Favorite: “The Architect’s Dream” by Thomas Cole

By David Masello

Architect Peter Pennoyer is reluctant to cut and paste a document or fire up the CAD drawing software typical in his industry. Instead, he and his staff architects prefer to do much of their designing by hand, actually drawing the moldings and staircases, fireplace surrounds, and coffered ceilings that figure into his residential projects.

“Hand drawing connects you to the human scale,” says Pennoyer from his New York office, where for decades he has been designing scores of America’s most notable, traditionally styled residences. The latest are featured in his book Peter Pennoyer Architects: City/Country (Rizzoli). “You realize quickly that drawing teaches you humility, and you realize that people, architects in particular, who drew regularly in their day did it better than we can today. Some things should be difficult. Struggle isn’t always bad.”

Such methodologies echo why Pennoyer has remained fascinated by “The Architect’s Dream” (above), an 1840 canvas by Thomas Cole (1801–1848) that is in the permanent collection of Ohio’s Toledo Museum of Art. Within a span of just five weeks, Cole, also a trained architect, painted this monumental canvas for his commissioning client, I. Town, a prominent New York architect of the day. The painting reveals a kind of timeline of architectural styles through the ages.

“The moment I saw the Cole, I remember being absolutely stunned,” Pennoyer recalls. “He probably made a smaller-scale sketch of this, a cartoon. He was astonishingly talented at then laying down paint on a canvas.”

The scene, which depicts an amalgam of idealized buildings — a glowing neo-Gothic church, the looming form of an Egyptian pyramid, an arched Roman aqueduct, towering obelisks, circular edifices, an Assyrian temple — is presented to the viewer as a skyline of structures. Indeed, the architectural panorama is viewed from what Pennoyer surmises is a Romanesque-style loggia, its opening framed by billowing green curtains.

Fronting the array of structures is a public gathering space populated by an inestimable number of people, who appear to be attending a ceremony. Of the buildings the artist chose to depict, Pennoyer feels confident that “Cole is definitely editorializing, holding up the Greek as the pinnacle of architecture. Where does the brightest light shine in the painting? On the Greek temple.”

A visit to Pennoyer’s Manhattan office reveals not only teams of architects busy at their drafting tables, but also floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled with architectural volumes, pattern books, and monologues — a repository of design wisdom and inspiration practically on the scale of the lost library of Alexandria.

In a metaphorical sense, then, it is fitting that Pennoyer is able to “read” even more into Cole’s scene than is initially presented to the viewer. Pennoyer points to the architect in the painting, who is depicted lounging atop a column, surrounded by volumes larger than he. “I’m an old-fashioned footnotes person,” he says, “and I’m pretty sure I remember learning that Town paid Cole for the work in architectural treatises.” Pennoyer surmises that such volumes might have included Claude Perrault’s 17th-century editions of his translations of the tenets of Roman architect Vitruvius. (Pennoyer has two copies in his office.)

“Just as hand drawing connects you to the human scale, so here does Cole relate the scale of the architecture,” Pennoyer emphasizes. Recognizing that computer technology does have its advantages, Pennoyer zooms up the image on his screen and comments on the crowd that appears to be marching in a procession from the Greek temple. “The fires suggest a pagan ritual, but while we can’t get in the head of Cole, it’s impressive to see how much he manages to pile on in this painting.”

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