The Fennimore County Agricultural Association
Agincourt was platted in 1853, shortly after the formation of Fennimore county, and incorporated as a city four years later. The county seat (and presumably the site of the first county fairs) was at Muskrat City, south of Agincourt. But the flatland site and regular flooding there forced the commission to relocate to Agincourt. Such maneouvers are often more political than strategic, but that’s a tale for another day.
County agricultural societies often incorporated in tandem with county formation as agents for information, promotion and economic development. Like the county courthouse, the fairgrounds was a valuable asset for the city that possessed it. Since courthouse and fairgrounds aren’t always in the same city, Agincourt has been fortunate.
So, as a point of departure, let’s set the process in motion, identify the site and pose some relevant questions.
- The Fennimore county Agricultural Society is roughly contemporary with the establishment of Agincourt, circa 1853.
- The fair site in the northeast quarter of the section adjacent to Agincourt measured slightly more than 100 acres on the west bank of the Muskrat river. The wiggle of the Agincourt Road right-of-way was also a minor factor.
- At some point Agincourt Road was rerouted northwest toward the east-west route of State Highway #7, which cut off roughly one third of the fairgrounds. Therefore…
- A trade was negotiated with the adjacent farm, that had likewise been cut apart. The resulting triangular fairgrounds extends seven-eighths of a mile west of the Muskrat and slightly less than a quarter mile along its bank.
- It is likely that the original fair entrance had been near the Agincourt Road bridge (at the fairgrounds’ southeast corner) but was relocated to the north side along Highway #7 with the advent of the automobile.
When did all this happen?
In addition to the fair’s own internal evolution, there are a few peripheral factors likely to have influenced its growth:
- Some sort of county or state institution was established across the Muskrat in far northwestern Agincourt (the purple area on the map above). Unspecified at first (perhaps an orphanage, home for the aged or for Civil War veterans), it morphed about WWI into a normal school or state teacher training college. It seems likely the college athletic facilities expanded across the river onto fair property as shared resources.
- Since fair activities are often restricted to the late summer harvest season, what efforts were made to extend its “season” and expand its use for the community. A chautauqua grounds would be a compatible function.
- When the electric street railway opened circa 1898, it would have been natural to establish a seasonal line to the fairgrounds for passengers, as well as a route for occasional deliveries by rail.
- And finally, the Agincourt Archers is a Double-A baseball team. Would their playing field have been on the fairgrounds?
County fairs are a distincly American phenomenon, with a wide variety of types depening on location and age. I wonder what the interweb has to offer.
Improving the gene pool
The most memorable classroom presentation I ever witnessed was at UC-Berkeley in the spring of 1980. Notice I didn’t say “lecture.” That word can be off-putting.
I sat in on J.B. Jackson’s class on the American landscape. Jackson had invented the academic field of cultural landscape studies and was surely one of the most charismatic and effective teachers in the history of education. I’m told Vincent Scully at Yale was Jackson’s match.
The amphitheater might have held 200, but slightly less than half the seats were occupied that morning. Jackson spoke from stage right, near a laboratory table, and thralled us for about forty-five minutes without slides or any other illustration. Only at the end, the lecture safely concluded, did he append a half dozen grainy slides taken from a moving vehicle in a dust storm. But the immediacy of those frozen moments only reinforced what we had just heard. His words had conjured better images than a Kodak carousel would have feebly cast on any available flat surface.
Jackson’s topic that morning? The county fair. I think of it today as a friend reveals he has taken on the design of Fennimore county’s fairgrounds.
THE COUNTRY FAIR
The country fair–contrasted with city fetes and festivals–was a place to display our prowess in horticulture and husbandry. But, more important than blue ribbons and bragging rights, it was a marketplace for improved crops and livestock. Seed was traded and sold. Male animals were put to stud; females sold to the highest bidder. Knowledge, too, passed among the crowd: tips on planting, erosion and pest control. The result was a mixed blessing. The gene pool did indeed improve, but at the cost of biodiversity–a lesson we are learning at our peril in the 21st century.
The country fair was a social event as well. Paths crossed that otherwise would not. Conventional wisdom grew in volume and assurance. And human breeding stock improved along with cattle and sheep. In a pre-industrial society, the availability of mates was often limited to the social island of the farmstead and, at best, the parish church and village. Families intermarried in a complex genetic tartan plaid of ever tightening weave. So the dance and other social events enabled marriageable youth to improve their prospects and their progeny. This was as true for medieval England as it was in 19th century Agincourt.
The story of the Fennimore County Agricultural Society will be more complex and nuanced than that. But it is a beginning. And, as Princess Irulan observes at the opening of Dune, “A beginning is a very delicate thing.”
Ghosts of Christmas Past #16
I never met Hal Holt but by all accounts he mentored some of Agincourt’s most eccentric citizens. An engineer by training and practice, Holt was a right-brained engineer, a “poet-plumber” more inclined toward the big picture than to formulas and safety factors. Perhaps that’s why he retired from the profession and devoted his life to history. Howard wrote about Holt’s death in 2008, a paean to Holt-the-Historian, crotchety keeper of local lore and grandson of Malcolm Holt, founder of the county historical society. So it was natural that Holt would have known Abel Kane and, moreover, that he would have mid-wifed an introduction for Howard Tabor.
Harold Holt had been born in 1920, Kane in 1933, and Tabor in 1945, an interesting generational spread for that shifting conversation on a Saturday afternoon circa 1972. But Holt never said very much about Kane, I suspect, because it would have seemed an invasion of privacy, not to mention an evasion of his personal code of conduct as an historian.
And by the way, we haven’t heard the last word from Hal.
“A few figs from thistles…”
Howard A. Tabor
Abel Kane
Tottering-on-the-Brink was what every classroom should be: an open environment for unfettered exploration. I relished the two or three times a month we gathered for dinner and conversation—i.e., communion. Until last week, however, I had never read Plato’s Symposium (embarrassed to admit that), but now I understand.
A typical gathering at the Brink? Each of them and none were typical.
I recall one that began with John Kirkpatrick’s pioneer recording of the Ives’ Second Sonata (the one called “Concord”), so multi-layered and poly-rhythmic that no other performer would risk it. (There are now, more than thirty years later, a half dozen fine interpretations. Times change; skills improve. We stand on the shoulders of our elders.) That notion of a work so technically challenging suggested a verbal parallel in The Magic of America, architect Marion Mahoney Griffin’s autobiography, itself multi-layered, poly-valent and comparably intimidating of interpretation. Leaps like that were common.
If you want to know someone, look at their books. One week in the 1990s, when Abel went to research at the Library of Congress, he asked me to keep an eye on the place and his cat Drusus, I happily packed a bag and camped out in the big room, surrounded by the county’s second biggest library, but certainly its most eclectic. My book-a-day goal included these:
- The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody by Will Cuppy, American humorist who lived in the namesake Tottering-on-the-Brink;
- Hadrian the Seventh, semi-autobiography of Frederick Rolfe, self-styled Baron Corvo, whose language was more wrought than writ;
- The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges;
- Douglas Adams’ Hitchhicker’s Guide to the Galaxy;
- Technics and Architecture, a history of building materials and systems (elevators, lighting, etc.; hardly the stuff of cliff-hanging thrillers) by Cecil Elliott—technology humanized; and
- James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games: a vision of life as play and possibility, a book that I have read a dozen times since
All authors I might not otherwise have met.
My experience with teachers is simple: the better among them never stopped being students. And a large number of those never knew they were teaching in the first place. Such was Abel Kane.
Abel Kane died July 5th, achieving his own independence. At his request I am executing Kane’s Last Will and Testament, which states in brief what he wanted most and modestly: 1) to have done little harm; 2) to have left a family of friends; 3) to have taught more by example than by words.
Harold Holt gave order to the history of Agincourt, Fennimore County and the Muskrat River Valley, the fourth generation of his family to fill that community role—whether the community wanted it or not. The practice of history is about discovery and interpretation, the telling of a community’s tale. Now and then, it is also about editing; some things are better left alone, unsaid. That category includes Abel Kane’s origins, which Hal Holt took to the grave.
I want
“I want what I want when I want it.”—Eric Cantor, in his high school yearbook
To want is not an evil thing. But wanting can seem less than admirable when it comes from the mouth of Rep. Eric Cantor (R—VA). I want many things, but none of them will come, I hope, at the expense of anyone else. Adding something to my list shouldn’t remove it from yours, nor diminish your chance of achieving it as well. Let me know when it does.
“A few figs from thistles…”
Howard A. Tabor
Tottering-on-the-Brink
Northeast of Agincourt, just over half way to Grou on the county road, you’ll pass the old Brinkman Township schoolhouse. The school closed about 1920 and mouldered until the early-50s when someone bought and converted the one-room school-teacherage into a home, then named it “Tottering-on-the-Brink.”
We hear a lot about the Founding Fathers these days—what they intended for a pre-industrial society that Tom Jefferson believed would never exceed three million people! A rare example of shortsightedness on Jefferson’s part. One thing is certain: the FFs meant us to be an educated people.
“Religion, morality and knowledge, being necessary to good governance and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”—from the U.S. Land Ordinance of 1785
Unlike our British cousins, publicly-supported elementary education was built into America’s westward expansion. The Land Ordinance of 1785 established the system of range and section lines that define ninety percent of U.S. geography. Townships consist of thirty-six sections (numbered in boustrophedon fashion from the upper right corner back and forth across its six-mile square) and section #16 was dedicated to public education; no child would be more than three or four miles from a school. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 extended this into the country’s newly acquired territory, and the Louisiana Purchase took the principle into the trans-Mississippi West.
My great-aunt Margaret taught at Brinkman until the time of its closure, so it was with no little interest that I heard about the old school’s rebirth. Hal Holt told me about it—he introduced me to many ideas, including coffee—and arranged an afternoon of conversation with the school’s new owner.
ABEL KANE
Aptly named, it turned out.
I had only heard about Mr Kane. Few people saw him, except for his regular visits to the library, the post office and Perin’s Grocery. He wasn’t reclusive, just pre-occupied with project’s that thrive in solitude. Hal and I drove out one Saturday afternoon in the early 70s, when Kane had been in the converted Brinkman school about ten years. The former teacher’s quarters (kitchen, bed-sitting room and bath) displayed a spartan clutter: I imagined locating anything as a minor archaeological dig. The single school room, however—about twenty-five by forty feet—used every foot of shelving and begged again as much. Books were two deep in places and stalagmites of reading matter obstructed every likely path across the softly worn floor. A hasty survey suggested an intensely personal ordering system, perhaps with a mind to match.
Hal and I were invited to sit around an oak dining table, but one I suspected it had not seen a formal meal in at least a decade. Kane introduced himself as an historian of indeterminate stripe but with a hankering for material culture. Buildings generally seemed to interest him, but I learned about specific projects later in our acquaintance. I recall our first conversation—it was forty years ago—as a broad ramble about out-of-bounds creativity; eccentric Americans and worse whose modus operandi had been an exception to the rule. Abel Kane admired the artistic independence, for example, of American composer Charles Ives (who became an insurance executive so that his music could avoid the taint of Mammon); Ives’ “Concord Sonata” was thought to be unplayable at that time, until pianist John Kirkpatrick tackled the score. Like Ives, Kane was also steeped in the New England Transcedentalists, perhaps, I thought, a reason for his appearance at Agincourt, “the transcendental town.”
Abel Kane also spoke of Carl Ruggles, another American composer and contemporary of Ives, who composed on the floor of his own studio in Maine, drawing in crayon on huge sheets of butcher paper, the brightly colored notes allowing Ruggles to see the sounds in his mind’s ear. Kane evidenced a similar wholistic view, with notecards, sketches, photographs, diagrams, transcripts, and multiply-flagged books in a semicircle around the brocade cushion where he sat. Popular culture wasn’t talking about left brain versus right brain then, but we were all using our right sides that afternoon.
Throughout the next three decades, I was a regular at Tottering-on-the-Brink. Whether Saturday evenings on the porch Kane built along the west side for sunset watching or Sunday afternoons at an impromptu potluck buffet on that big round table, conversations ranged farther, wider and deeper than was my custom. I often felt along for the ride, but exciting, irreverent, unguarded rides they were. I learned much from Abel Kane, yet knew practically nothing about him. Until last month, that is, when I became executor of his estate. Only then did I learn what he wanted.
There’s more to this story….
Fathers (and sons)
Howard would be too modest to tell you about his immediate family–his father, for example. So let me say a few words about Warren Tabor, who died in 1995.
Warren James Tabor [1917-1995] managed the local power company; a progressive sort who involved the corporation in various community projects. In 1990, for example (five years before he died), Tabor negotiated purchase of the old interurban depot as the power company headquarters and an important step in downtown revitalization. Yet he was a skittish, shy man who avoided photographers and any sort of limelight. So imagine Tabor, wife, and friends on a hot evening at the Fennimore County Fair circa 1980. How did they get him to hold still long enough for an unrecorded artist to do this quick portrait sketch?
Measuring about nine by six inches, this was sketched on a thick piece of cardboard in about twenty minutes. Having your portrait done is creepy, as the painter, friends and passers-by stop to stare at the artistic progress; the subject remains ignorant of what’s going on until the work is nearly complete. Tabor must not have liked it, because the painting remained hidden at home until after his death. Only then did it find its way into the Memorial Gallery in the old public library building, where it has hung discretely for the past fifteen years. Warren wouldn’t approve.
If you’d like to see this and other works in the Memorial Gallery collection, about forty pieces will be shown in the next Agincourt exhibit—Homecoming/Coming Home—in October 2012. Or if you just can’t wait until then, pester me and I’ll let you have a peak.
By the way, Howard doesn’t look a lot like his dad, favoring the Tennant side of the family instead.
The Power of Ten
In any life, there are bound to be highs, optimal experiences, things that register as “10” on our personal Richter Scales: moments of supreme joy; the triumph of accomplishment; achieving a personal best. I was with my friend Richard when he had one of those intense encouters with self. Richard’s daughter Heather married a few years ago and he had to give a father-of-the-bride toast at the reception. We all understood its intensity. I have seen him nearly that emotional on only one other occasion.
At least as often, at the other end of the spectrum, our “tens” can be negative experiences: natural disasters over which we are powerless; onerous tasks that we’d prefer to avoid at almost any cost. These are the events that test mettle and confirm character. Howard phoned last night because there is one of those tasks on his horizon; I could hear it in his voice and wished that I could be a better friend. But if these were things someone else could undertake, they wouldn’t be a 10, would they.
“A few figs from thistles…”
by Howard A. Tabor
TEN
Personal scales of value have been on my mind a lot lately and they all seem to involve 10. Ten fingers. Ten toes. Ten Jews make a minyan (מִנְיָן ). “Just ten minutes more, Mom!”
Technically, 10 isn’t the last of the first ten numbers; it’s the first of the next ten—thanks to the invention of zero (another number that might be worthy of our attention some other day). “Powers of Ten,” a film by Charles and Ray Eames, is one of the most elegant explorations of this deceptively simple idea; rent it some time on Netflix.
CHICAGO
Vexillology is the science of flags. Like heraldry, where every element, symbol and color bears meaning, flags, especially national flags, are rich with information. At a smaller geographic scale, I recall the municipal flag of Chicago which intrigued me when I worked there in the late 1960s.
On a rectangle of pure white (with few exceptions, flags are a 3:5 proportion), two horizontal blue bars define a row of four red stars. The bars represent the two branches of the Chicago River (and the three resulting white stripes, the north, west and south sides of the city) and each red star symbolizes a watershed event in the city’s history. That’s what Wikipedia says, but I recall a different, more satisfying explanation from my youth.
First there’s the issue of the Chicago River. It was certainly never blue; in fact, it’s purposely dyed green on St Patrick’s Day. Besides, shouldn’t the blue more accurately represent Lake Michigan. The lake was the life-giving source of drinking water; the river, of the city’s bouts with typhoid and worse.
Then there are those symbolic four stars. Who chose the events they represent? And what happens when the city encounters a new one? Will another star appear or will the original four change their affiliation? Will one event displace another? It was explained to me another way, which I offer here to make a point, rather than for its Truthiness.
It was explained to me as a contrast of defining moments—positives and negatives. Tens and minus tens, I suppose. The blue bars (I was told) represent Chicago’s crowning cultural achievements: the World’s Fairs of 1893 (the Columbian Exposition) and 1933 (the Century of Progress, celebrating Chicago’s incorporation in 1833). Between these, the four red stars—like Red Badges of Courage—are linked with tragedy, some would say odd references to be put on a public symbol of civic pride:
- 1812—the Fort Dearborn Massacre
- 1871—the Great Chicago Fire
- 1933—the assassination of Mayor Anton Cermak
- …and a fourth event that I either can’t recall or doesn’t exist because this interpretation of the flag is totally bogus.
I’m clearly drawn to a flag that represents extremes, the physical and emotional limits of our joy as well as our forebearance.
I also wonder if these scales of 10 are arithmetic or geometric. Is the line on the graph straight or curved? The Richter Scale is of the latter sort, where each number is ten times the previous value, rather than ten more. Adds new import to the difference between 1.0 and 8.5, doesn’t it!
HERE AND NOW
Today is one of those watershed days for me. Friendship that flowed between me and another is likely to take a different course. Some situations can be neither delegated nor diverted. And what transpires may well redefine what it means to be a 10.
Agincourt has been a 10 for me; the source for some of my greatest joy and contentment. Just ask Dr Bob. But it has also been—like any real place—frustrating, contentious, humbling, infuriating, and humiliating; a source for irritation, confrontation, and angst. Perhaps I should count that a measure of its success.
Bastille Day
Today is Bastille Day, celebrating the storming of the notorious Parisian jail on July 14th, 1789, and the beginning of the French Revolution. For a few years after that, it commemorated the fall of one tyranny and its replacement with another. Revolution, of necessity, had to become Revelation. Let’s hope for better luck for the Egyptians, Tunisians and others presently engaged in a similar process.
So, today, find someone French and give them a long deep kiss.
Oh, this is also the birthday of my friend James verDoorn. You can kiss him or not, as you see fit.
This Life (not a sermon)
At heart I am a Gnostic.
In simplified form, Gnostics believe that from the beginning there was the One, the All, the Everything. There was neither anyone nor anything else. And for that reason, unable to get outside itself—there being no outside to go to—the One sought self-awareness. So it created the World as a place to achieve that. And into this world it sent shards of itself, ignorant of their origin, yet capable in time of discovering who they were and from whence they had come. You and I are some of those shards.
The pleroma (πλήρωμα) separates us from the One. New Testament books written in Greek include this word at least a dozen times, but it is consistently translated as “fullness,” as “in the fullness of time.” Gnostics understand the pleroma as the barrier—a sort of spiritual hymen—between us and our origin. It is the horizontal bar on the ankh symbol tattooed on my back, a reminder of my goal. It may be out of sight, but it is never out of mind.
Look at the ankh: the bifurcated world of good and evil, right and wrong below the pleroma; the unified Oneness we seek, above.
In addition to the World, there were also created a number of demi-gods, fallen angels and others (according to ancient Gnostic wisdom) put in charge of this place (below the bar or pleroma). Forgetting their relationship with The One, however, their consequent mismanagement of this place may account for the plethora of present day Faiths. Details of Gnostic theology are curiously interesting, arcane and convoluted. Gnostic Heaven and Hell, for example, are not separate and distinct places of reward and punishment after the fact. They exist right here, right now. This life can be heavenly or hellacious; the choice is ours.
I take from the Gnostics this simple notion: The task here in this life is to discover my origin and eventually return home. When this life is over, I will present myself for examination and receive one of three judgments: 1) I will have lived well and fully and be permitted home to rejoin The One; 2) I will have lived badly, drink the draught of forgetfulness and be sent back to do it again until it is done right; or 3) I will have made mistakes but be allowed to return and build upon my previous existence. Number 3 is my heartfelt desire. Complaints to the contrary, I’m beginning to like this place.
There is a Gnostic church; Google it. It has bishops and clergy and liturgy and all the trappings of “religion.” I want nothing to do with it, nor with any other organized religion, since those institutions only confirm my equally heartfelt belief that in the syzygetic pairing of religion and spirituality, it is the latter which concerns each of us; the former is a cloud of misdirection. Yet clerics abound, spouting more nonsense than wisdom. “Sky Pilots” my father called them; folks who wear their shirts backwards or in some other way self-identify among the masses as keepers of special knowledge and absolution. I used to scurry from their presence, but no more.
My spiritual advisors are, more often than not, unaware they are fulfilling that role. You see them every day, as I do: glimpses, glimmers and glints of The One seen in lives lived well and fully. Exemplars of what it means to be both completely human and humane. Too often, it is their opposites we see in full force and flourish; the Marcus Bachman’s of this life. Bachman’s head is situated so far and so firmly up his ass that he and his ilk are become more Möbius than Men. Maurits Escher would be hard-pressed to paint his portrait; an eye-wrenching image of insides and out conjoined from some spiritual car crash.
So, if and when this thought occurs—”I cannot live”—please allow yourself to compete that sentence: “I cannot live this life this way.” Correct your course; seek the good and true. Keep an eye out for those glimpses, glimmers and glints.
See you on the other side of the Pleroma.
Begged, Borrowed, Stolen
Sad to say that I have an Iomega external hard drive, acquired as a backup for a lot of miscellaneous by important files, but which is nwt inaccessible. The design is/was deficient in a major way: the USB connection was extremely fragile and became disconnected. After an expensive experiment, I’m left with one possible solution: pay a data recovery service from $500 to $2,000 to do their thing. This could have been avoided if Iomega had simply equipped their drives with a SATA port that allows the USB connection to be bypassed. In its proprietary wisdom, Iomega chose not to equip their drives with this valuable feature.
If the external drive were accessible, I could post a copy of the “Biographical Dictionary of the Agincourt Project,” a compendium of every personal name associated with the project to date—and much in need of updates. It would appear—absent 2,000 bucks for the data retrieval service—I’ll be reconstructing this from memory.
Who’s on First?
There are three categories in the Biographical Dictionary: 1) Imaginary characters like Anson Tennant who have been created during the evolution of Agincourt; 2) real people who have come to play during the last five years in the sandbox that is the Agincourt Project (current students, faculty, graduates, friends, acquaintances, hapless passersby and others with time on their hands); and 3) real people who are deceased but whose talents, reputations, etc. have been conscripted into the evolving story. I suppose the largest group in category three are architects—designers I admire and hope to understand better by imagining designs for a wide variety of projects. Chicago architect Francis Barry Byrne was channeled by my friend Richard Kenyon as the architect circa 1950 for the new Catholic church of Christ the King. Most of the others on this short list were chosen from my own list of personal favorites.
Many of you will know there is a special place in my pantheon of architectural demigods held by William Halsey Wood [1855-1897], architect of Newark, NJ who designed more than forty Episcopal churches during a brief career cut tragically short by tuberculosis. It would be too easy, though, to ask Wood to have designed a church for us; the danger of cobbling together a pastiche of his architectural themes would not be worth the risk. The same would be true for the banks of Louis Sullivan or the single-family houses of Frank Lloyd Wright. So for Halsey Wood, I chose a county court house to be his Agincourt commission.
Wood designed a large number of churches and up-scale single-family homes. But evidence of commercial work is non-existant and there are only a handful of institutional commissions, so I felt safe invoking his name for the Fennimore County court house of 1888-1889. You can see it’s compact Richardsonian Romanesque roof scape across the street from Asbury Methodist and First Baptist.
Designing a Richardsonian Romanesque court house was relatively easy, since I’ve been a fan of that great architect’s work for nearly fifty years. But putting a Halsey wood spin on it won’t be obvious until the elevations and masonry details appear here later.
The Tribe in Agincourt
During the opening in October 2007 someone asked about a temple in Agincourt: had we considered the presence of a Jewish community in that part of Iowa. I said “yes” and that I had made some notes. It’s almost four years later but I have to admit the project is still not ready for birthing. If you have time, some thoughts on these ideas will be welcome.
Since Agincourt was founded in the mid-nineteenth century (1857), the likely suspects for Jewish settlement would have been Ashkenazim, merchants from Central Europe. Both small department stores in the Chicago suburbs where I grew up were owned by families with that background, and I have read about other similar enterprises throughout the Midwest. There would certainly have been a sprinkling across northwest corner of Iowa. But in sufficient numbers to warrant a temple? Throughout the 1870s and 80s, I’ve assumed the High Holy Days would have been celebrated in the home; perhaps a rabbi traveled from Des Moines or Sioux City. I’ll try to have a conversation with Rabbi Kabrinsky to explore an appropriate narrative….
The site is an ecumenical one. Agincourt’s founders took a peculiarly 19th century transcendentalist view toward town planning: framing the civic core of government, commerce and education, they set aside four blocks for religious institutions; four “Church Lots” that were doled out by means of a lottery. Block “B” has evolved as the setting for three houses of worship: remarkably, it is shared by the Methodists, the Jewish community and the new [ca.2000] “Agincourt Islamic Center” built to accommodate a growing population of Somali and Sudanese refugees who have come to work at the canning factory.
As you know, this entire project grew from a desire to play in the sandbox of architectural history, so two opportunities came to mind. The first grew from a postcard I got on eBay: a 1930-ish real photo, black-and-white card of a Masonic Lodge, the sort of small-town “civic” architecture that speaks of “institution” without being overly symbolic. I thought that with a very few modifications, it could easily have been a temple; perhaps with an inscription at the entry (the congregation’s name in Hebrew and English) and some incised ornament suggesting presence of the Torah within. The challenge for me as a designer has been imagining a reasonable interior layout that coincides with the exiting arrangement of windows and doors. Incidentally, postcards have become a mainstay of the Agincourt story—a way of simulating (borrowing?) reality—hence my wish to adapt such a wonderfully Midwestern building as the one in this card. The other opportunity involves two know designers from the past.
In the spectrum of American architectural history, there are two architects who stand out (in my mind, at least) as designers of temples: Henry Hornbostel of Pittsburgh (working primarily in the ‘teens) and Erich Mendelsohn (German emigré who took refuge here between the wars). You may know his Mt. Zion Congregation on Summit Avenue in St. Paul. I have assumed the local building committee would have been familiar with Mendelsohn’s work in the Midwest—St. Paul. St. Louis and Cleveland…and Dallas—and had approached him with a more modest proposal. How might Mendelsohn have adapted his Modernist imagery of the late 1940s and 50s for Iowa?
Finally, I have also taken up the challenge of a contemporary structure, a “here-and-now” design under my own name, rather than as a surrogate “channeling” the intentions of others. That design seems to be growing from the Ethical Culture aspect of Judaism, something that resonates with my own unrepentant Modernist perspective.
[Picture here to follow]
The intention here is a Miesian universal grid, economical and efficient, but with a single deviating element. I thought to abstract the Twelve Tribes as a gathering of twelve columns defining the sanctuary: a dozen columns, unevenly spaced, vaguely forming an irregular polygon, with each column unique (made of a different material or shaped in some very particular way).
I’m inclined to go ahead with all three scenarios.