THE NEW PENCIL POINTS January – June 1943

Six-Volume Bound Set

Three Brazilian Houses by Bernard Rudofsky; Furniture by Arne Kartworld, Chicago School of Design, Gilbert Rohde and the Paul Bry Shop; Brazilian Architecture by Oscar Niemeyer, Marcelo & Mitlon Roberto, Correa Lima, Alvaro Vital Brazil and Adhemar Marinho and Carlos Porto; Stores  by Edward D. Stone and Ladislav Rado; Postwar Planning by Serge Chermayeff; Chicago Plans: A Comprehensive Presentation Prepared by Chicago Plan Commission; Marcel Breuer; Prefabrication Special Issue: "The Packaged Building System" by Konrad Wachsmann & Walter Gropius; Houses by Richard Neutra, George Fred Keck, Harwell Hamilton Harris, Milliken & Bevin, Gardner A. Dailey, Eleanor Pepper & George W. Kosmak, Chester E. Nagel House in Austin, TX;  / Patios by Philip Johnson, Josef Frank, William Wilson Wurster, and Oiva Kallio; more

Kenneth Reid [Editor]: THE NEW PENCIL POINTS. East Stroudsburg, PA: Reinhold Publishing Company [Volume 24, Numbers 1 – 6] January – June 1943.  Original editions. Institutional binding with printed spine. Slim quartos. Side stitched printed wrappers. 528 pp. Covers, illustrated articles and advertisments all present. Rear covers missing. Cover designs, layout and typography by Bernard Rudofsky. Non-circulating Public Library bound edition with minimal, yet expected, marks, stamps and institutional wear. A nice reference copy with all advertising matter included.

[6] 8.75 x 11.75 original magazines with 528 pages of vintage American architectural content, including covers and advertisements. "Pencil Points," the forerunner of "Progressive Architecture" embraced the streamline moderne aesthetic in the arts.

Contents include

”Chester [Emil] Nagel (American, 1911- 2007 ) was among the first architects to bring the International Style to Texas. Born in Fredericksburg in 1911, he studied architecture at the University of Texas, graduating in 1934. From 1935 to 1938 he worked as an architect for the National Parks Service, helping to design facilities for Bastrop and Palo Duro state parks.

"In 1939 Nagel received a scholarship to study at the Harvard Graduate School of Design where he came in contact with Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. After receiving his Master's degree from Harvard in 1940 he returned to Austin and, inspired by Gropius' ideas, designed one of the first International Style structures in the state, a house for himself and his wife on Churchill Drive.

During the war years, Nagel was assigned to the Army Corps of Engineers in Bastrop, and from 1943 to 1945 he worked as a test engineer on the new Convair B-36 bomber in Ft. Worth. After the war he returned to Austin and collaborated with Dan J. Driscoll on the Barton Springs Bathhouse (1945). In 1946 he was called back to Harvard to be Gropius' assistant and later became an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Design. He gave up his teaching position in 1951 to join The Architect's Collaborative (TAC) and from 1951 to 1953 he headed the TAC offices in Washington. Nagel's designs, many of which were collaborative ventures with Gropius, included the Valley House in Lexington, Massachusetts (1940), the Overholt Thoracic Clinic in Boston (1955), and the American Embassy in Athens (1956). In 1958 he opened his own practice in Massachusetts and during the course of the next decade designed a series of projects in Florida, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands as well as several buildings for the Harvard medical and dental schools."

Quoted from Christopher Long, n.d., from the Alexander Architectural Archive, The University of Texas at Austin.

The Wallace E. Pratt House, also known as Ship On The Desert was the residence of Wallace Pratt in what is now Guadalupe Mountains National Park in far western Texas.

Pratt, a petroleum geologist for the Humble Oil & Refining Company, had previously built the Wallace Pratt Lodge in McKittrick Canyon a couple of miles to the north in the Guadalupe Mountains. Finding the cabin site to be remote and prone to being cut off by flooding, Pratt started construction of a new, modern residence on the east slope of the mountains. Work on the residence started in 1941. The house was designed by Long Island architect Newton Bevin, who lived for a time at the site with his wife, and built by contractor Ed Birdsall. Work was stopped by World War II, but resumed in 1945 and was completed the same year. In contrast to Pratt's rustic canyon cabin, the house, which Pratt named the Ship On The Desert, is an International Style house with horizontal lines and extensive glazing.

Only 16 feet (4.9 m) wide and 110 feet (34 m) long, the house provides broad views to the east over the plains and the west to the mountains. The majority of the house is on a single level, with a "captain's bridge" over the dining room giving access to a rooftop terrace. A detached garage contained a guest bedroom. Apart from glass, the predominant material was local limestone in several shades.

Pratt and his wife, Iris, lived at the Ship On The Desert until 1963, when Pratt's health dictated a move to Tucson, Arizona.[3] The house was donated to the new park along with 5,632 acres (2,279 ha) of lands in the northern part of the proposed park by the Pratts between 1959 and 1961. It was used as a residence for National Park Service employees, and has been determined to be eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places. The house is occasionally open for tours sponsored by the National Park Service.

The house was featured on the National Trust for Historic Preservation's 2018 list of most-endangered historic locations.

The first issue of the legendary architecture journal Pencil Points appeared in 1920 as "a journal for the drafting room." Born out of The Architectural Review, and merged with Progressive Architecture in 1943, Pencil Points became the leading voice in architectural and graphic design when modernism flourished, introducing key players from America and Europe. It also established the agenda in architectural theory: multi volume pieces by John Harbeson, Talbot Hamlin, Hugh Ferriss, and others dealt with major issues that are still relevant today-architectural education and practice, small-house design and portable housing, city planning, and the influence (or not) of modernism. Items like George Nelson's series of reports from Europe in the early 1930s, H. Van Buren Magonigle's diatribes against modernism, and a glossary of Ecole des Beaux-Arts terms sit side-by-side with the best architectural drawings and photographs of the 20th century.

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