Drafting Manuals and Manual Training: Rouillion and Ramsey's Architectural Details

Overshadowed by the influences of architectural academicism, a drafting culture grounded in the manual training movement of the nineteenth century significantly shaped the vocational base of the profession. In turn, that culture offered a path of upward mobility to ambitious would-be architectural draftsmen arising from the working classes even while subordinating them to the social identity of an aspiring professional elite. A document of drafting culture and a precursor of Architectural Graphic Standards, the drafting textbook Architectural Details, published in 1924, demonstrates how manual training in the drafting vocation became intertwined with the draftsman's-and architect's-social construction.