"More Great Cincinnati Families at Home", part two in an exhibit on the
families behind some of our city's greatest architectural treasures, is
now open at the
Betts House, 416 Clark Street in the West End
The exhibit features the residences of the Emery, Longworth-Anderson, Maxwell-Schmidlapp-Graydon, and Werk-Oskamp families.
Co-curator for the exhibit is Walter E. Langsam, architectural historian, teacher at the
University of Cincinnati, and author of
Great Houses of the Queen City, from which he drew much of the exhibit's information.
"Because
there I also used different generations of families to provide some
continuity," he says. "I used different ethnic backgrounds and
different neighborhoods and different styles. But, at the same time,
the more I could have different houses with different generations of
the same family, the more meaningful it seemed."
While
some of the residences were designed by such well-known architects as
Burnham & Root, Grosvenor Atterbury, Delano & Aldrich, Samuel
Hannaford, and Elzner & Anderson, some of the architects have
remained obscure.
"There are some other local architects who are
really very important and have not been recognized," Langsam says.
"Most of the names are not known at all, and yet most of them have more
than local significance."
But Langsam says that the houses tell more about the families themselves than about their architects.
"A
lot of it's about their own self-images," he says. "The Werks saw
themselves as German, so their German castle's over there. But yet the
third one on the right there [of the Longworth-Anderson family], this
was two of the German-American families, but it's one of the earliest
American Colonial Revival houses in the city. Obviously they were
making a somewhat different statement."
A companion lecture series, hosted by Langsam, begins May 2 at the
Cincinnati Fire Museum.
"These are the people who were the clients for most of the important buildings of the city for 200 years," he says.
The Betts House exhibit will be on view through September 30.
Writer:
Kevin LeMasterSources: Walter E. Langsam, co-curator, "Great Cincinnati Families at Home"; Juile Carpenter, executive director, Betts House