Talk:John Gaw Meem

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Assessment comment[edit]

The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:John Gaw Meem/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.

Comment(s)

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I have just completed the entry on John Gaw Meem in the new Grove Encyclopedia of American Art. As a historian and the author of two dozen architect biographies in major reference works and four books on architects, I find Wikipedia's coverage paltry. I have written only one architect bio on Wikipedia because I am frustrated at the naive and out of date standards used in these articles. This one is a good case in point:

--The lead paragraph ascribes the "Pueblo Revival Style" to John Gaw Meem. He would never have thought himself a revivalist, and the attribution is wrong even if he had used the term, for architects had used Hispanic revival idioms before Meem came to Santa Fe. The Wiki policy of using styles to tag architects is ridiculous, unscholarly, and naive.

--The sources are not consistent in quality. Bunting is the authoritative biography. The Hooker book is poor. Using a National Trust Guide is absurd. What about the Macmillan Dictionary of Architects?

--Meem's writings are wonderful and explain his work succinctly. The only one cited is a minor article.

--The "Criticism" section does not belong in an entry on a major American architect, and is here because the authors think of Meem as a mere copyist (which he wasn't). Meem's work stands on its own and cannot be judged from a Modernist point of view. Frank Lloyd Wright hated the work of nearly every architect whose buildings he encountered.

--Nowhere is Regionalism mentioned. The 1920s art movement toward regional and vernacular sources had a profound effect on not only Santa Fe but Meem and his freinds.

--Mark Alan Hewitt FAIA

Last edited at 23:40, 30 August 2009 (UTC). Substituted at 20:11, 29 April 2016 (UTC)