Beaux-Arts Institute of Design

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The Beaux-Arts Institute of Design (BAID) was created in 1916 the goal of providing education for American architects, and other artists, mostly sculptors and mural painters who were allied with architects.

Early in its career, BAID was populated by students who were either immigrants or first generation Americans. They often came from working class backgrounds and their training was towards getting a union job in the building trades rather than becoming a fine arts sculptor.

Contents

[edit] History

The year 1893 saw many of the most important architects, sculptors and painters gathering in Chicago. Sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens called this group, who were preparing for the World's Columbian Exposition, the greatest such collection since the fifteenth century. Out of those meetings three significant organizations were established. First, in 1893, was the National Sculpture Society (NSS), followed the next year by the American Academy of Rome and the Society of Beaux-Arts Architects. In the beginning the NSS and the architects who used their services on the buildings that they designed (many of them Beaux-Arts trained) travelled on the same path, or at least parallel ones, but by the turn of the century their trajectories had begun to diverge. The sculptors, who saw themselves as "fine art sculptors" were finding the architects more and more demanding and increasingly intrusive into what the sculptors saw as being their realm. Meanwhile the architects thought the sculptors difficult to work with, overly resistant to the architects needs, and unreliable in terms of timeliness, an extremely important factor in the building trades. So, with the tacit approval of the NSS who were tending to shy away from the production of purely decorative sculptural elements the Society of Beaux-Arts Architects established the Studio for Decorative Sculpture in 1912 and this in turn was merged with BAID when it was created in 1916.

[edit] Academics

The BAID set up a style of instruction based on the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Harbeson (see references) explains the features of this approach thusly:

  • The division into ateliers.
  • The tradition of the older students helping the younger.
  • The teaching of design by practicing architects (and the judgement of the competitions by a trained jury of practicing architects).
  • The beginning of the study of design as soon as the student enters the atelier.
  • The system of the esquisse. (The working out of problems through timed sketches.)

[edit] Notable alumni

[edit] References

  • Bogart, Michele H., Public Sculpture and the Civic Ideal in New York City: 1890-1930, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1989
  • Brummé, C. Ludwig, Contemporary American Sculpture, Crown Publishers, New York, 1948
  • Gurney, George, Sculpture and the Federal Triangle, Smithsonian Institute Press, Washington D.C., 1985
  • Harbeson, John F. The Study of Architectural Design: With Special Reference to the Program of the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design, Pencil Points Press Inc., New York, 1926
  • Kvaran, Einar Einarsson, Architectural Sculpture in America, unpublished manuscript
  • Stern, Gilmartin & Mellins, New York, 1930, Architecture and Urbanism Between the Two World Wars, Rizzoli International Publications, New York, 1987
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