From Pine Parthenons to Pocketbooks: Frank Kidder, MIT, and the Reinvention of American Timber ca. 1862–84

Abstract

Abstract Resource conflicts in late nineteenth-century America transformed cultural and technical understandings of building materials as settlers and industrialists alike brought pressure to bear on the research university. Architect-engineer Frank Kidder and his Architectural Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology provide a window onto how these politics transformed the symbolic and pedagogical significance of timber. While the university’s engineers worked to expand logging amidst deforestation, its architects, like William Ware and Henry Van Brunt, devised an allied esthetics of materials that valorized forests and settlers in nationalist terms. Kidder brought these disciplines together, embodying the educated woodsman that Ware and Van Brunt sought to cultivate. His 1884 pocketbook promulgated their simultaneously rationalist and nostalgic view of timber among the new class of professional architects they trained.