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Phyllis Dearborn and Robert Massar Photographs of Pacific Northwest Architecture, 1943-1963

Clark residence stairway
Clark residence stairway, Seattle, 1957

The Phyllis and Robert Massar Photograph Collection of Pacific Northwest Architecture is a photographic archive created when they were professional architectural photographers in the Pacific Northwest during the period 1943-1963. During the time when they were active in photographing the contemporary architecture of the PNW, Robert Massar and Phyllis Dearborn Massar were professionally known as Dearborn-Massar. Both graduates of the University of Washington, they maintained homes in Seattle and New York, photographing in the summer in the west and returning to New York City in the winter. Their images represent the work of some of the most well known architects in the Northwest and document the transition into the development of a regional variant of Modernism, sometimes called the Northwest Contemporary style of architecture.

About the Database

This database was produced as part of the Crossing Organizational Boundaries IMLS Grant. The results of this grant project are also showcased on the King County Snapshots web site. The information for the Dearborn Massar Collection was researched and prepared by the IMLS Grant, UW Libraries Special Collections Division, and Cataloging staff in 2002-2003. Not all the photographs from the collection were included in this database: the database consists of over 1200 digital images chosen from a group of approximately 6000 photographic prints. The photographic prints were scanned as a 3000 pixel TIFF image in 8-bit grayscale, resized to 640 pixels in width and compressed into JPEG format using Photoshop 6.0 and its JPEG quality measurement 3. The scanned images were then linked with descriptive data using the UW CONTENTdm program. The original collection resides in the UW Libraries Special Collections Division as the Dearborn Massar Collection no. 251.

List of Architects represented:


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