Greetings, fellow blogsters.

As you can probably tell, I am new, very new, to the world of blogging and have yet to comprehend why I am doing this and what will come of it, as they say, “in the fullness of time.” The aspect that utterly astounds me is simple: Who are you 700+ people who have visited and, presumably, read what is here? If at least a few of you are unknown to me–i.e., not current or former students–it might be helpful in suiting our mutual needs if you’d let me know your interests (and consequent disappointment or  frustration, perhaps) in visiting my outpost on the web. I love words; use them far too loosely, but not always well; and appreciate hearing a few in reply.

If responding here is inconvenient and/or uncomfortable, feel free to e-mail me at plains.architecture@gmail.com.

Richard Kenyon, a friend and architect from Avon, Connecticut, answered the call for the 2007 exhibition with a design for Agincourt’s Catholic church–the third building on that site, it turned out. He imagined that it would have been constructed circa 1950-1951 from designs by surrogate Chicago architect Francis Barry Byrne, a real person admired by both Richard and me. Since then, several surrogates have shown up in the Agincourt Project, real historical characters who have been conscripted into playing with us in the sandbox, even though most of them are long dead. Byrne was an ideal choice for a 1950s project: he had several other projects in the region at that time (in St. Paul, MN, and Kansas City, MO), so we felt very comfortable engaging his considerable talents–posthumously.

Kenyon’s design worked with major themes of Byrne’s post-WWII work: lozenge shaped sanctuaries and simplified Modernist towers in the spirit of Medieval Ireland. His schematic plans and elevations were an eloquent testament to a time in American architecture when religious buildings were hardly representative of the best we could do. For an excellent treatment of Barry Byrne, the best on-line source is, strangely enough, a site connected with a 1920s project in Ireland: the parish of Christ the King at Turner’s Cross, Cork.

Howard Tabor got busy setting the stage for the Kenyon-Byrne collaboration by writing a four-part history of Roman Catholics in Fennimore County–and, not incidentally, exploring two recent thorny issues: pederasty and the ordination of women (which I only link here because they make some Catholics uncomfortable). So don’t get me started on separation of Church and State! I can get apoplectic.

“Life is what you do while you’re waiting to die.” –Zorba, the Greek.

While the library design stewed (or was it me who was stewing?), other parts of Agincourt drew/distracted my attention. The city would have, for example, a full array of faiths and church buildings in a comparable range of styles. Demographically, the swath of states from Ohio to Iowa is rich with Methodism, so it’s natural for a town founded in the 1850s to have had a sequence of Methodist churches, increasing in size and services as the denomination evolved and the community grew. My familiarity with Methodist church architecture goes back more then ten years, when I sought to understand the so-called Akron Plan (more properly known as the Akron-Auditorium plan, but that’s the topic of another blog). The beauty of inventing an entire community is that I could design the 1920 church without necessarily knowing its predecessor. So I allowed myself to be diverted briefly by Asbury Methodist Episcopal Church.

The founders had set aside four “church lots” bracketing the core of civic life, the heart of government and learning. Distributed by lottery to the largest denominations, the Methodists had drawn northwest, where their first frame church had been erected, but the time had come for enlargement. Its site is nearly a city block, but one diagonally clipped corner suggested a plan based on a central octagonal auditorium. The scheme developed quickly one evening (on a splayed Qwest Communication envelope; I work best on junk mail and cocktail napkins) and grew during the following two years–it took that long to understand the basement and balcony levels. But I’m satisfied that Asbury is, indeed, a typical full-blown Akron-Auditorium plan, perhaps the last of its species. 

What this dance with the Methodists had taught me, however, was my degree of dependence upon plan. I can feel the elevations but I cannot see them yet. Give me time or advice…or both.

There are so many popular definitions of history–all that “written by the winners” sort of thing–that I’m reluctant to contribute another. Now in my fortieth year teaching architectural history to eagar undergraduates, however, I’ve concluded very few things. Among them are these:

• Teaching history is exactly like vaudeville: you’ll be successful if you know your material, read the audience and play to the back row; and
• Technically, there is no history; there is only biography. (Someone famous actually said this or something like it, so I’m just paraphrasing.)

The Agincourt Project has been my exploration of architecture as the inevitable interaction of narrative and the built environment. Culture shapes architecture; buildings tell the story of their owners/users/designers/builders.

People make buildings in a context. So, to design a building in a context other than your own is to engage intimately with circumstances that may no longer exist. In the present case, I cannot design an American public library circa 1914 without some understanding of the context: the place and the people. Having been an arm-chair officianado of the Progressive era, I feel qualified to work within Edwardian notions (albeit on this side of the Atlantic) of socio-political, economic and technological norms. As I’ve written earlier, I also now have a literal physical setting (a 50′ by 140′ lot at the northeast corner of Broad Street and Agincourt Avenue in a northwest Iowa town) and a growing cast of characters, including a building committee with preconceptions, desires and aspirations, and an architect fresh from apprenticeship, anxious to display his prowess (however real or imagined).

My guess is that Louis Henri Sullivan* would not have fallen into the trap of the Carnegie-era library formula. And his young protege Anson Tennant might also have avoided/evaded those knee-jerk tendencies simply because of his youth; formulas being for the middle-aged and insecure. I have yet to write the advertised program for this competition, but my suspicion is that the building committee were intent on something extraordinarily predictable. I also have to believe that at least a few entrants read between its lines and broadened the committee’s notion of the form a modern public institution might assume. My conception for the library took this turn: the library proper would be on the second floor of a building of at least two stories, and the ground floor would be occupied by rental retail space to generate income for the publicly-supported institution above. It might also incorporate an art gallery to memorialize the family making the original gift.

One of the greatest resources for engaging small-town architecture in the years 1880-1920 (which neatly includes my project) has been the common penny postcard. Unlike most histories of architecture–written as they are by architectural (read “art”) historians of an academic bent, where we are shown the best by the brightest, postcards are the most egalitarian architectural history survey course you’re ever likely to take. Breadth of either quality or geography is a recent tendancy in the treatment of building as material culture. I’ll go out on a limb here and assert that history has not only been written by the winners, a number of them are snobs. So, imagine my surprise one day while surfing the web, when I found an image of the late 19th-century public library in Keokuk, Iowa.

Yikes! I had already done preliminary planning for Agincourt and now had physical proof of its validity. (Don’t you love it when that happens? Pardon my smugness; it’s justified so rarely.) I can’t prove it with notarized pages from my sketchbook, but the earliest plan anticipated finding this image by at least a year. I could now proceed with gusto.

*Sullivan’s middle name was “Henry,” though it is misspelled on his tombstone in the French style.

Already you can tell that Anson Tennant was not like others of our kind: He has two death dates.

With the enthusiasm of youth and inspiration derived from a year of study at Chicago’s Art Institute, Tennant had entered a competition to design the new public library for Agincourt, his home town in Iowa. The competition was organized (under terms suggested by the American Institute of Architects) to be scrupulously neutral, with anonymous entries and an outside professional advisor. Normand Patton, one of the most prolific library designers of his generation, fulfilled that advisory role. But, until notes from the library committee’s private meetings come to light, let’s give them the benefit of doubt and say that Tennant’s solution was both innovative and also directly responsive to the program requirements. So, in the Spring of 1914–the Spring brought to a horrible end by the outbreak of World War I in August of that year–young Tennant won the competition and set about developing a full-blown solution to his community’s need for its first purpose-built public library–a building, incidentally, funded locally, without outside aid (or interference) from Andrew Carnegie.

So far, so good. I had set a number of design parameters in place and was fully prepared to work within them and to learn, in the fullness of time, what they might mean.

What quickly became apparent, however, was that I had entered a path at its middle; I had some notion of where it was going, but had no concept where it had begun. Even at the age of twenty-four, Anson Tennant needed a past.

• Had he designed anything prior to this commission?
• Where had he studied and apprenticed?
• When, in fact, did he first utter those fateful words “I want to be an architect”?

I had positioned myself at a point in a complex process that required backstory before it could go forward. To know who Tennant was at twenty-four, I had to meet him at eighteen. Even before that, I had to be aware of the doll house he had built for his little sister Claire in 1905, the Christmas she had diphtheria and was’t expected to live. I selfishly projected onto and into him some of my own experiences with magazines and hanging around construction sites. Perhaps Tennant in 1900 was not so different form me in 1956.

Hindsight may be 20-20.

Looking back over the past four years, I can see why several approaches to the Sullivanesque library challenge didn’t interest me. Witness the so-called Sullivanesque libraries of the years 1900-1920.

Madison, Wisconsin, architects Claude & Starck produced a passel of libraries between 1900 and 1920 (one of the partners had a close relative on the Wisconsin State Library Board, which didn’t hurt). But their approach was surprisingly formulaic. “Pull down number 53 and put a bay window in it for the lady.” The Carnegie-financed library at Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, is one of a half dozen that are virtually interchangeable–not that this is cheating (i.e., unethical professional behavior). Clients were often reassured that their design had a verifiable price tag, since it had just been constructed down the road for a different client. Other building types like churches and schools worked pretty much the same way. I guess my point here is simple: This building may be “Sullivanesque,” but Sullivan would never have done it this way.

Clearly I cannot be Louis Sullivan; no one can. Even Louis had a tough enough time being himself. I had to create an avatar; someone strongly influenced by Sullivan; someone working in his milieu. Enter Anson Curtiss Tennant [1889-1915], local-boy-makes-good. With sufficient backstory, Tennant would design Agincourt’s new public library during 1914-1915. And he would evolve in as complex a fashion as has the design I attribute to him.

For those of us born and nurtured in the Midwest, the Jeffersonian Grid is so ubiquitous that it has become our default. Whether deep in the heart of Des Moines or out among the aerial irrigation systems of western Nebraska, the long reach of Rene Descartes is everywhere. Oh, sure, there are variations, but they only prove the point. This is not a place to seek the tail wagging the dog.

I decided almost immediately that my Sullivanesque library circa 1914 would be in Iowa (northwest Iowa specifically and on land ceded to the U.S. government through a treaty with the Sac and Fox peoples) and that it would not be in an existing community. (After all, I was on a Summer budget and had no time for travel.) But the Jeffersonian Grid combined with the westward extrension of railroads to simplify my immediate task: create a typical mid-19th century railroad town whose dates would conveniently fit the political circumstances of the time. Don’t ask where the name Agincourt came; I don’t know. It’s turned out to have been a serendipitous choice, however; one richly veined with enough imagery to create a dozen community histories. I have learned in sixty-five years to trust my intuition.

Within a day or two of that fateful CSI rerun, I had created Agincourt, Iowa; based it upon the familiar pattern of typical railroad towns, and tweeked it as planners of that era often did. I must confess, though, that Philadelphia has also been my hidden inspiration and that I owe William Penn and especially his Surveyor General Thomas Holmes an enormous debt.

In the Summer of 2006 I was watching CSI reruns. During a commercial break Chicago architect Louis Sullivan came to mind. (I’m an architectural historian, so that’s not such a far-fetched idea.) But not about pre-1900 LHS, the designer who practically invented the skyscraper. I was thinking about Late Louis–the substance-abusive designer of small-town banks throughout the American Midwest, at places like Owatonna, Minnesota, Sidney, Ohio, and Grinnell, Iowa. Sullivan called this series of eight small banks his “jewel boxes,” and he lavished on them some of his most effusive ornament. These banks interest me enormously, but that night in August 2006 I had a different thought.

These banks were products of a different financial perspective. Home-grown, family-owned, they were institutions of pride for their respective communities. While they were hardly “too big to fail,” there was little danger of that happening. What interested me in 2006 was the likelihood that these same communities (in Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota) were also contemplating the building of a Carnegie era library–one of the 1800 or so small public libraries funded by industrialist Andrew Carnegie or the hundreds of others that they influenced. As leaders in their communities, bank presidents were also likely to be on library boards. So here’s the question du jour: Why didn’t Louis Sullivan ever have the opportunity to design a Carnegie-era public library? He was working in communities where the public library movement was strong, and he was working with clients who moved and shook the places where they lived and worked. Here’s the more intriguing follow-up question: What would a Carnegie library look like if Louis Sullivan had designed one?

Before the CSI rerun was over, I had set myself this problem: Design a Carnegie-era public library circa 1914 in the style of architect Louis Sullivan. Four years later, I’m still struggling with that personal challenge. What I couldn’t have known at the time was that Agincourt, Iowa would become the vehicle.

[For a brief introduction to Sullivan, there is an exhibit currently at the Art Institute of Chicago.]