Some Assembly Required: Mail-order Houses in Indianapolis

The Archive is participating in Indiana Landmarks' program titled Some Assembly Required: Lectures, Lunch and Tours of Mail-order Houses in Indianapolis, which will take place October 1, 2011. In addition to all of the interesting talks on mail-order houses, Lustrons, and historic paint colors, I will be talking about the obscure history of the Architectural Guild of Indinapolis.

You may recall a post a few posts back that discussed the Architectural Guild. For the presentation, I'll go into more detail and show some architectural models and drawings that were used for this home-grown yet short-lived service in Indianapolis.

Hope you can join us for an interesting day discussing catalog homes.

The Scandal Sheet

Used as a design template for announcements and other club information, the Scandal Sheet was reproduced as a blueprint for distribution within the Indianapolis Architectural Club (I.A.C.) during the 1930s. The example above is titled Representing Architectural Letters and illustrates five different architects' styles of lettering for architectural drawings. Those who are familiar with the Pierre & Wright Architectural Records Collection may recognize the distinctive lettering styles of Francis (Fran) Schroeder and Charles Soltau who drafted the first two columns of letters.

The design for the Scandal Sheet was, naturally, born out of a seemingly friendly design competition amongst the membership of the I.A.C., shown here in front of the Indianapolis War Memorial:

Also located in the same folder as the items above, is the sheet from 1930 that establishes the design competition criteria, below. The awards are listed as "Don't worry too much about the reimbursements--merely consider that you'll catch Hell if you don't participate in this, the first competition of the year 1930."

Images: Indianapolis Architectural Club Scandal Sheet, vol. 3, no. 11 and Competition for A Title Block for "The Scandal Sheet" (34-16A23, 34-16A16, 34-16A18), Fran E. Schroeder Architectural Records Collection, Drawings + Documents Archive, Archives and Special Collections, Ball State University Libraries.