The imagined histories of twenty-five architectural drawings and models told through
reminiscences stories conversations letters and monologues. Even when an architectural
drawing does not show any human figures we can imagine many different characters just off the
page: architects artists onlookers clients builders developers philanthropists-working
observing admiring arguing. In Stories from Architecture Philippa Lewis captures some of
these personalities through reminiscences anecdotes conversations letters and monologues
that collectively offer the imagined histories of twenty-five architectural drawings. Some of
these untold stories are factual like Frank Lloyd Wright's correspondence with a Wisconsin
librarian regarding her $5 000 dream home or letters written by the English architect John
Nash to his irascible aristocratic client. Others recount a fictional if credible scenario by
placing these drawings-and with them their characters-into their immediate social context. For
instance the dilemmas facing a Regency couple who are considering a move to a suburban villa
a request from the office of Richard Neutra for an assistant to measure Josef von Sternberg's
Rolls-Royce so that the director's beloved vehicle might fit into the garage being designed by
his architect a teenager dreaming of a life away from parental supervision by gazing at a
gadget-filled bachelor pad in Playboy magazine even a policeman recording the ground plans of
the house of a murder scene. The drawings reproduced in color are all sourced from the
Drawing Matter collection in Somerset UK and are fascinating objects in themselves but Lewis
shifts our attention beyond the image to other possible histories that linger invisible
beyond the page and in the process animates not just a series of archival documents but the
writing of architectural history.
