More than 20 years ago, architect Doug Harris was poking through a flea market in the Washington, D.C., area when he came across a six-inch-high, stamped-metal replica of the Empire State Building.
Harris bought the model for a few dollars and thus established what has since bloomed into a collection of 150 similar miniatures. His structures occupy two shelves of an oak cabinet in the living room of the Brevard home he shares with his wife, Ellen, just a few minutes’ walk from Harris Architects, the firm the couple founded 12 years ago.
“Collectors call them souvenir buildings or miniature monuments,” Harris says of the diminutive group of towers, churches and landmarks clustered like an eclectic little metropolis behind the cabinet’s glass doors. “I find most of them at flea markets, which is like going on a scavenger hunt. There are some I bought on the Internet, but that’s not nearly as much fun.”
Harris has also enlisted an antiques-collecting neighbor to keep a sharp eye out for other acquisitions. “He’s my authorized buyer,” the architect says with a smile. Prices are decidedly modest, usually between $20 and $50, although some enthusiasts shell out hundreds of dollars for rare models.
Aficionados hail Dorothy Brown, who died in 2008, as the mother of the souvenir-building movement: she was the first to publish a simple, 152-page reference work in 1977. Brown’s book contained not only information about specific models but also the background of the actual structures from which they were derived, lending a scholarly patina to the pursuit.
Harris’ models are almost all formed of molded and stamped metal, plus a few porcelain ones, including a pair of salt-and-pepper shakers shaped like the U.S. Capitol building and the Washington Monument. Beyond their representational appeal and the kitsch factor, souvenir buildings can mark important historical moments. One of Harris’ statues of Liberty, for instance, hails from the 1939 World’s Fair. It shares shelf space with a model of the Unisphere from the 1964 World’s Fair, and jostles for position with more cosmopolitan cousins such as Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral and Rome’s Coliseum. Architectural styles leap millennia from the Classical period to the Art Deco exuberance of the Chrysler Building, the International-style Sears Tower and Marcel Breuer’s Brutalist Whitney Museum of American Art.
The Souvenir Building Collectors Society seems as perplexed as any of its approximately 200 global members about the attractions of souvenir buildings; a passage on the group’s website speculates that they may “trigger a memory of a building or a structure, a time, a place, or perhaps a person.” For Harris, his model of Philadelphia’s PSFS Building — an International-style skyscraper completed in 1932 — is the most evocative.
“The Philadelphia Savings Fund Society was for years one of the tallest buildings on the Philadelphia skyline,” he says. “The rule in Philadelphia then was that no building could be taller than the height of William Penn’s hat on his City Hall statue, and the PSFS building was just about that high. I grew up in New Jersey, just across the river from Philadelphia, and I remember driving across the bridge into the city with my father and seeing the PSFS building in the distance. He joked that PSFS stood for ‘Philadelphia smells funny sometimes.’ A lot of years later, it was where I had a job interview at an architectural firm in an office on the 21st floor.”
The collecting habit struck while Doug and Ellen, now married 24 years, were working and raising a family in D.C. Today, in Brevard, Ellen specializes in preservation and restoration and has lent her talents to projects involving local iconic building the Grove Park Inn and Clemson University’s historic John C. Calhoun Mansion and Library (a.k.a. “Fort Hill”). Doug focuses on single-family residential and corporate design and, like his collection of tiny buildings, reaches beyond set boundaries and styles.
“Being an architect in a small town is like being a doctor in a small town,” he says. “You do a little bit of everything.”
Visit www.harrisarch.com or call 828-883-5535 for info on Harris Architects PLLC.