OHIO AN ARCHITECTURAL PORTRAIT

By Richard N. Campen '34.Illustrated with over 500 original photographstaken and processed by the author. ChagrinFalls (Ohio): West Summit Press, 1973. 320 pp.$15.

This volume goes beyond sugar-coated pictorial quaintness for sentimentalists enraptured with the romantic. Not only the contents sets it apart but also the work involved. Mr. Campen is an architectural Thoreau. He does all the research, processes all the 550 half-tones, designs the book and the promotional material, personally addresses and dispatches every flyer (including those to more than 500 libraries in Ohio), unloads four tons of books, packs and invoices 1000 prepublication copies, writes a long and inter- pretative essay to illustrate photographs arranged by types, documents them with captions well researched, and extends in geography and time his earlier regional study entitled Architecture of theWestern Reserve.

His new volume encompasses all building types and periods, from early vernacular and Classic Revival styles to the New Formalism and Brutalism of our own day and from Chillicothe's "Adena" and Cincinnati's Baum-Taft House to Cleveland's Erieview and Aurora's Walden.

Mr. Campen prides himself on his headgear. He likes to tilt a battered yellow felt for travel throughout Ohio in the Campen White House, an English Sprite caravan, as he cocks his architectural eye on landmarks requiring a nice adjustment of camera angles. Whipping out his notebook, he jots down facts about elusive cornerstones with, etched in, building dates and names of architects.

The yellow felt is supplanted by a plaid cap for the darkroom where he loads bulk film into cassettes, prepares developers, fixers and flattener solutions, and makes enlargements during innumerable evenings when hundreds of prints are processed.

The third hat, a transparent green visor, has an elastic head band, which expands because of the strain during midnight ratiocinations when Mr. Campen rejects vast quantities of information and pictorial material. He composes also his introductory essay and checks the explosive tendency of photo-captions to wander off into verbosity.

The Scotch Tam-o'Shanter is worn during months when over the light table he must choose optimum photo arrangements from infinite possibilities offered by blank and uncritical pages. A Max Harrison tweed fits the head of the advertising man choosing copy and design for mailing pieces to the public. Now, more relaxed, Mr. Campen may clap on a snappy books-salesman felt, and he is reserving an empty peg on his hatrack for his autographing and lecturing mortarboard.

The result of so much sartorical preoccupation? One hundred seventy-five years of Ohio building, 1798-1973: residences, commercial buildings, churches, historical landmarks, contemporary styles, Cincinnati and Cleveland as urban entities, collegiate architecture, urban redevelopments, and restorations of the 19605, all with informative captions. Appropriate indices serve as blazed trails for those who need guides in the forests of Ohio architecture.