The Uses of Daylight

2012-05-14T15:45:00-04:00

For retailers, daylight offered one additional advantage the advertisements did not mention: the implication of moral virtue. Large department stores were described as cesspools of fraud, filth, poor working conditions, child labor, anti-competitiveness, potential press censorship (because of their advertising clout), disease, drunkenness, savagery, prostitution, suicide and darkness. A well-lit interior, it was said, could do much to counter such negative associations.

Earlier this year on Places, Keith Eggener assessed the career of the now forgotten early 20th-century Kansas City architect Louis Curtiss, and argued that Curtiss's obscurity has less to do with intrinsic merit than with the politics of professional reputation. In a new article examining the Boley Building — a department store which featured one of the first glass curtain walls in America — he makes good on his claim that Curtiss's legacy deserves new attention.

The Midwestern Maybeck

2012-02-07T05:46:00-05:00

A dandy bedecked in flashy all-white outfits and a pince-nez, chain-smoking custom-made cigarettes that he ordered from a New York manufacturer in lots of 10,000... an early devotee of the motorcar, president of the local Automobile Club, and a notably fast and reckless driver... He paid his rent in gold coins, before moving to an opulently furnished, Oriental-themed downtown Kansas City apartment/studio building of his own design.

Why is Louis Curtiss so much less celebrated than Bernard Maybeck?

On Places, Keith Eggener examines the career of the Kansas City architect, "designer of some of the earliest buildings in the world to employ caisson foundations, rolled steel columns and glass curtain-walls," who nonetheless remains a relatively obscure figure, well outside the canon of architectural history.

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The Uses of Daylight

The Midwestern Maybeck