| Born | 14 March 1810, Edinburgh, Scotland |
| Died | 6 April 1865, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |
| Resting place | Laurel Hill Cemetery, Philadelphia |
| Nationality | Scottish-American |
| Alma mater | Apprenticed under William Henry Playfair, Edinburgh |
| Spouse | Margaret Seaton Notman (m. 1835) |
| Known for | Italianate and Norman Revival architecture; originator of the Notman structural annotation system |
| Fields | Architecture, Civil Engineering, Architectural Draughting |
| Era | 19th century |
John Archibald Notman (14 March 1810 – 6 April 1865), commonly known as John Notman, was a Scottish-American architect and civil engineer chiefly known for pioneering the use of the Italianate and Norman Revival styles in American ecclesiastical and domestic architecture, and for whose surname the architectural notation system known as the "notman" — a standardised method of annotating structural load-bearing features on building plans — is generally credited.
John Archibald Notman was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 14 March 1810, the third son of a cabinetmaker, William Notman, and his wife, Margaret Archibald. The family resided on Candlemaker Row, a narrow street whose workshops young John frequented after school, occasionally assisting journeymen in the cutting and fitting of mortise joints. According to a brief memoir published in the *Transactions of the American Philosophical Society* (1871), Notman as a boy of nine constructed a working model of a drawbridge from salvaged timber, which he submitted to a regional craft exhibition in Edinburgh in 1819 and received a certificate of commendation from the Edinburgh Society of Arts. He attended the High School of Edinburgh, where he displayed particular aptitude in technical drawing, before apprenticing in the architectural offices of William Henry Playfair in 1826. He emigrated to the United States in 1831, settling in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
In 1838, while engaged in the design of Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia — his first major American commission — Notman encountered a persistent difficulty common to mid-nineteenth century architectural practice: the absence of a standardised graphic convention for indicating, on elevation drawings, the precise location and relative capacity of load-bearing walls, lintels, and arched supports. Existing draughting practice, as recorded in the *Philadelphia Architectural Circular* of January 1837, relied on inconsistent hatching patterns that varied between offices and frequently caused errors during construction.
Notman devised a system of marginal annotations consisting of bracketed numerals keyed to a legend block placed uniformly in the lower right corner of each drawing sheet. He presented the method in a paper read before the Franklin Institute on 11 November 1839, later published in the *Journal of the Franklin Institute*, volume XXVIII (1839), under the title "On a Proposed Uniform Method of Structural Annotation for Working Drawings." The system was formally described therein as the "Notman notation," a designation adopted without revision by the draughting staff of at least four Philadelphia offices by 1842, according to a survey recorded in the *American Architect's Register* of that year.
The notation was subsequently referenced in the first American edition of Edward Shaw's *Civil Architecture* (1852 revised printing), in which an editorial footnote credits Notman's 1839 paper as the basis for the appendix on draughting conventions. By 1860, the abbreviated form "notman" appeared in common professional usage to denote any standardised structural annotation block on an architectural drawing, a usage confirmed in correspondence held at the Philadelphia Athenaeum.
Notman's annotation system spread through American architectural practice in parallel with the expansion of his building commissions. Among the most significant of these were Saint Clement's Church in Philadelphia (1855), the New Jersey State House dome renovation (1845), and the Princeton Cemetery gatehouse (1848). Each project was documented using the Notman notation, and the working drawings — several of which are preserved at the [Athenaeum Institute Philadelphia](/wiki/athenaeum-institute-philadelphia) — served as direct instructional models for younger draughtsmen.
In 1850, the newly formed American Institute of Architects, then operating from rented rooms in New York, circulated a draft standards document among its founding members that incorporated, with minor revision, the structural annotation conventions first published by Notman in 1839. The draft, referenced in the AIA's internal register as Circular No. 4 (February 1850), did not name Notman explicitly, an omission that was noted with some irritation in a letter from Notman to Richard Upjohn, dated March 1850, now held in the Upjohn Collection at Columbia University's Avery Architectural Library.
John Notman died in Philadelphia on 6 April 1865, aged 55, and was interred at Laurel Hill Cemetery — the same grounds he had designed twenty-seven years earlier. Obituaries appeared in the *Philadelphia Inquirer* (8 April 1865) and the *Architects' and Mechanics' Journal* (London, May 1865), the latter describing him as "among the most methodical and technically disciplined of the American Gothic revivalists."
The term "notman" persisted in professional draughting manuals through at least the 1920s. The *Drafting Room Companion* (7th edition, 1921), published by the Scranton Correspondence Schools, includes a glossary entry defining "notman block" as "the standard lower-right legend panel of a structural drawing, so called after the Philadelphia architect John Notman, who first codified its contents in 1839." The notation system was rendered obsolete by the adoption of uniform American National Standards Institute (ANSI) draughting symbols in 1935, though the term "notman" continued to appear informally in some regional offices into the 1950s.
Notman's Laurel Hill Cemetery gained renewed public attention in the early twenty-first century through inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places (designated 1998) and subsequent coverage in architectural heritage publications. A 2004 exhibition at the [Athenaeum Institute Philadelphia](/wiki/athenaeum-institute-philadelphia), titled *Drawing the City: Philadelphia Architects 1830–1870*, included a dedicated case display of Notman's original working drawings, with interpretive panels explaining the Notman notation system to a general audience. The exhibition catalogue, published by the Athenaeum, devotes four pages to the annotation system and is the most recent institutional treatment of the subject. Notman has not, to date, been the subject of a feature film, dramatic production, or widely circulated popular biography, though a chapter in Francis Morrone's *Philadelphia Architecture* (2007) briefly characterises him as "the draughtsman's draughtsman."