C(zm^; Mrs. Elizabeth (Betty) Cain, former chair
of The Friends of the Columbia Libraries, has
donated to Avery Library the personal books and
papers of her late husband, Mr. Walker O. Cain.
Walker was a loyal friend of the Avery Library and
donated during his lifetime many books and doc¬
uments from the McKim, Mead and White archi¬
tectural offices, to whose practice he was succes¬
sor. Betty has now donated Walker's papers and
drawings, documenting his career and extraordi¬
nary drawing abilities.

Goodman bequest: The Avery Libraiy has received
the Percival Goodman bequest from his widow,
Mrs. Naomi Goodman, who paid for the creation
of a comprehensive finding aid. Percival
Goodman (1904—1989) was an architect, urban
planner, professor, author, and artist.

A professor of Architecture and City Planning
at Columbia from 1946 to 1971 and an emeritus
professor thereafter, Goodman is perhaps best
remembered as an architect who believed that the
power of design could improve social conditions.
In 1947, he co-authored, with his brother, the
philosopher Paul Goodman, Communitas, a bltie-
prinl for ideal communities. He later wrote The
Double E, a treatise on the relationship of ecology
to city planning, which was published in 1977.

Goodman willed his architectural library and
all other architectural records remaining in his
possession after he closed his office in 1979 to the
Avery Library. He had previously donated a large
portion of his professional work to the American
Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming.
Mrs. Goodman has since arranged for the return
of this material to the Avery Library so that the
complete records of Goodman's 60-year career
can be consolidated and preserved at Avery.
 

Goodman, who left school to work in his
imcle's architectural office in New York when he
was 14 years old, was later awarded the Paris Prize,
a scholarship to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
In France, he was exposed to the work of Le
Corbusier and others who greatiy influenced his
thinking. He created many plans for sections of
New York, including "Riverview" in 1945, a mod¬
ernist development that wotild have provided
housing for thirteen thousand families in Long
Island City. The concept prefigured by more than
forty years the more gradual industrial-to-residen¬
tial transformation occurring there today.
Goodman's archive is invaluable to scholars of
twentieth-century architecture in that it includes
drawings, plans, models, photographs, slides, cor¬
respondence, teaching and lecture notes, pub¬
lished articles, and unpublished manuscripts, as
well as planning studies undertaken by Goodman
and those supemsed by him as a professor at
Columbia.

The atrocities of the Holocaust had a profound
effect on Goodman, and after World War II he
designed synagogues for new communities in
need of temples. His use of modernist architec¬
ture combined with commissioned work by con¬
temporary artists set the style for his synagogue
designs. A major component of the collection is
the documentation for these more than fifty syna¬
gogues.

In a salute to Goodman on the occasion of his
eightieth birthday in 1984, Paul Goldberger in the
Neu) York Times wrote, "Percival Goodman retains,
more earnestly, surely, than most of his colleagues,
a commitment to the possibilities of rational plan¬
ning. That is, in many ways, the ultimate legacy of
modernism—not  the esthetic  of sleekness  and
 

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