Spare Time

The leisure of which U. S. architects have had so much lately was put to good use last week. In Manhattan, for the benefit of unemployed draughtsmen, a first Architects Hobby Show was held in Knoedler's Gallery, which usually devotes its chaste walls to the very expensive output of the French Impressionists. It cost $1 to see what famed architects do in their spare time.

It was immediately apparent that Walter Damrosch's onetime son-in-law, Architect Pleasants Pennington, raises pigeons. A bamboo aviary of them (built in spare time by Architect Mogens Tvede), surrounded by flowering plants, occupied the centre of the first of two exhibition rooms.

As might be expected the commonest hobby was watercolor sketching. Dozens of renderings of Rome, Spain and the coast of Maine hung on the walls. Architects Frederick Ackermann and John Russell Pope showed photographs. There were other hobbies, more original.

The late great Stanford White's son Lawrence proudly exhibited three volumes of his translation of Dante's Divine Comedy.

Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes showed a copy of his six-volume Iconography of Manhattan Island, a most elaborately illustrated history of New York that usually brings from $1,000 to $1,500 at auction and is known all over the world.

Ely Jacques Kahn presented a chafing dish full of spaghetti and a bowl of French dressing in token of his interest in cooking. After the second day the French dressing was removed.

Oval Joseph Urban exhibited a large wood carving of a madonna & child.

Julius Gregory took time off from designing country homes to hammer out a pair of silver sugar tongs.

Modernist Architect William Lescaze showed a metal ash tray and a flower holder.

Joel Barber carved his own wooden decoys: a swan, two mallards, a pintail.

Roger H. Bullard offered a case full of transfixed butterflies. Christopher Grant LaFarge is another butterfly hunter, while his son gaunt Christopher ("Kipper") LaFarge exhibited some costume designs for eunuchs.

Bristle-haired Raymond Hood exhibited a miniature bed as a symbol of his hobby which the gallery explained was Sleeping.

Kenneth Murchison, famed chairman of the Beaux Arts Ball, showed an orchestra score.

Apparently golfing with prospective clients is too much part of an architect's regular work to be offered as a hobby. Other sports were represented.

William Van Alen (Chrysler Building) showed a 4 1/2 Ib. black bass and William F. Lamb (Empire State) a collection of China pigs.

Architects Bradley Delehanty and Frederic C. Thomas flaunted their racing silks & caps in the face of Depression.

Kerr Rainsford, whose hobbies are collecting armor and singing Christmas

Carols in public, showed a 15th Century broadsword.

A potent swordsman is Architect William Hamilton Russell. When not designing country houses for tycoons in Newport, Islip and Wheatley Hills, he represents the U. S. on international fencing teams. He was U. S. champion in 1916, 1919, 1923. He was on the Olympic Team at Antwerp in 1920 and Paris in 1924. Last week he exhibited a whole case full of medals and a gold-plated rapier from his admirers in the Fencers' Club.

Julian C. Levi also hung up a pair of foils, a mask, and a brass French fireman's helmet, trophy of the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, whose disdain for the pompiers of the city is expressed in their marching song:

On dit quelquefois an village Qu'un casque qa, sert a rien du tout,--. . . Ca sert a donner du courage A cenx qui n'en ont pas du tout--pas du tout*

* They sometimes say in our village That a helmet has no use at all ... It serves to give courage To those who have none.

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