Robert Allen Cook architectural collection

Description

The Robert Allen Cook architectural collection includes a wide range of documents and more than 3,500 architectural drawings. The materials document the daily operations of an architectural office during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries and shed light on such practical matters as labor costs, materials, hiring practices, client relations, and the making of design decisions.

The variety of building types represented among Cook's drawings indicates that he was a broad general practitioner, able to design everything from important public buildings to bakeries. The drawings depict commercial buildings, schools, churches, hospitals, greenhouses, barns, factories, fire stations, Masonic buildings, residences of all types, garages, theaters, and even automobile showrooms. The collection provides some documentation for the vernacular face of New England as it still looks today in many towns.

The operations of Cook's firm are thoroughly chronicled by extensive professional correspondence, letter books, tax records, account books, bills and receipts, pay cards, time sheets, cancelled checks, contract accounts, and hardware schedules. Individual projects are well documented through photographs, postcards, contract files, specifications, and architectural drawings. Pamphlets, periodicals, newspapers, and books relate to commissions and occasionally contain articles by Cook. The trade catalogues in the collection were used by Cook primarily as reference and source materials.

Robert Allen Cook's largest-scale project was his work designing workers' housing and industrial buildings for the Draper Company of Hopedale, Massachusetts, the largest supplier of textile machinery in the country. Hopedale was considered to be one of the most successful company towns in America. In The Model Company Town (Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), John S. Garner writes, "one town above others exemplifies a significant achievement in industrial organization, housing, and site management. Hopedale, Massachusetts, offers a paradigm by which other company towns, as well as model company towns, can be compared. It represents the best of its type: not only was it able to provide a pleasant environment for its inhabitants, but it also retained a model image and social order through professional design and site maintenance."

The biographical material in this collection consists of a few advertisements, trade cards, letters of introduction, membership cards, and receipts. Unpublished writings include an essay, "Burbank Gives His Views on Childhood Culture" (1905); notebooks titled "Building Notes," "Book of Measurements," and "Europe;" brief lists of buildings, photographs, and incomplete drawing and specification indices. A small file on his trip to Rome supplements the "Europe" notebook.