During forty years of teaching and seven (yes, seven) years as an undergraduate, I’ve met a broad range of students. The range has been fairly constant but the variety has changed with the generations. Writing about the differences between inspiration and imitation revived memories of someone I knew at the University of Oklahoma in the 1960s. In the interest of privacy, let me call him/her Mango.

Mango was in the class ahead of mine, so we shared few courses. We did run into one another during a technical class, however (plumbing, I think), where Mango did not do well, not even well enough to pass. He/She had taken the course the year before and had to take it again the year following, for which I felt unbounded sympathy, since it was taught by Professor Joe Smay. I mention Joe–now safely gone to that great draughting board in the sky–because Professor Smay was one of OU’s genuine and most eccentric treasures. He lectured with a cold and soggy cigar in his mouth, a cigar that was never lit. It goes without saying that a cigar cramped Joe’s lecture style. Also (and I say this with caution) Joe was OLD. How old, you ask? Joe was so old that he had Oklahoma architectural license #0001. That’s saying something.

Professor Smay was also not the sort of person who welcomed criticism. You learned quickly, for example, not to challenge his grading. Inquire about points lost on a test question and Joe was more than willing to admit he might have been in error. But it would only be fair to regrade your entire exam–just in case he might have made an error elsewhere. Sure enough, a point or two might be gained on one question, but I can guarantee that more points would be lost somewhere else. The net result of any challenge was that your score inevitably went down. In that learning environment, Mango was doomed. As far as I know, he/she never completed that course or any other where number crunching was required.

Mango and I did share a one-semester studio experience–third year, I think. Before discussing that encounter, let me say something about Mango’s physical presence: tall, very tall, Ichabod Crane tall, and thin, Alberto Giacometti thin. Mango was also inclined to dress for comfort: trench coats and sandals were a common costume that always left one wondering, like the Scotsman, what other clothes, if any, might be hidden beneath. It was creepy.

I came into studio one afternoon, a few weeks into the semester, and found Mango (a studio no-show up to that point) aggressively sanding his/her desktop. Remember that we actually draughted then and all that that entailed: lots and lots of pins to hold multiple sheets of paper in place. Wooden desktops were pocked with thousands of small holes that sometimes required filling with wood filler and a cover of heavy green paper. Mango labored on that surface for the better part of three weeks until it was satisfactorily prepared for actual work.

That work finally began with the design of a smallish fire station for Norman, Oklahoma, on a site within walking distance of campus. I arrived one afternoon to find Mango kneeling on the desk, ass skyward, and draughting with a crow quill pen, desperately trying to make straight lines without benefit of T-square or triangle. I offered to lend some of my tools, but was rebuffed with an icy “Tools are a crutch!”

Trying NOT to watch Mango became a genuine contest for everyone in the vicinity. Eventually, my curiosity got the better of me and I sneaked a peak: Mango’s fire station had slowly taken shape–a very familiar shape, the precise shape of Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1908 design for Unity Temple. Two opposing sides of Wright’s design, however, now sported large overhead doors, large enough for fire trucks. Wright’s balconies for overflow church attendance had been repurposed as sleeping quarters for fire fighters, while two of his stair and mechanical towers now served hose-drying and a shiny brass fire pole.

At this point you need to know that Mango’s parents had been connected with Taliesin, Wright’s architectural office in Wisconsin, and that Mango claimed to be Wright’s illegitimate offspring. So, perhaps those same creative juices flowed in my classmates veins. It was not for me to judge.

There is a bottom line here, however: Strong design personalities like Frank Lloyd Wright attracted many to bask in the circle of their influence, but few were able to break free of that strong gravitational pull and achieve anything other than the status of a satellite.

Based on budget, lot size and orientation, S. S. Beman produced a wonderfully innovative series of church designs for Christian Science. The church at Davenport, Iowa, though wider than it is deep, at least represents the architect’s attitude toward style: he preferred simple Neo-Classical buildings that could be erected in masonry or wood, with a uniform covering of stucco in greys, pinks, robin’s-egg blue, and other pastel after-dinner-mint shades. Perhaps his work for this new denomination called for a kit or architectural parts; for an approach that was wholesale, rather than retail. I can dig it.

Bernard Maybeck, on another hand, focussed extraordinarily on the craft of architecture, the relationship between design and material; on how the work comes from the working. His Christian Science church at Berkeley, California is a monument to the Arts & Crafts and, simultaneously, a paean to economies that can derive from ordinary industrial building materials. Make certain your next visit to the Bay Area includes a stop at 2619 Dwight Way.

If the melding of these two approaches to design weren’t difficult enough, I had also become intrigued by the Etruscans, the overshadowed source of ancient Roman architecture. Rome can sometimes be treated unjustly as merely derivative of Greek architectural style. Though no Etruscan temples have survived intact, however, we can appreciate them from surviving tomb paintings, medals and models. Here was an easy going Tuscan style in decided contrast to the exquisite finicky refinements of Greek Doric.

I could imagine an Agincourt church design drawn from these disparate sources.

About thirty years ago, Hermann Pundt spoke at the Department of Architecture (the Landscape Program hadn’t been established yet). Pundt was a Karl Friedrich Schinkel scholar who had published a book on Schinkel’s career, one of the first reconsiderations in recent scholarship. That was the subject of his formal evening presentation. But it was his less structured talk the following afternoon that I recall more vividly: titled something like “Frank Lloyd Wright and Willem Dudok, a duality of difference.”

Those of you familiar with the Dutch modernist’s work know that Dudok suffers, on this side of the Atlantic, from a too-close comparison with Frank Lloyd Wright. Why is it that we habitually evaluate the work of someone aware of Wright and potentially influenced by him as an “also ran” in the history of architecture? It’s neither fair nor even accurate. Professor Pundt enlightened us about the potential of that influence: we can either imitate or allow it to inspire us. It should go without saying that the path of inspiration is difficult but so much more rewarding, though an opportunity to apply the principle didn’t arrive until I considered Agincourt’s Christian Science Church.

With apologies to followers of Mary Baker Eddy, I cannot hear her name without recalling the knee-jerk observation of Fred Schellabarger, the OU professor who taught the first half of the architectural history sequence at Norman; you can blame Fred for many of my deficiencies. He was a card-carrying Episcopalian whose disdain for non-liturgical denominations of Christianity was obvious. Of Christian Science he often observed, “Neither Christian nor scientific!” in verbal parentheses.

Mrs Eddy offered Science and Health with a Key to the Scriptures to all branches of the Christian faith, but none would have it. Reluctantly (one imagines), she founded her own denomination, one with a spin that I find enormously interesting: quite aside from praying yourself out of illness, Christian Science played its own special role in the women’s movement at the end of the 19th century. Her church has no ordained clergy, its services being conducted by two readers, one male and one female. Its buildings also bear little orthodox symbolism. In fact Christian Science architecture tended to be dominated by a handful of regional designers. In the Midwest that was S. S. Beman.

Beman’s churches for Christian Science bear a strong family resemblance; variations on a powerful theme drawn from the Neo-Classical “Mother Church” in Boston. The church in Fargo and the one in DeKalb, Illinois are virtually interchangeable, as the new church in Agincourt would have been circa 1908. Beman designed literally dozens of churches, however, and his influence would be far too dominant on any interpretation of Christian Science corporate imagery. Something should be added to the mix; I wanted to increase the “degree of difficulty.”

Another architect prominent at that time was Bernard Maybeck, key figure in the Arts & Crafts movement in the Bay Area. But while Beman had designed dozens of churches, Maybeck had effectively designed only one, in his hometown Berkeley, California. (Incidentally, both Beman and Maybeck were converts to Christian Science.) My challenge was to conceive how their two very different styles might have blended and to imagine the circumstances in which that could have occurred. The result of that miscegination appears below.

North elevation, First Church of Christ, Scientist (1908-1909), Agincourt, IA

I’m pleased with the result. Let me know what you think.

Last month was the unheralded ninety-fifth anniversary of the Agincourt Public Library, the last and best example of Anson Tennant’s brief architectural career. Can’t imagine how it slipped my mind.

As I continue to prepare drawings for Jeremiah Johnson’s model-building prowess, I thought you might like a preview of its elevations to put beside the very preliminary plan published here several weeks ago. Lacking the ornamental skills of a Louis Sullivan (I shouldn’t feel so bad; even Frank Lloyd Wright couldn’t do it), the ornamental flourishes on the ground floor columns are giving me fits: I can see them in my mind’s eye but fail again and again to render them for public consumption. Vince Hatlen has told me of a wonderful metal crafter in the Twin Cities who I hope to interest in frabricating one for the 2011 exhibit.

Howard Tabor has written several articles about an incongruous trinity of women important to turn-of-the-century Agincourt: Maud Adams, Annabelle Miller and Sissy Beddowes. Attend the tale of their odd affiliation.

Maud Adams (née Baldwin) came to Agincourt in 1888 when her husband B.F. won the masonry contract for Fennimore county’s second courthouse. He fell from faulty scaffolding, ruptured his spleen, a died a dew days later, leaving his pregnant widow with small savings and no social safety net. Soon after the birth of their daughter Amanda in 1889, Mrs Adams accepted an offer from her neighbors to open a restaurant that would highlight her baking skills. In short order she returned the favor, employing a series of young women in a virtual finishing school that continued to her death in the 1940s.

Annabelle Miller (née Schwert) would seem to be Adams’ antithesis. The Millers ran a tobacco shop behind the old Hazzard House Hotel, aptly named for the number of fires that eventually caused its demise. Mr Miller died in 1893 or 1894, probably from tuberculosis, and also left his widow with little means of support. Her brother Armand Schwert came to Belle’s questionable rescue, remodeling a stable at the rear of the property, adapting it as a House of Ill Repute and making his sister a de facto madam. A comparable number of young women passed through Mrs Miller’s dubious employment. 

Sissy Beddowes, the third leg of this odd triangle, was the wife of carpenter and former U.S. Indian Agent Amos Beddowes, a Connecticut native who had settled on the banks of the Muskrat River years before there was an Agincourt. In his government role, Amos had worked closely with the Sac and Fox tribes, earliest inhabitants of this part of Iowa; so closely, in fact, that he married a young Native woman whose name translates She-Listens-to-the-Moon, medicine woman to her people. The connection between the moon and medicine suggested Circe, Greek goddess associated with each of those ideas, as her English name. Circe morphed into Sissy, whose knowledge of seeds, herbs and roots easily exceeded the local medical profession’s. In 1910 she even shared her herbal wisdom at Chicago’s homeopathic college.

How, you might well ask, did these three disparate lives intertwine? That’s easy: sex and its unregulated consequence.

Some of Belle Miller’s employees inevitably became pregnant. If Sissy Beddowes’ concoctions couldn’t terminate the pregnancy, then Maud Adams would shelter the girls through their “lying in” and work with Doc Fahnstock to legitimize the birth and place the child through private adoption. Tres discrete! [Read earlier blog entries for the story of Neil Klien, who entered life precisely this way.]

My point here is to put nineteenth-century pharmaceuticals in perspective: Folk wisdom was the basis for drug conglomerates of the twentieth century, but it never entirely disappeared. I remember my father accepting folk remedies–mustard plasters, corn squeezins and sheep-shit tea–from customers at our gas station, Black emigrants from the South who had come to work the factories of Chicago; people I knew who were at most three generations from slavery. I also recall that these homespun remedies worked!

Community-based folk wisdom was effective; it had a multi-generational record of success. “Snake oil” wasn’t, because it was ephemeral, opportunistic and motivated by greed.

The prospect of a 21st century economy unhindered by regulation “in the interest of public health and safety” reminds me of an early Agincourt impulse I had: snake oil.

During the 19th century Americans could and did put anything on and in their bodies. Whether cosmetic, curative or nutritional, our markets were no only free, they were wide open. Regulation of food and drugs curbed a colorful segment of the free market; but until that happened, the advertised claims for such products knew no bounds. And, as you might imagine, the hordes of customers waiving fistfuls of cash were boundless. Ah, fools and their money. Be it ever so sacred.

Surely some industrious Agincourter capitalized on the gullible or the desperate. What was required? A cellar, shed or stable; paper-labelled bottles, jars or tins; interestingly-colored smelly stuff. Oh, and of course, shamelessness. I know–let me repeat: I know–that an industrious Iowa entrepreneur availed him- or herself of this unparalleled unregulated opportunity. There is a story here–a typical 19th century American tale–waiting, nay crying out, to be told.

From the outset of this project I have wanted to create labels, bottles and full-blown P.T. Barnum-esque advertising for Agincourt’s spin on the snake oil phenomenon. Any ideas on how I can find someone to craft these bottles? Your advice is welcome. 

These days, when asked to make a public presentation, I sometimes offer an illustrated tour of Agincourt, Iowa. Just as often, though, you’ll be relieved to learn that I’ve spoken on other topics: 1) the Gothic Revival as source for the Modern Movement, 2) the evolution of architectural drawings during the 19th and 20th centuries, 3) the Social Gospel, 4) emergence of the architectural profession in the last 150 years, or 5) Victorian culture on the Great Plains. Granted, most of these are historically based, but that’s just who I happen to be.

Last year I was invited to speak at UNLV (thanks to our friends at Klai+Juba) and gave one of the best presentations of my career: a guided tour of imaginary Iowa to a capacity audience (so I’m told) of students and community. A half hour of post-presentation Q&A reinforced my belief that this project has been worth my investment. Some of the crowd even got the obtuse inside jokes. But the most illuminating experience so far has been another shorter presentation to a handful of sixth graders at Faribault, Minnesota.

Molly Yergens (Milton and Barbie Yergens’ daughter) teaches art at Shattuck-St Mary’s, an Episcopal day and boarding school with students quite literally from around the world. Molly had challenged each of her charges to imagine a community and hoped the Agincourt story might stir their creative juices. So I gave them twenty minutes of sketchbook images, pix from the 2007 exhibit and other material that hasn’t been shown yet. Things went well, but then I noticed a downcast face and a furrowed brow and wondered about his concern. “Well,” he paused, “it seems to me that people might actually believe Agincourt really exists.”

“You catch right on!” I enthused, because that’s exactly what excites me about this project. I recall the BBC production of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast and supplementary discussion with cast members, including an off-hand observation about the difference between fantasy and imagination. Despite the puns and inside humor, I have hoped that this exercise of the imagination will be solidly based in real historical processes; I want precisely what my new young friend had feared: the nagging suspicion that you’ve been there before; got a tire repaired at Cliff’s Garage; had pie and coffee at Adams’ Restaurant; received a postcard from Aunt Harriet’s high school reunion trip. 

In a few weeks we’ll be offering a set of Agincourt postcards–images of buildings and people–for gift-giving this year. Proceeds will support a scholarship in our NDSU department. But my real hope is that some of these cards will find their way to Ebay; that ultimately “…people might actually believe Agincourt really exists.” Everything I do is motivated by that wish. And what I can learn along the way.

Twenty-five years ago or thereabouts, someone gave me a religious medal. About an inch and a quarter tall, it is made of aluminum and bears a relief image of Saint Dymphna. Her story is typical for obscure saints, especially females: widowed father (Irish king) sees the light of his late wife in the blush of his daughter’s cheeks; she flees to Belgium with the court jester, is pursued by her father and beheaded when she continues to resist his amorous advances. You know, boilerplate stuff from reality TV. But the manner of someone’s death doesn’t always predict the circumstances of their canonization. In Dymphna’s case her relics preserved in a church at Gheel, Belgium have become associated with miraculous cures. This medal invokes her protection with the words “St. Dymphna pray for us.”

Incidentally, Dymphna is the patron saint of the criminally insane.

The original Catholic parish at Agincourt, founded in the early 1860s, would typically have borne the name of a dedicatory saint. Many such saints names have ethnic or national connections. Saint David, for example, is the patron saint of the Welsh; Saint Patrick of the Irish; Saint George of the English. Churches dedicated to Saint Augustine frequently serve African congregations, since he had been Bishop of Hippo on the Mediterranean coast of present-day Tunisia. Nineteenth-century Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi is likely to be sainted within the next few years. But there are a large number of canonized lives much less familiar; one might say obtuse. This is especially true in rural Europe where local saints continue to be venerated by their neighborhood populace–and there alone. When was the last time you invoked the name of Blaise, Mungo or Procopius? As a once and former adherent of the Church of Rome, I continue to be fascinated by the sanctity claimed for a relative few of our species.

The canonization process can begin soon after the candidate’s death or centuries later. It depends. Miracles are the usual raison d’etre, but I suspect that politics have much more to do with it. Mother Theresa of Calcutta has already been beatified on the fast track to full sainthood. Controversial historic figures like Pius XII (called “Hitler’s Pope” in a 1999 book by John Cornwell), however, are likely to steal their way through the lengthy process on the coat tails of universally popular figures like his successor John XXIII. But who would be the spiritual benchmark for Agincourt?

Once again, I’m at a loss to explain the source for Saint Ahab. The name came from nowhere and a quick google search found his saintly life unclaimed by any denomination. The circumstances of his canonization are sketchy. At present I can tell you this:

• He was an obscure Croatian saint
• His relics were rescued by Crusaders retreating from their failed religious wars
• They were taken to Agincourt in northern France and installed in a modest Romanesque church
• He has very likely become the patron of those suffering from OCD

Ahab’s hagiagraphy is yet to be written (perhaps by a local authority on iconography). And his portrait icon will be crafted by Mr Jonathan Rutter, Moorhead artist already deeply imbedded in the Agincourt Project sandbox. Howard Tabor has written a lengthy history of Catholics in Fennimore county, describing that first church already replaced by two successors, but I have yet to interpret Tabor’s word picture.

The only significant difference between me and the students I engage each day is this: there are more cards on my rolodex. Pardon the antique metaphor. (I thought the last of that desktop detritus had found its way to the Smithsonian, but the other day I saw a computer version where virtual cards rotate on the screen; how tenaciously we cling to the familiar!) The forty years of experience that separate me from twenty-somethings may have added information and experience to who I am, but they have also burdened me with preconception and prejudice. I take care to distinguish among them and draw from my better self.

Photograph courtesy of Mr Peter Atwood

This Arts & Crafts window wants a home, and that home can only grow from the cards on my rolodex. Its gentle horizontality; the circular vignette of landscape; its asymmetry fit with my experience of smaller residential work in the U.S. during the gaggle of years surrounding the First World War. They probably account for my attraction to it. But first things first: I need a client. Perhaps it was the link I had made between “synecdoche” and my grade-school education that offered someone: this will be a teacher’s home, and the teacher will be a woman.

Folks of my generation were taught by what I call secular nuns. Teaching was a profession of women, and they were largely unmarried; I was in the seventh grade before I saw a man at the head of the classroom. So my education came from misses: Hletko, Rapp, Piancimino, Piper, Spellman, among others; we had not yet imagined “Ms.” Early in life they had chosen career over marriage, and that career could only have been teaching, nursing or God (though, technically, that last choice does involve a wedding). So my client is a composite of those wonderful women who had helped me learn to think. Let’s call her Rose.

The moment I saw this window, it suggested the work of a Chicago-area architect whose work has fascinated me for many years: Lawrence Buck. Because this teacherage would be small, I recalled two of Buck’s smallest houses–one for himself in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago (demolished) and the other extant in suburban Oak Park; both date from around 1910. These would be my models. Coincidentally, the Oak Park home had been built for a teacher–Miss Rose Kavana (interesting variation of the more usual Kavanaugh)–so now I had my client’s full name: Rose Kavanaugh. Her home would be no more than a block from Darwin School in Agincourt’s northwest quadrant.

There are certain defaults in Lawrence Buck’s houses: asymmetry, compactness, stucco-on-frame construction, clustered windows with small pent eaves, passive solar orientation. I can recognize his work at five hundred feet from a moving car in a snowstorm. In fact, I did just that in Rockford, Illinois, several years ago (minus the snowstorm) driving through with my friend Richard Kenyon. So Miss Kavanaugh’s home came to me quickly. And her window will soon have an outlook: beside the front entry, so she can glimpse her guests and anticipate their welcome. I imagine myself standing there, age twelve, with gratitude for the gift of her teaching.

First design of the Kavanaugh cottage.

There are far more figures of speech than the metaphor and the simile, two we learned in eighth-grade English class from Miss Rose Spellman. Until Philip Seymour Hoffman’s recent film “Synecdoche, New York,” I didn’t know the word synecdoche. But it’s definition–the whole for the part, the part for the whole; the general for the specific, and vice versa–reminded me that I’ve heard these figures of speech most of my adult life; that I’ve even used them now and then, possibly in error.

In architecture, synecdoche seems closely related to the idea of deductive thought, moving from the general to the specific. Design begins with general information and observation, then moves through preliminary and intermediate schemes, toward a specific solution; from large questions to increasingly small, detailed and specific answers. I am intrigued by the prospect of a studio design exercise reversing that process. Perhaps Spring semester….

Though I’m repulsed by this example, recall with me the Kohler TV commercial where an affluent couple is shown the work of a prestigious architect in his exemplary office (the office itself being synecdochic: it is a specific design that presumably stands for the total oeuvre of its designer). Seated in his conference room, the architect asks “Now what can I do for you?” Then, from her purse the woman brings forth a faucet. “Design a house around this.” Her challenge to the architect–design a whole from and for this part–is the heart of the Agincourt Project.

Photograph courtesy of Mr Peter Atwood

Two months ago I found a stained glass window from the Arts & Crafts era. The glass and leading are in surprisingly good condition, though the wood frame betrays a house whose inner-city neighborhood likely brought about its own demise. Yes, I would gladly return my acquisition for the restoration of a modest single-family home in Toledo, Ohio; it belongs there, to delight children’s searching eyes and reassure harried parents that little moments matter. So now I accept the challenge set by the pretentious woman with the faucet fetish: what notion of “home” might grow from this urban artifact?