Editor’s Introduction

Abstract

ARCHITECTURE often sparks strong opinions. Who has not glanced at a residence or entered a museum and felt either admiration (“I love that house!”) or dislike (“That place is SO ugly!”)? The livelihood of architectural historians, journalists, and reviewers of the built environment has long rested on their ability to evaluate buildings for professional and avocational readers alike. One thing is certain, though, opinions about a building’s success vary widely and often relate to perceptions about whether it expresses an “original” idea in wood, stone, glass, metal, and other materials. But what is original? Can repurposed design elements or architectural fabric count as something new? Does critical acclaim or functional utility even matter if the built environment satisfies its patrons? Articles in this issue of Winterthur Portfolio discuss two buildings, a little-known private home and a well-known museum, and the varied responses to the structures’ mimetic attributes. Amy D. Finstein’s “A Gropius-Breuer House like Notable Others: Consumerism, Copying, and Connoisseurship in an Unsung Commission” and Sandra Tomc’s “The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: AVenice Spectacle” highlight buildings that were, in their own ways, intentionally not “original” but rather demonstrated international design conversations in American settings. We see individuals ranging from a wealthy socialite to an up-and-coming doctor incorporating European references into their American buildings. By taking a closer look at these two projects and their patrons, the contexts for their creation, rather than value judgments such as original or derivative, take center stage. By highlighting the Abele House in Framingham, Massachusetts (1941), as an important material expression of midcentury consumer culture, Finstein counters critics’ and scholars’ dismissal of it as a not altogether successful mashup of famed architects’ Walter Gropius’s and Marcel Breuer’s own houses nearby. She argues that, for Abele, selecting elements