Iowa didn’t license the practice of architecture until the late 1920s, which means that the post-Civil War period of professionalization was regulated solely by the marketplace. Many called themselves “architect” but only a handful provided services we would recognize today. Some succeeded; others moved on to fresh pickins.

Those states and territories bordering the 100th Prime Meridian (a widely accepted boundary between the tall grass prairies of the Midwest and the short grass prairies of the Great Plains) settled rapidly after 1865, thanks to the Morrill Act, and publishers appeared almost overnight to tell us who was here and how to find one another. The Iowa State Gazetteer and Business Directory of 1884-1885 listed businesses by both city and type; its statewide listing of “Architects and Superintendents” appears on pages 1040 and 1043 and offers a cross section of their distribution:

• BOONE—1
• DUNHAM—2
• CALLIOPE—1
• CARROLL—1
• CEDAR RAPIDS—1
• CENTRALIA—1
• CLARINDA—1
• CLINTON—1
• COUNCIL BLUFFS—2
• CRESTON—1
• DAVENPORT—3
• DES MOINES—10
• DUBUQUE—5
• FORT DODGE—1
• GREENE—2
• HARLAN—1
• KEOKUK—1
• McGREGOR—1
• MARSHALLTOWN—3
• OTTUMWA—3
• SIOUX CITY—2
• UNIONBURGH—1
• VILLISCA—1

Give me a day or two to add some population figures to these cities and we’ll have a relatively firm basis for understanding how Agincourt satisfied its need for architectural services.

When did Agincourt earn its first architect? 

There may have been hybrid architect-builders in the growing city, especially during its boom times, to satisfy the needs of a burgeoning population. Remember that America’s first professional program for the education of architects was opened shortly after the Civil War and before that there were few real distinctions between those who designed buildings and those who constructed them. Some day I’m going to flesh out that part of community history. In the meantime, absent a resident professional, architectural services would have come from larger nearby communities for some buildings and potentially even farther afield for a handful of others. (More about that latter group another time.)

Reed Malm has a wonderful cabinet photograph of two architects in their office; he’s christened them Hans und Franz and allowed me to “borrow” them. For the present, they’ve become recent Austrian immigrants Hans Joachim and Franz Perlmutter, architects and engineers from Sioux City. I’ve given them two commissions in Agincourt thus far: Wasserman’s Hardware (for a fellow countryman) and the new Northwest Iowa Traction Co. depot—the present case in point.

The depot program has four parts:

• Office and passenger ticketing and waiting room for NITC
• A restaurant to accommodate the relocated Bon Ton Cafe
• Ground-level rental space for small retail stores
• A modest hotel oriented toward what we used to call commercial travelers

Placing the ticket/waiting room at the street corner of Broad Street and Louisa, the Bon Ton and hotel lobby can be tucked discretely behind. Retail stores extend westward. And above all this is the 22-room UCT Hotel (the United Commercial Travelers was a fraternal organization for traveling salesmen, where they could both stay and display their wares). The second floor plan in yesterday’s blog gives an idea of how the interurban trains actually plow through the building at a 45-degree angle, a two-story glass-roofed arcade for which there’s plenty of precedent in architectural history. Trust me. I don’t make this shit up.

Planning this building has been a cake walk. A construction date in 1908-1909 allows the structure to be hybrid: some traditional masonry bearing walls and a cast iron frame fireproofed with terra cotta. But it’s the details that scare the crap out of me: remember I’m a modernist and ornament is anathema to us, like sunlight to vampires. I may disappear in the puff of vapor.

When Diane Ackerman’s book Deep Play appeared about ten years ago, I purchased several copies and gave them to students, colleagues and friends (not that I draw fine lines of distinction between those groups). Ackerman’s contention is that notions of work and play are not antipodes on a straight-line spectrum; opposites, antitheses. Instead, she bends that axis into a circle; permitting the extreme intensity and involvement of work to recognize its natural counterpart in play. The degree of our engagement with either work or play — our creativity — draws us inexorably to the blurred conjunction of the pair.

Ask any child of six to put away the game, to disengage from the puzzle. “Just five more minutes, Mom.” Whatever the task at hand, their focus is so intense that play has become work and vice versa. Work-Play are conjoined at the nexus of Space-Time, excluding all else. Children know this instinctively. So, what has our child-rearing and educational system done to suppress it in most adults? Good question, for which I have no easy answer. What Ackerman delineates so well is also, I think, at the heart of Richard Florida’s Creative Class.

Blithe admissions that I “play in the past” acknowledge Diane Ackerman’s presence in Agincourt. It will hardly surprise me to find that she’s received an honorary degree from Northwest Iowa Normal and planted the notion of work-as-play at one of its recent commencement exercises. I’ll bet Howard was there.

Today I think of (and thank) Ms Ackerman as the NITC depot takes form.

Paper Trail 2.2

The benefit of a long life (and there are detriments, by the way, but that’s another story) is that I’ve been around long enough to witness patterns as cycles; the patterns that some ideas represent are born again or, just as likely, have simply refused to die. Light rail is one of them.

In the early years of the 20th century, the U.S. enjoyed one of the world’s great networks of light rail, then known as interurbans: heavier duty than street railways (trollies); lighter than passenger trains. Interurbans filled both gap and need, serving a regional audience when travel by auto was expensive and ill-served by state and national networks of paved roads.

The Northwest Iowa Traction Co. connected logically at Fort Dodge with another system. That was the beauty of interurbans: independent companies saw the non-competitive inter-linking of their lines as an advantage to ridership. At one point in the 1920s it would have been possible (though lunatic) to travel by multiple independent but interconnected systems from Chicago to New York. It might have taken three days but it was nonetheless possible. We will never see such a system again (nor should we) but shards of it are being reborn across America.

The NITC depot in Agincourt — hub and headquarters of its seventy-six mile line — has existed in sketch form since 2007. But it must evolve in the next month for two reasons: 1) it is something I simply need to do (fulfilling my lust for playing in the past) and more importantly 2) David Crutchfield has volunteered to redevelop this 1909 building for its own mini-centennial in 2009 as the energy-conserving headquarters of the local Fennimore County power company.

Who am I to deny another’s need to play in the sandbox that is Agincourt.