Case Study Houses
The Case Study Houses were experiments in American residential architecture sponsored by Arts & Architecture magazine, which commissioned major architects of the day, including Richard Neutra, Raphael Soriano, Craig Ellwood and Ray Eames, Pierre Koenig, Eero Saarinen, A. Quincy Jones, Edward Killingsworth, Ralph Rapson to design and build inexpensive and efficient model homes for the United States residential housing boom caused by the end of World War II and the return of millions of soldiers; the program ran intermittently from 1945 until 1966. The first six houses attracted more than 350,000 visitors. While not all 36 designs were built, most of those that were constructed were built in Los Angeles, one was built in San Rafael, Northern California and one in Phoenix, Arizona. Of the unbuilt houses #19 was to have been built in Atherton, in the San Francisco Bay Area, while #27 was to have been built on the east coast, in Smoke Rise, New Jersey. A number of the houses appeared in the magazine in iconic black-and-white photographs by architectural photographer Julius Shulman.
Entenza, John "Announcement: The Case Study House Program". Arts and Architecture McCoy, Esther. "Case Study Houses". 2nd edition. 1 June 1977, ISBN 978-0912158716, Hennessey & Ingalls Smith, Elizabeth A. T.. Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses. Cambridge: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0262692137. Smith and Peter Goessel. Case Study Houses: The Complete CSH Program. Taschen. ISBN 978-3822864128. Smith, Elizabeth A. T.. Case Study Houses. Taschen. ISBN 978-3-8228-4617-9. Travers, David "About Arts & Architecture" Arts & Architecture website - accessed March 3, 2009 Case Study House Program of Arts & Architecture Article interviewing Rodney Walker's sons Info on CSH and Shulman at KCET Info on Case Study House 26, San Rafael
Harry Bertoia
Harry Bertoia, was an Italian-born American artist, sound art sculptor, modern furniture designer. At the age of 15, given the choice to stay in drought ridden Italy or move to Detroit, Harry chose to adventure to America and live with his older brother, Oreste. After learning the language and the bus schedule, he enrolled in Cass Technical High School, where he studied art and design and learned the skill of handmade jewelry making ca.1930-1936. At that time, there were three jewelry and metals teachers Louise Green, Mary Davis, Greta Pack. In 1936 he attended the Art School of the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts, now known as the College for Creative Studies; the following year in 1937 he received a scholarship to study at the Cranbrook Academy of Art where he encountered Walter Gropius, Edmund N. Bacon and Ray and Charles Eames and Florence Knoll for the first time. Starting out as a painting student but soon being asked to reopen the metal workshop in 1939, Bertoia taught jewelry design and metal work.
As the war effort made metal a rare and expensive commodity he began to focus his efforts on jewelry making designing and creating wedding rings for Ray Eames and Edmund Bacon's wife Ruth. When all the metal was taken up by war efforts, he became the graphics instructor. Still at Cranbrook, in 1943 he married Brigitta Valentiner, moved to California to work for Charles and Ray at the Molded Plywood Division of the Evans Product Company. Bertoia worked there until 1946 sold his jewelry and monotypes until obtaining work with the Electronics Naval Lab in La Jolla. In 1950, he was invited to move to Pennsylvania to work with Florence Knoll. During this period he designed five wire pieces that became known as the Bertoia Collection for Knoll. Among these was the famous diamond chair, a fluid, sculptural form made from a welded lattice work of steel. In Bertoia's own words, "If you look at these chairs, they are made of air, like sculpture. Space passes right through them." The chairs were produced with varying degrees of upholstery over their light grid-work, they were handmade at first because a suitable mass production process could not be found.
The chair edge utilized two thin wires welded on either side of the mesh seat. This design had been granted a patent to the Eames for the wire chair produced by Herman Miller. Herman Miller won and Bertoia & Knoll redesigned the seat edge, using a thicker, single wire, grinding down the edge of the seat wires at a smooth angle—the same way the chairs are produced today. Nonetheless, the commercial success enjoyed by Bertoia's diamond chair was immediate, it was only in 2005 that Bertoia's asymmetrical chaise longue was introduced at the Milan Furniture Fair and sold out immediately. In the mid-1950s, the chairs being produced by Knoll sold so well that the lump sum payment arrangement from Knoll allowed Bertoia to devote himself to sculpture, he produced over 50 commissioned public sculptures, many of which are still viewable today. In the 1960s, he began experimenting with sounding sculptures of tall vertical rods on flat bases, he renovated the old barn into an atypical concert hall and put in about 100 of his favorite "Sonambient" sculptures.
Bertoia played the pieces in a number of concerts and produced a series of eleven albums, all entitled "Sonambient," of the music made by his art, manipulated by his hands along with the elements of nature. In the late 1990s, his daughter found a large collection of near mint condition original albums stored away on his property in Pennsylvania; these were sold as collector's items. In 2015, these Sonambient recordings are being re-issued by Important Records as a box set with a booklet of the history and unseen photos. Bertoia's work can be found in The Addison Gallery of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Dallas Public Library, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, the Nasher Sculpture Center, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Reading Public Museum, the Allentown Art Museum, Milwaukee art museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Vero Beach Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center.
Bertoia's "Sunburst Sculpture" owned by the Joslyn Art Museum was installed in the Joslyn's Fountain Court. It is now located in the lobby of the Milton R. Abrahams Branch of the Omaha Public Library. Lord Palumbo owns several Bertoia works. Bertoia's "Sounding Sculpture" can be found in the plaza of The Aon Center, Chicago's third tallest building. Another "Sounding Sculpture" smaller than the one mentioned above, is featured in the Rose Terrace of the Chicago Botanic Garden, a third similar to the piece in Chicago called "Sounding Piece" was until 2003 on display at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York; as explained in October 3, 1995 piece in the weekly "Dear Uncle Ezra" column of the university newspaper: Dear Uncle Ezra, What is that sound coming from the Johnson Museum? It's a pingy type sound that I guess could be some kind of wind chime but it seems like it's coming from the building itself. — Just wondering Dear Chiming In, Well, it is coming from the building itself.
What you hear is "Sounding Piece", a sculpture by Harry Bertoia that permanently resides on the sculpture court
United States
The United States of America known as the United States or America, is a country composed of 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, various possessions. At 3.8 million square miles, the United States is the world's third or fourth largest country by total area and is smaller than the entire continent of Europe's 3.9 million square miles. With a population of over 327 million people, the U. S. is the third most populous country. The capital is Washington, D. C. and the largest city by population is New York City. Forty-eight states and the capital's federal district are contiguous in North America between Canada and Mexico; the State of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east and across the Bering Strait from Russia to the west. The State of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean; the U. S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, stretching across nine official time zones. The diverse geography and wildlife of the United States make it one of the world's 17 megadiverse countries.
Paleo-Indians migrated from Siberia to the North American mainland at least 12,000 years ago. European colonization began in the 16th century; the United States emerged from the thirteen British colonies established along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the colonies following the French and Indian War led to the American Revolution, which began in 1775, the subsequent Declaration of Independence in 1776; the war ended in 1783 with the United States becoming the first country to gain independence from a European power. The current constitution was adopted in 1788, with the first ten amendments, collectively named the Bill of Rights, being ratified in 1791 to guarantee many fundamental civil liberties; the United States embarked on a vigorous expansion across North America throughout the 19th century, acquiring new territories, displacing Native American tribes, admitting new states until it spanned the continent by 1848. During the second half of the 19th century, the Civil War led to the abolition of slavery.
By the end of the century, the United States had extended into the Pacific Ocean, its economy, driven in large part by the Industrial Revolution, began to soar. The Spanish–American War and World War I confirmed the country's status as a global military power; the United States emerged from World War II as a global superpower, the first country to develop nuclear weapons, the only country to use them in warfare, a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. Sweeping civil rights legislation, notably the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, outlawed discrimination based on race or color. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union competed in the Space Race, culminating with the 1969 U. S. Moon landing; the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the world's sole superpower. The United States is the world's oldest surviving federation, it is a representative democracy.
The United States is a founding member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States, other international organizations. The United States is a developed country, with the world's largest economy by nominal GDP and second-largest economy by PPP, accounting for a quarter of global GDP; the U. S. economy is post-industrial, characterized by the dominance of services and knowledge-based activities, although the manufacturing sector remains the second-largest in the world. The United States is the world's largest importer and the second largest exporter of goods, by value. Although its population is only 4.3% of the world total, the U. S. holds 31% of the total wealth in the world, the largest share of global wealth concentrated in a single country. Despite wide income and wealth disparities, the United States continues to rank high in measures of socioeconomic performance, including average wage, human development, per capita GDP, worker productivity.
The United States is the foremost military power in the world, making up a third of global military spending, is a leading political and scientific force internationally. In 1507, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller produced a world map on which he named the lands of the Western Hemisphere America in honor of the Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci; the first documentary evidence of the phrase "United States of America" is from a letter dated January 2, 1776, written by Stephen Moylan, Esq. to George Washington's aide-de-camp and Muster-Master General of the Continental Army, Lt. Col. Joseph Reed. Moylan expressed his wish to go "with full and ample powers from the United States of America to Spain" to seek assistance in the revolutionary war effort; the first known publication of the phrase "United States of America" was in an anonymous essay in The Virginia Gazette newspaper in Williamsburg, Virginia, on April 6, 1776. The second draft of the Articles of Confederation, prepared by John Dickinson and completed by June 17, 1776, at the latest, declared "The name of this Confederation shall be the'United States of America'".
The final version of the Articles sent to the states for ratification in late 1777 contains the sentence "The Stile of this Confederacy shall be'The United States of America'". In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote the phrase "UNITED STATES OF AMERICA" in all capitalized letters in the headline of his "original Rough draught" of the Declaration of Independence; this draft of the document did not surface unti
Stockholm
Stockholm is the capital of Sweden and the most populous urban area in the Nordic countries. The city stretches across fourteen islands. Just outside the city and along the coast is the island chain of the Stockholm archipelago; the area has been settled since the Stone Age, in the 6th millennium BC, was founded as a city in 1252 by Swedish statesman Birger Jarl. It is the capital of Stockholm County. Stockholm is the cultural, media and economic centre of Sweden; the Stockholm region alone accounts for over a third of the country's GDP, is among the top 10 regions in Europe by GDP per capita. It is an important global city, the main centre for corporate headquarters in the Nordic region; the city is home to some of Europe's top ranking universities, such as the Stockholm School of Economics, Karolinska Institute and Royal Institute of Technology. It hosts the annual Nobel Prize ceremonies and banquet at the Stockholm Concert Hall and Stockholm City Hall. One of the city's most prized museums, the Vasa Museum, is the most visited non-art museum in Scandinavia.
The Stockholm metro, opened in 1950, is well known for the decor of its stations. Sweden's national football arena is located north of the city centre, in Solna. Ericsson Globe, the national indoor arena, is in the southern part of the city; the city was the host of the 1912 Summer Olympics, hosted the equestrian portion of the 1956 Summer Olympics otherwise held in Melbourne, Australia. Stockholm is the seat of the Swedish government and most of its agencies, including the highest courts in the judiciary, the official residencies of the Swedish monarch and the Prime Minister; the government has its seat in the Rosenbad building, the Riksdag is seated in the Parliament House, the Prime Minister's residence is adjacent at Sager House. Stockholm Palace is the official residence and principal workplace of the Swedish monarch, while Drottningholm Palace, a World Heritage Site on the outskirts of Stockholm, serves as the Royal Family's private residence. After the Ice Age, around 8,000 BC, there were many people living in what is today the Stockholm area, but as temperatures dropped, inhabitants moved south.
Thousands of years as the ground thawed, the climate became tolerable and the lands became fertile, people began to migrate back to the North. At the intersection of the Baltic Sea and lake Mälaren is an archipelago site where the Old Town of Stockholm was first built from about 1000 CE by Vikings, they had a positive trade impact on the area because of the trade routes they created. Stockholm's location appears in Norse sagas as Agnafit, in Heimskringla in connection with the legendary king Agne; the earliest written mention of the name Stockholm dates from 1252, by which time the mines in Bergslagen made it an important site in the iron trade. The first part of the name means log in Swedish, although it may be connected to an old German word meaning fortification; the second part of the name means islet, is thought to refer to the islet Helgeandsholmen in central Stockholm. According to Eric Chronicles the city is said to have been founded by Birger Jarl to protect Sweden from sea invasions made by Karelians after the pillage of Sigtuna on Lake Mälaren in the summer of 1187.
Stockholm's core, the present Old Town was built on the central island next to Helgeandsholmen from the mid-13th century onward. The city rose to prominence as a result of the Baltic trade of the Hanseatic League. Stockholm developed strong economic and cultural linkages with Lübeck, Gdańsk, Visby and Riga during this time. Between 1296 and 1478 Stockholm's City Council was made up of 24 members, half of whom were selected from the town's German-speaking burghers; the strategic and economic importance of the city made Stockholm an important factor in relations between the Danish Kings of the Kalmar Union and the national independence movement in the 15th century. The Danish King Christian II was able to enter the city in 1520. On 8 November 1520 a massacre of opposition figures called the Stockholm Bloodbath took place and set off further uprisings that led to the breakup of the Kalmar Union. With the accession of Gustav Vasa in 1523 and the establishment of a royal power, the population of Stockholm began to grow, reaching 10,000 by 1600.
The 17th century saw Sweden grow into a major European power, reflected in the development of the city of Stockholm. From 1610 to 1680 the population multiplied sixfold. In 1634, Stockholm became the official capital of the Swedish empire. Trading rules were created that gave Stockholm an essential monopoly over trade between foreign merchants and other Swedish and Scandinavian territories. In 1697, Tre Kronor was replaced by Stockholm Palace. In 1710, a plague killed about 20,000 of the population. After the end of the Great Northern War the city stagnated. Population growth halted and economic growth slowed; the city was in shock after having lost its place as the capital of a Great power. However, Stockholm maintained its role as the political centre of Sweden and continued to develop culturally under Gustav III. By the second half of the 19th century, Stockholm had regained its leading economic role. New industries emerged and Stockholm was transformed into an important trade and service centre as well as a key gateway point within Sweden.
The population grew during this time through immigration. At the end
Bauhaus
The Staatliches Bauhaus known as the Bauhaus, was a German art school operational from 1919 to 1933 that combined crafts and the fine arts, was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught. The Bauhaus was founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar; the German term Bauhaus—literally "building house"—was understood as meaning "School of Building", but in spite of its name and the fact that its founder was an architect, the Bauhaus did not have an architecture department. Nonetheless, it was founded upon the idea of creating a Gesamtkunstwerk in which all the arts, including architecture, would be brought together; the Bauhaus style became one of the most influential currents in modern design, Modernist architecture and art and architectural education. The Bauhaus movement had a profound influence upon subsequent developments in art, graphic design, interior design, industrial design, typography; the school existed in three German cities—Weimar, from 1919 to 1925. Although the school was closed, the staff continued to spread its idealistic precepts as they left Germany and emigrated all over the world.
The changes of venue and leadership resulted in a constant shifting of focus, technique and politics. For example, the pottery shop was discontinued when the school moved from Weimar to Dessau though it had been an important revenue source. After Germany's defeat in World War I and the establishment of the Weimar Republic, a renewed liberal spirit allowed an upsurge of radical experimentation in all the arts, suppressed by the old regime. Many Germans of left-wing views were influenced by the cultural experimentation that followed the Russian Revolution, such as constructivism; such influences can be overstated: Gropius did not share these radical views, said that Bauhaus was apolitical. Just as important was the influence of the 19th-century English designer William Morris, who had argued that art should meet the needs of society and that there should be no distinction between form and function. Thus, the Bauhaus style known as the International Style, was marked by the absence of ornamentation and by harmony between the function of an object or a building and its design.
However, the most important influence on Bauhaus was modernism, a cultural movement whose origins lay as early as the 1880s, which had made its presence felt in Germany before the World War, despite the prevailing conservatism. The design innovations associated with Gropius and the Bauhaus—the radically simplified forms, the rationality and functionality, the idea that mass production was reconcilable with the individual artistic spirit—were partly developed in Germany before the Bauhaus was founded; the German national designers' organization Deutscher Werkbund was formed in 1907 by Hermann Muthesius to harness the new potentials of mass production, with a mind towards preserving Germany's economic competitiveness with England. In its first seven years, the Werkbund came to be regarded as the authoritative body on questions of design in Germany, was copied in other countries. Many fundamental questions of craftsmanship versus mass production, the relationship of usefulness and beauty, the practical purpose of formal beauty in a commonplace object, whether or not a single proper form could exist, were argued out among its 1,870 members.
The entire movement of German architectural modernism was known as Neues Bauen. Beginning in June 1907, Peter Behrens' pioneering industrial design work for the German electrical company AEG integrated art and mass production on a large scale, he designed consumer products, standardized parts, created clean-lined designs for the company's graphics, developed a consistent corporate identity, built the modernist landmark AEG Turbine Factory, made full use of newly developed materials such as poured concrete and exposed steel. Behrens was a founding member of the Werkbund, both Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer worked for him in this period; the Bauhaus was founded at a time when the German zeitgeist had turned from emotional Expressionism to the matter-of-fact New Objectivity. An entire group of working architects, including Erich Mendelsohn, Bruno Taut and Hans Poelzig, turned away from fanciful experimentation, turned toward rational, sometimes standardized building. Beyond the Bauhaus, many other significant German-speaking architects in the 1920s responded to the same aesthetic issues and material possibilities as the school.
They responded to the promise of a "minimal dwelling" written into the new Weimar Constitution. Ernst May, Bruno Taut and Martin Wagner, among others, built large housing blocks in Frankfurt and Berlin; the acceptance of modernist design into everyday life was the subject of publicity campaigns, well-attended public exhibitions like the Weissenhof Estate and sometimes fierce public debate. The Vkhutemas, the Russian state art and technical school founded in 1920 in Moscow, has been compared to Bauhaus. Founded a year after the Bauhaus school, Vkhutemas has close parallels to the German Bauhaus in its intent and scope; the two schools were
Wayzata, Minnesota
Wayzata is a city in Hennepin County, United States. It is in the western part of the Minneapolis–Saint Paul metro area; the name Wayzata is derived from a Lakota Sioux phrase meaning "North Shore". Located on the shores of Lake Minnetonka, the city is a popular tourist destination; as of the 2010 census, the population was 3,688. Wayzata High School, located to the north in Plymouth, was ranked by Newsweek on its list of the 1000 top public high schools in America in 2012; the Mdewakanton Dakota, a sub-tribe of the Dakota nation, inhabited the area around Lake Minnetonka beginning around 1700 CE. They treasured the "Big Water" as an endowed hunting and fishing ground and protected the land from the rival Chippewa tribe. While these natives had been living in the region for hundreds of years prior, the land was claimed by Spain and France, who sold it to the United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. For many years, the nearest Euro-American settlement was Fort Saint Anthony, it wasn't until the 1851 signing of the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux that the lands west of the Mississippi River were opened for land claims to be filed.
Tension between the settlers and the natives in the area rose in the 1850s and climaxed during the Dakota War of 1862. After the war, most Dakotas were forced to flee the area. Although the Dakota no longer live in the area, their legacy lives on in the name of the city. Waziya was their god of a giant who blew the cold winds from his mouth. With the suffix ta added, the name means "North Shore." The name Wayzata is a Euro-American translation of this phrase. In 1852, two pioneer families settled on the present site of Wayzata, one of them being the family of Oscar E. Garrison. Garrison built a cabin at what is now the intersection of Lake Street and Broadway Avenue in downtown Wayzata. In 1854 he filed a claim for most of present-day Wayzata proper. Wayzata was established that year. In 1855, Wayzata had an influx of settlers, who built a hotel and a blacksmith shop. Most of these early settlers made their living in agriculture by clear-cutting the trees to grow corn and wheat. Since the eastern forests had been exhausted of their supply, ginseng root was in great demand as an aphrodisiac in the Orient.
When ginseng was discovered in the hardwood forests near Wayzata, the town became a distribution center for roots collected around the lake. In 1857, Wayzata's growing economy was nearly terminated by a locust plague. Growth came to the city when the Saint Paul & Pacific Railroad extended a line to Wayzata from Saint Paul; this made Wayzata the gateway to Lake Minnetonka. After the Civil War, vacationers from around the world began arriving to enjoy the lake's natural environment and cool climate. With numerous trains scheduled for arrival in Wayzata, hotels were built around the lake. One such hotel, the Maurer House-West Hotel, was built. An estimated twenty-thousand vacationers flocked to the area each year, spending entire summers at seventeen hotels scattered around the 125 miles of the lake shore. Paddle-wheel steamboats were used to bring visitors from the train station at Wayzata to many of the hotels; the largest of these steamboats, the Belle of Minnetonka, was 300 feet long and could purportedly accommodate up to 2,500 passengers.
This era referred to as Lake Minnetonka's "Glory Years," reached its peak in 1882 when James J. Hill, now owning the Saint Paul & Pacific Railroad, built the 400-room Hotel Lafayette in Minnetonka Beach, about five miles west of the town. In 1881 Wayzata broke away from the Minnetonka Township and became a separate governmental entity as a reaction to the roaring tourist-vacationer lifestyle; the first act of the Village Council was to ban saloons, the second was to have the railroad tracks moved away from the downtown business district. An 1883 town law required the tracks to be relocated 300 feet from the shoreline. Hill, the chairman of the railroad, ignored the law. In 1889, the Council filed a lawsuit forcing the railroad to comply. Hill argued that he had state law on his side and that, if the town continued its lawsuit, he would move the train station nearly a mile east of town. In 1891, the Minnesota Supreme Court denied the legality of the law, Hill, as promised, moved the station to flat land beneath today's Bushaway Road railroad bridge.
The village of Wayzata was taken off the map, for the next fifteen years the town's economy grew. In 1905, the village council voted for a reconciliation ordinance, Hill responded with the construction of a new depot near the business district. By 1890, the Glory Years of Lake Minnetonka had reached their apex. A nationwide economic depression and the migration of tourists to newer resort areas in the West transformed Wayzata into a residential community. Summer cottages began to appear along the shores of Lake Minnetonka during this time; some of the largest "cottages" were constructed in Wayzata in the neighborhood known as Ferndale and along Bushaway Road. As the cottage era continued, the community of Wayzata became residential, with small commercial centers at each end of Lake Street. By the 1920s, motorboating had become popular, Wayzata had two nationally renowned boat builders located on the shore of Lake Minnetonka. Weekends brought thousands of spectators to the lake to watch boat races.
In the 1930s, today's U. S. Route 12 reached Wayzata as a hard-surface road
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1861 in response to the increasing industrialization of the United States, MIT adopted a European polytechnic university model and stressed laboratory instruction in applied science and engineering; the Institute is a land-grant, sea-grant, space-grant university, with a campus that extends more than a mile alongside the Charles River. Its influence in the physical sciences and architecture, more in biology, linguistics and social science and art, has made it one of the most prestigious universities in the world. MIT is ranked among the world's top universities; as of March 2019, 93 Nobel laureates, 26 Turing Award winners, 8 Fields Medalists have been affiliated with MIT as alumni, faculty members, or researchers. In addition, 58 National Medal of Science recipients, 29 National Medals of Technology and Innovation recipients, 50 MacArthur Fellows, 73 Marshall Scholars, 45 Rhodes Scholars, 41 astronauts, 16 Chief Scientists of the US Air Force have been affiliated with MIT.
The school has a strong entrepreneurial culture, the aggregated annual revenues of companies founded by MIT alumni would rank as the tenth-largest economy in the world. MIT is a member of the Association of American Universities. In 1859, a proposal was submitted to the Massachusetts General Court to use newly filled lands in Back Bay, Boston for a "Conservatory of Art and Science", but the proposal failed. A charter for the incorporation of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proposed by William Barton Rogers, was signed by the governor of Massachusetts on April 10, 1861. Rogers, a professor from the University of Virginia, wanted to establish an institution to address rapid scientific and technological advances, he did not wish to found a professional school, but a combination with elements of both professional and liberal education, proposing that: The true and only practicable object of a polytechnic school is, as I conceive, the teaching, not of the minute details and manipulations of the arts, which can be done only in the workshop, but the inculcation of those scientific principles which form the basis and explanation of them, along with this, a full and methodical review of all their leading processes and operations in connection with physical laws.
The Rogers Plan reflected the German research university model, emphasizing an independent faculty engaged in research, as well as instruction oriented around seminars and laboratories. Two days after MIT was chartered, the first battle of the Civil War broke out. After a long delay through the war years, MIT's first classes were held in the Mercantile Building in Boston in 1865; the new institute was founded as part of the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act to fund institutions "to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes" and was a land-grant school. In 1863 under the same act, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts founded the Massachusetts Agricultural College, which developed as the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In 1866, the proceeds from land sales went toward new buildings in the Back Bay. MIT was informally called "Boston Tech"; the institute adopted the European polytechnic university model and emphasized laboratory instruction from an early date. Despite chronic financial problems, the institute saw growth in the last two decades of the 19th century under President Francis Amasa Walker.
Programs in electrical, chemical and sanitary engineering were introduced, new buildings were built, the size of the student body increased to more than one thousand. The curriculum drifted with less focus on theoretical science; the fledgling school still suffered from chronic financial shortages which diverted the attention of the MIT leadership. During these "Boston Tech" years, MIT faculty and alumni rebuffed Harvard University president Charles W. Eliot's repeated attempts to merge MIT with Harvard College's Lawrence Scientific School. There would be at least six attempts to absorb MIT into Harvard. In its cramped Back Bay location, MIT could not afford to expand its overcrowded facilities, driving a desperate search for a new campus and funding; the MIT Corporation approved a formal agreement to merge with Harvard, over the vehement objections of MIT faculty and alumni. However, a 1917 decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court put an end to the merger scheme. In 1916, the MIT administration and the MIT charter crossed the Charles River on the ceremonial barge Bucentaur built for the occasion, to signify MIT's move to a spacious new campus consisting of filled land on a mile-long tract along the Cambridge side of the Charles River.
The neoclassical "New Technology" campus was designed by William W. Bosworth and had been funded by anonymous donations from a mysterious "Mr. Smith", starting in 1912. In January 1920, the donor was revealed to be the industrialist George Eastman of Rochester, New York, who had invented methods of film production and processing, founded Eastman Kodak. Between 1912 and 1920, Eastman donated $20 million in cash and Kodak stock to MIT. In the 1930s, President Karl Taylor Compton and Vice-President Vannevar Bush emphasized the importance of pure sciences like physics and chemistry and reduced the vocational practice required in shops and drafting studios; the Compton reforms "renewed confidence in the ability of the Institute to develop leadership in science as well as in engineering". Unlike Ivy League schools, MIT catered more to middle-class families, depended more on tuition than on endow
