MUSEUM TREASURE
Architectural Archive's craftsmen and artists have kept the old world tradition of manufacturing. Detailed drawings are very important and is our first step in our commissions, a traditional first step method of presenting our product. Renders and drawings are shown to the clients for approval explaining each step of a job commission.
A-Archive has kept the old Artisan tradition of hand carving our patterns and models using the same fine cuts of the great craftsmen in the Renaissance era 100s of years ago.
Above: examples of the hundreds of drawings we have made for our customers. We create these detailed drawings to show our clients exactly what to expect as a finished product.
Architectural Archive plays an important part in the film industry. Our artifacts, walls and chandeliers have appeared in more than one hundred featured films and commercials.
The pictures above shown from Steven Speilberg's massive set for the movie "The Haunting of Hill House," we have supplied over 70 lighting fixtures for this movie alone.
Without exception, these great homes from America's Gilded Age are wonderful and unique windows into a time of unprecedented change and creativity in American culture. A time when the explosive growth in technology made some wealthy and promised a utopia where individuals could develop to their highest and best purpose. A time when, for many Americans, all of human history seemed to point to America and its destiny to bring Western culture to its ultimate expression.
Fortunately for us and future generations, most of these homes have been preserved as museums and are now part of our common cultural heritage. Without them our appreciation and understanding of this fascinating period in American history would be severely diminished.
At Architectural Archive we consider ourselves heirs of a great Western Tradition. We have traced cultural linage from the Greeks, through the Roman Empire, to the European Renaissance, particularly the Venetian Renaissance. America's upper classes and merchant classes traveled the world visiting the great European cities and the ancient sites of the Mediterranean, as part of a Grand Tour, collecting and honoring western cultural heritage. we have collected examples and have followed the tradition of Venice's democratic society of well-to-do merchants and traders who collected the world's wealth, loved architecture and enjoyed a strong sense of public responsibility, appealed to them on the basis that it was both what they were becoming and what they aspired to.
Architectural Archive gathers inpsiraton from the extensive studies of The World's Columbian Exposition have shaped our company in the great designs of the American Guilded age where America's most prominent architects and artists, backed by the wealth of America's industrial revolution, built a literal representation of America's Gilded Age with its unique blend of technology and Western Tradition. Perhaps the best illustration of this blending of technology with a sense of Western Tradition can be found in the grand facades of the exposition. Inside they displayed the very latest in technology but the facades were given grand names like the Palace of Electricity and the Palace of Mechanic Arts. The White City, as the Exposition came to be known, was a temporary stage set of monumental proportions where Americans meant to show themselves and the world that America was the rightful heir to, and the highest expression of, the Western traditions and virtues presaged by earlier societies. Never mind that virtually all of these architects and artists had studied abroad, at places like the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. They studied abroad not to mimic Europe, but to pick up the threads of the arts and culture from earlier Western societies in order to more efficiently bring Western Culture to its full glory, which was America's obvious destiny. It seemed to these artisans that what they were doing was not only an obvious extension of what Europe had previously done, but also something uniquely different and better, in no small part because of American technology and ingenuity.
