Architecture in the Pine Tree State.(Current and Coming)

Before it became a state in 1820, Maine was a part of Massachusetts, and while much of the northern part of the region was sparsely settled frontier, the southern and coastal parts of Maine were dotted with large towns full of architecturally sophisticated buildings. At the same time that the citizens of Maine were engineering their political independence from Massachusetts, the profession of architect, as we have come to define it, was emerging in the United States. Earlier, architecture had been predominantly the purview of learned gentlemen who were capable of drawing what they had in mind and the carpenters, masons, and other specialists who turned these often rudimentary plans into buildings.

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A three-part exhibition entitled The Maine Perspective: Architectural Drawings has been organized by the Portland Museum of Art to take place over the course of the next three years. The first installment, subtitled The Rise of the Architectural Profession, 1800-1870, is on view from February 7 to May 22. The fifty drawings in the exhibition represent the work of some twenty-seven architects. For this relatively early period, the range of building types is extraordinary: among them, meetinghouses, churches, prisons, an insane asylum, a hotel, a bank, lighthouses, a gristmill, and rural ...