues of 1901 to 1914 continues, and our collections hold a smattering of individual examples. The ultimate goal is to present this seminal publication in as complete a form as possible through our online catalog. If you have any copies of The Western Architect you would like to donate, please contact us at info@oadarchives.org.