The Architectural League History Project
We are working to document and analyze the League’s nearly-150 years of history, and we need your help to do it.
The Project
In order to preserve, contextualize, and interrogate its past (for a fuller history, see our history page here), The Architectural League has embarked on a multi-year, three-part history project that will result in the publication of a critical scholarly history of the institution on the occasion of the League’s 150th anniversary in 2031.
At a time when formal architectural education in the United States was still rare, the 1881 establishment of The Architectural League of New York—a voluntary association for “the purposes… of architectural study”—was an acknowledgement on the part of young architects that if they were to grow creatively and intellectually, they would need to build the environment in which to do so themselves.
Over the course of more than 140 years, that spirit of mutual education has remained constant. Indeed, it is what drives the League today in its mission to support critically transformative work in the allied fields that shape the built environment, stimulating the thinking, debate, and action necessary to confront today’s converging crises of racism, inequity, and climate change in service of a more livable and just world. The architects, artists, engineers, planners, landscape architects, designers, and others who currently define the League’s programs are as motivated by a desire to improve themselves and the practice of architecture as the 26 young architects who decided to organize themselves on that winter day in 1881.
Three-Phase Plan for the History Project
The first phase of the project is dedicated to the organization and permanent housing of the League’s post-1974 archive. (Much of the pre-1974 archive is held at the Archives of American Art.) Total holdings consist of roughly 250 boxes of physical documents and several thousand digital files. The League also plans to digitize our large collection of aging audio and video recordings of programs dating back to 1974.
We are simultaneously in the process of collecting and creating a repository of oral histories of individuals who have significantly contributed to the League’s work. Our goal is to create an archive of professionally recorded and edited video interviews, to be housed within the League’s archival collection. Initial interviewees include Emilio Ambasz, Jonathan Barnett, Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel, Barbara Jakobson, John Lobell, Deborah Nevins, Suzanne Stephens, Robert A.M. Stern, and Susana Torre. The project will conclude with a critical history published on the occasion of the League’s 150th anniversary, in 2031.
History Committee
The project is overseen by a committee of distinguished members of the New York architecture, design, and historic preservation communities: Teri Harris, Rosalie Genevro, Leslie Gill, Frances Halsband, Paul Lewis, Anne Rieselbach, Karen Stein, Suzanne Stephens, Robert A.M. Stern, and Gregory Wessner; and is managed by the League’s Director of Research and Operations, William Kelly, PhD.
Need
We expect expenses for this multi-part, multimedia project to total approximately $300,000.
To Give
To make a gift use our contribution form and select “History Project” in the “Area of Support” field. You may choose to make a one-time or recurring contribution to sustain our efforts to preserve the League’s rich legacy. Contributions will be processed by The Architectural League of New York, and are tax deductible to the full extent of the law (Federal Tax ID: 13-1671027).
If you prefer to donate by check or other means and for additional information about supporting this special project, please contact:
Cameron King
Director of Development and Communications
The Architectural League of New York
king@archleague.org
William Kelly
Director of Research and Operations
The Architectural League of New York
kelly@archleague.org
From the Archive
“The Architectural League of New York Announces to its Members the Acquisition of a New Club House at 115 East Fortieth Street – May 1927”
In 1927 the League moved out of the American Fine Arts Society building at 215 West 57th Street, where it had been housed for many years, and into a clubhouse of its own on East 40th Street.
The League’s new home was next door to a building in which many of the city’s leading architects, and League members, had their offices.
The League’s new headquarters included a dining room, a “locker room” where members could store their liquor (as this was during Prohibition), and a double height exhibition space where the League mounted weekly exhibitions of members’ work.
As Robert A.M. Stern and colleagues write in New York 1930, “As a result [of having its own premises] the League emerged as the nation’s principal forum for formal and informal discussion about architecture; under the reign of Raymond Hood, Ralph Walker, and Ely Jacques Kahn, its dining room became the locus of the most significant talk and debate about architectural Modernism in the critical years that accompanied the 1929 stock market crash and the Depression.” (New York 1930: Architecture and Urbanism Between the Two World Wars, p. 190)
The announcement states that the League planned “to occupy its new Home by Thanksgiving and open it with a most unique House Warming.” You can click on the images read the announcement in its entirety, and to see detailed floor plans of the club house.
See the full document below:
