American Institute of Architects. - Architectural Graphic Standards

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

JOHN WILEY & SONS, INC.
AMANDA L. MILLER
VICE PRESIDENT AND PUBLISHER

KATHRYN MALM BOURGOINE
ACQUISITIONS EDITOR

LAUREN POPLAWSKI
EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

KERSTIN NASDEO
PRODUCTION MANAGER

JACQUELINE BEACH
PRODUCTION EDITOR

JUSTIN MAYHEW
SENIOR MARKETING MANAGER

DESIGN/PRODUCTION
BRUCE MAU DESIGN, INC.
DESIGNER

LUCINDA GEIST
COMPOSITION

JANICE BORZENDOWSKI
COPYEDITOR

BRUCE BASSLER
STUDENT EDITION EDITOR

AGS EDITORS
DENNIS J. HALL, FAIA, FCSI
SENIOR EXECUTIVE EDITOR

NINA M. GIGLIO, ASSOC. AIA, CSI
EXECUTIVE EDITOR

RICHARD L. HAYES, PHD, AIA
EXECUTIVE EDITOR

KEVIN SHAFER
DEVELOPMENT EDITOR

WANDA MADRID-DIAZ, ASSOC. AIA
ASSISTANT EDITOR

LESLIE H. SCHLESINGER, CSI-I
ASSISTANT EDITOR

Unless a hidden stash of documents suddenly turns up, we will never know why John Wiley, my grandfathers grandfather, developed an interest in architecture. Without documents, we are forced to parse the logic of Johns publishing program, which was shaped in part by his experiences working with his father, Charles, the founder of the company. We do know two things. Soon after John revived his fathers faltering publishing house, he developed an interest in what we publishers like to call need to know information. Both John and his father played formative roles in the origins of American literature, publishing writers such as James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe. Working with his partner, George Palmer Putnam, John evinced an interest in more practical subjects, such as architecture, engineering, landscape design, and surveying, and consequently, Wiley & Putnam would come to play a comparable role in the development of an American architecture.

Wileys 200-year history is filled with important publications that have helped shape the built environment. Wiley & Putnam published Andrew Jackson Downings Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening with a View to the Improvement of Country Residences and Cottage Residences in 1841 and 1842, respectively. Downing was an important figure in the development of a distinctive American architecture, one closely associated with the countrys early suburbs, where John would move in the 1850s. Downing also influenced the shape of the urban landscape perusing large-scale urban park designs with his assistant, Calvin Vaux.

John Wileys other interest, which looks something like a personal obsession, was John Ruskin, the renowned British aesthete, artist, social reformer, and architectural critic. Beginning in 1851, and for the rest of Johns active publishing life, he and his offspring, as John Wiley & Sons, published endless sets and single monographs penned by Ruskin.

Soon after John split amicably with Putnam in 1848, he gave up on fiction and moved slowly but decidedly into publishing for the academy and the professions, a move that was accelerated by the arrival in the business of a second son, William Halsted Wiley, a civil engineer. John published books that would be used by carpenter-builders, draftsmen, and architects and then, with his sons, branched out more and more into related engineering professions. As with the history of Architectural Graphic Standards, one can trace the evolution of home, commercial, and industrial constructionrailroad and bridge building, ship and fortification design, highway construction, all of those physical features associated with the industrialization of Americaby delving into Wiley books.

Our company was particularly adept at handbook publishing, and Frank E. Kidders Architects and Builders Pocket-book, later rewritten by Harry Parker, went through 18 editions between its original publication in 1884 and 1986, when it finally went out of print.

The arrival of Architectural Graphic Standards in 1932 was part of a natural progression. It was very much in the tradition of Wileys century-long commitment to quality publishing for a particular profession or group of professions. Charles G. Ramsey and Harold R. Sleeper authored and designed the first edition and continued to do so until Sleepers death. Sleeper, as George B. Johnston points out in his introductory essay, published other books with Wiley. At one point in the 1950s, when Wiley was beginning to outgrow its offices at 440 Park Avenue South, my father asked Sleeper to design a building for the company. However, Wiley was neither large nor profitable enough at the time to undertake such an ambitious project, and the project was not realized.

From the start, AGS acquired the reputation as an indispensable tool for architects and others, a reputation that has been sustained by constant revision to assure that the content keeps up with changes in all aspects of design and construction. I must add that even from the perspective of a nonprofessional, the book itself is an appealing work of art. Beginning in the mid-1990s, constant revision has been supplemented by the delivery of