Doll Architecture

To raise money for unemployed draughtsmen, New York architects have held progressive cocktail parties, poker games, exhibited their hobbies. Chicago architects held a studio ball with a nude young woman, at $1 a look, as one sideshow (TIME, Feb. 22 et seq.). Recently the decorous firm of Delano & Aldrich thought of a new one.

William Adams Delano and Chester Holmes Aldrich specialize in Georgian mansions and clubhouses, at present the most depressed branch of the depressed profession of architecture. The firm's draughtsmen must not only draw but make models for their exacting clients. That gave Partner Delano an idea. Just back from Paris where he had been supervising the erection of the new U. S. Government Building fronting the Place de la Concorde, he set his idle apprentices to work designing dolls' houses. Last week with the Christmas season approaching genuine Delano & Aldrich doll houses were on sale for $10 and $12.

Three models have been produced to date: a four-room, red brick Georgian house with green slate roof and green shutters; a white stucco town house with a blue door arched with brick; a pink brick house with a shop on the ground floor, an apartment above. Each house is about two feet square, wired for electricity with a tiny fixture in the ceiling of each room. Encouraged by the success of these, Delano & Aldrich talents were bent last week on two new models: a larger business block with a restaurant and grocery on the ground floor, and an even larger Georgian mansion. Chief Draughtsman W. Bowman enthused: "It has a lovely staircase." These will sell at slightly higher prices.

The department of doll architecture is not only able but eager to make any tycoon's child happy with an exact model of her own home, working either from photographs or plans. Prices, they promise, will not be exorbitant. Unemployed draughtsmen and department stores are not the only people to benefit. Frames for the doll houses are made at Greenwich House Workshops, a semi-charitable institution to teach handiwork to New York children. Each doll house bears a Delano & Aldrich label, is a fine advertisement for the firm.

Delano & Aldrich's little houses are sold unfurnished. But alert to the advertising value, McMillen, Inc., interior decorators, will join forces with the firm of architects in an exhibition at Manhattan's Art Center on Nov. 28.

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