Alongside the Parthenon in Athens, Greece, the ca. 410 B.C.E. Erechtheion has lively moldings, which C. Howard Walker especially praised for their curves based on ellipses and conic sections rather than simple com-pass circles.

Walker preferred Greek versions of Corinthian entablatures (top left) over their Roman and Renaissance progeny, but he was willing to let his readers choose their own dominant aesthetics.

Walker was fascinated by cathedrals’ varied takes on intersecting circles in rose windows.

JANUARY 2008 » book review

It’s All in the Trim

Theory of Mouldings
by C. Howard Walker, FAIA
W.W. Norton & Company, New York, NY; 2007
146 pp.; hardcover; 100 b&w line drawings and 25 b&w photographs; $25
ISBN 978-0-393-73233-7

Reviewed by Eve M. Kahn

As soon as this eagerly awaited book arrived, I opened it to a random page and started reading sonorous passages aloud to my mystified husband and mortified daughter. “Mouldings should run with the grain, for if cut across the grain, weakness ensues,” I intoned. When my family still looked blank, I tried this aphorism: “Nothing so tends to stale the effect of mouldings as to have their sections struck with compasses, the universal adoption of sections of arcs of circles.” My audience at last humorlessly begged me to stop.

So then I thought about bringing the book over to my neighbors, who had, thanks to a minimalist architect’s advice, banned moldings during their apartment renovation and then watched haplessly as the trimless doorways’ plasterwork chipped and spalled. But I thought better before gloating over such a costly, regretted rejection of a seemingly frivolous, highly serviceable form of ornament.

Misguided minimalism wasn’t the main threat to moldings when architect C. Howard Walker (1857-1936) published the original, now extremely rare 1926 edition of this handbook. Instead Walker was battling against uninformed, overblown historicism. “At the present day, there is a plethora of precedent often unintelligently used,” he wrote. He also scolded, “There is no more common fault in designing mouldings than that of making them excessive in quantity and scale.”

Walker, a Bostonian who taught for decades at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was best known for designing libraries and monuments (including bases of Daniel Chester French statues) and for supervising design of the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, MO. His 1936 eulogists described him as a staunch traditionalist, “vigorous, caustic, and fearless in denouncing sham.” He occasionally dabbled in automobile design, “in the infancy of the industry, a task where skill in combining curved surfaces is paramount, and his knowledge of architectural mouldings must certainly have contributed to his success,” New York City-based architect Richard Sammons observes in this edition’s foreword.

Walker advised Theory of Mouldings readers to include only essential curves. Restraint “is a prime virtue,” he wrote. He carefully explained the ancient, utilitarian underpinnings of each molding component and cousin. Column flutes echo the ridges of reeds bundled to form Egyptian columns, chamfers on columns help reduce the number of sharp edges prone to in-jury, crown molds evolved from half-logs that channeled water off façades and modillions and mutules are the progeny of beam and rafter tips. Walker then laid out guidelines for combining standard molding types into tasteful new inventions. First, a designer should decide whether the desired overall look is delicate (which calls for concave moldings) or robust and sturdy (requiring convex shapes). But always mix the two types a little, to prevent boredom, he wrote: “A dominant type should be used. As a foil to this dominant, in less quantity or size, should be introduced the contrasting type.”

The book contains hundreds of profiles of suggested, imaginary moldings or built, historical examples scattered across Europe (mainly Greek, Roman and Gothic). Amid this varied sampling, he pointed out his own favorites: “Greek mouldings are the most subtle in line and shadow, the most finely cut and the most carefully studied.” He advised against reviving a few other countries’ and eras’ products: “Spanish mouldings are redundant,” while some 15th-century French and German Gothic sections have “only an intricacy which piques curiosity,” and as for trim by Serlio and Borromini, “all logical derivation was ignored, and personal aberrations were rife.”

This book belongs in the library of any practicing architect who regularly draws from tradition, and especially those who teach. Building-parts manufacturers should keep it on their office shelves, too – after all, as millwork expert Brent Hull pointed out in the July 2007 issue of Period Homes, “Running a well-designed molding costs no more than running a cheap molding.” I’m not sure, however, that everyone who needs Walker’s advice will buy this edition. I wish W.W. Norton & Company – which published the book as part of The Institute of Classical Architecture & Classical America’s (ICA&CA) Classical America Series, a 30-year effort that has brought forth two-dozen volumes so far, half of them reprints – had invested a little more in production.

Recent photographs of surviving moldings that Walker describes would not have been hard to find in stock archives. And ICA&CA members would likely have gladly supplied images and even specs from their own portfolios, demonstrating how contemporary architects and designers conceive and realize historically appropriate, aesthetically delightful, sensible moldings. (In the foreword, Sammons included some drawings and photographs of his firm’s recent projects, but the reproductions are tiny and grainy and the captions not very enlightening in terms of his thought processes and materials choices.) ICA&CA members also no doubt could have sent in some cautionary snapshots of bad moldings that they have spotted on spec houses nationwide.

Even in this volume’s somewhat limited current format, I can nonetheless see it inspiring better shapes in the field. Architects and woodworkers can feed Walker’s outlines into CAD and teachers can work his quotes and sketches into PowerPoint. Clever, erudite building-parts salespeople could even incorporate Walker into their pitches. What up-wardly mobile client could resist lines like, “Simplicity should not deteriorate into monotony” or “Mouldings are honorable things [that] are not to be treated casually”? 

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