Some designs are labored, like ten hours in the stirrups birthing a bowling ball.

As a man I’m happy to have been spared what the other, fairer sex endures to maintain the species. You’ve seen works of architecture that qualify: each aspect, every detail finessed, finagled, but more likely shoe-horned or bludgeoned into place. They reek of so much thoughtful purpose and purposeful thought that just looking at them induces migraine.

Try to imitate the work of another architect and you’ll see what I mean. Designing Agincourt’s public library in the style of Louis Sullivan may be the principal case in point. During these past seven years, I’ve learned a lot about Louie and at least as much about myself. I ain’t no Louie.

While that design continues to evolve—and it had better do it pretty quickly, because the model builders start next week—why not complicate matters by diving back into another old design: the original St Ahab’s church dedicated in September 1862, designed and at least partially built by its priest Francis Manning. I’ve written more than a few words about Fr Manning, to tell the story of those driven by faith in spite of significant obstacles in their path, but also to establish the point of view that drove the design of the church building in the first place. You can read about St Ahab/Christ-the-King in four sequential bogs entries written early in the story [just search for “Manning”] but here is perhaps the meat of Rev Manning’s vision:

No faith can be stronger than its foundation, and Rev Manning had laid it well. From a few fish and a ship’s mast she had built St Ahab’s, probably from her own design. She was, it turns out, from a coastal town on the Atlantic side of Ireland. So, if you visit the cemetery today and squint at the old church, there is something downright nautical about it, a misplaced vessel washed up on our shore and recycled like flotsam from the beach. It was apparently not in her nature or the nature of her people to waste time, resource or opportunity. She would be proud that we’ve carried on the tradition. Being green is hardly new.

Yesterday’s blog offered a set of parentheses for Saint Ahab’s: St Henry’s Ecumenical Chapel in Turku, Finland, by Sanaksenaho Architects, and a simple vernacular solution to the need for shelter at the shore, half of an upturned boat used as a shed, on the northeast coast of England near (if not actually on) Holy Island. Could I have chosen better inspiration? Our son Georg appended an image of St Benedict’s Chapel, a 1988 design by Peter Zumthor. I heartily approve of adding its character to the mix of factors that should push me toward a solution.

Here (and in the other two examples mentioned) is precisely what I mean about effortless design. Zumthor’s work is thoughtful to be sure, pensive without anguish; something done with the ease of breathing at rest. Douglas Adams had something to say about this very idea in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, though I don’t have the quote at hand. It was something along the lines of “Oh, well, yes, then. It’s all right”.

You know what I mean.

“The most difficult task for a Communist historian is to predict the past.”

Years ago I ran across this quote somewhere on the web; I’ve not been able to find it since.

Agincourt works a lot like this: any building extant in the community today is likely to have at least one predecessor. Take Christ the King, for example. The 1950 building that serves the parish today replaced a red brick building of the 1890s. And that, in turn, had replaced the original church—St Ahab’s—built about 1860 but clearly outgrown by post-Civil War population increase.

The current building (designed by our friend Richard Kenyon channeling the Modernist vocabulary of mid-century architect Francis Barry Byrne) is successful on many levels—as an interpretation of Byrne’s actual work; as a piece of urban design; as narrative.

In the story of St Ahab/Christ-the-King, Father Farber had fallen from the roof of church #2 and damaged his optic nerve. But I have no idea what that building looked like. It was enough for me to know that the vestry roof was too steep for the aging but independent priest. It was an episode that helped establish his character.

Church #1—the original St Ahab—on the other hand was integral to the evolution of parish history; to the choice of the dedicatory saint himself. The parish’s founding priest, Rev Francis Manning, had also been a pivotal character whose calling was passionate and vision prophetic. How could I not like him? Especially when he turned out to be a she. The Vatican can’t be happy.

In my own peculiar way, the Communist historian’s task is mine: the present I’ve imagined is obligated to predict its past.

Saint Ahab’s

Reverend Manning had been born in Ireland, the oldest of several children. But the Potato Famine killed her parents and forced a migration to coal country in eastern Pennsylvania. What seemed important from her past was a high degree of remote-fishing-village independence transplanted ultimately to Iowa’s tall-grass prairie. Writing about it now—only now—can I see the prairie analogy to “seas of grass”.

I’ve tried a couple times to design the original St Ahab’s, but it defeats me. Clearly what I want is somewhere between these two images.

Among the most embarrassing episodes in American history—and they are manifold—is Executive Order #9066 signed by President Roosevelt on February 19, 1942. Though its effect on the American people wasn’t immediate, EO9066 paved the way for interment—open-ended imprisonment for the duration of the war—of Japanese Americans.

Recall that we were at war with Germany, Italy and Japan (and their allies), but Americans of German and Italian ancestry were not identified as a danger to the U.S. war effort. If EO9066 hadn’t singled out the Japanese, Milwaukee and large portions of New Jersey would have been emptied. Instead, it was Japanese homes and businesses that were confiscated; it was Japanese-Americans who were shipped to interment camps throughout the country—strategically away from areas sensitive to the war effort like manufacturing and munitions. Gordon Olschlager has already told this story through a design for the 1967 Fennimore County Courthouse.

In 2007 Gordon asked if Agincourt had a courthouse. I told him there had been an initial courthouse circa 1860s—framed in wood and probably late Greek Revival or Italianate in style. And that it had been replaced by a Richardsonian Romanesque design of 1888, a design that was indeed part of the 2007 exhibit. Then Gordon asked in there might have been another replacement, to which I replied: “Why don’t you decide when the ’88 courthouse is struck by lightening.” Two months later a crate arrived with the model of Gordon’s mid-century Modern conception: a spectacular design organized around the ruins of the previous building. A large element dramatically bridged the site and framed the vista between jail and the former courthouse. For those who haven’t seen it, we need to borrow Gordon’s model for the next exhibit.

I was an undergraduate at the University of Oklahoma from 1963 through 1968, so his design was eerily familiar. I may even have seen some of myself in it. But it was Gordon’s story that took my breath away. He had written the tale of a Japanese-American family in a Louisiana interment camp [I think it was Louisiana]: parents and two teenage children. The son died from incompetent medical treatment, but the daughter survived, attended architecture school [Tulane] and married a classmate from Iowa. Back in Des Moines, they entered a competition for the Fennimore courthouse. Many of Gordon’s Asian colleagues in Los Angeles gave authenticity to the story.

As we discuss the status and standing of hybrid Americans today—Hispanic Americans, Black Americans, gay and lesbian Americans, and others—I wonder if there were more to the story that Gordon had begun.

Tadao Ito

I also wonder if everyone thought interment was such a good idea.

I was born in 1945 but don’t recall much before about 1950. We were a working-class family nibbling at the edge of the Middle Class, and some of the language I heard in my youth wouldn’t pass the litmus test for “political correctness” today. But we change, don’t we; we grow.

My elementary and high school years are on my mind these days [50th high school reunion in two weeks!]. Argo-Summit and Bedford Park were populated with hybrid Americans; I could swear in ten languages by the age of ten, including Russian, Italian, Greek and Puerto Rican Spanish. Childhood had been picturesque. But Asians hadn’t been part of my experience. My loss. What I could imagine, however, was loyalty to the point of civil disobedience.

Enter Tadao Ito, a first-generation Japanese American marooned in Agincourt when the U.S. entered the war in December 1941. It may not be very architectural, but I can weave something from this simple idea.

These days collateral has a nasty connotation: the leverage banks require for a loan or the death of non-combatants in an act of war. I’d like to think my Episcopal church project has had some positive collateral effect. Take the second group of biographies (mentioned in the previous entry Toward Product) as example.

“Bishops and Pawns” is a cluster of thirty or more short biographical sketches of clergy active in Dakota during the last territorial decade, 1879-1889. Bishops were rarely on the scene. Initially we were administered from Omaha by the elderly Bishop Robert Harper Clarkson, with responsibility for more than 225,000 square miles and no convenient way to reach its northwestern extremities than travel through the Twin Cities. I suppose Missouri River steamboats were an option. When the Missionary Diocese of North Dakota was finally established, Clarkson continued as bishop but was assisted by his brother in Christ, Henry Benjamin Whipple, Bishop of Minnesota, a good deal more conveniently situated. During those years, northern Dakota’s Episcopalians depended on the spiritual strength and physical stamina of yeoman priests—virtual circuit riders—like Rev B. F. Cooley who came to Fargo in the spring of 1881.

Cooley proves to have been a “type” among 19th century Episcopal clergy. A “High Churchman”—meaning he was drawn to Anglo-Catholic patterns of liturgy, music and design—he was born in Massachusetts at a time when his diocese was decidedly “Low” or Evangelical. His bishop Manton Eastburn was barely tolerant of such popish pageantry as elevating the host at communion and bowing during the liturgy of consecration. These actions got Cooley in trouble more than once. There were, have been and continue to be pockets of liturgical conservatism in the Episcopal denomination, so much so that a splinter denomination (the Anglican Church in North America) has formed from defecting parishes. Recently the entire Diocese of Quincy (Illinois) went its own way and sought refuge in the ACNA. In Cooley’s time such wholesale defection was unthinkable, so he migrated from parish to parish throughout New England, eventually seeking greater tolerance in dioceses like Newark and Chicago.

The frontier attracted High Churchmen like Cooley. It may be that their zeal needed the outlet afforded, even required, by frontier conditions, the paucity of resources, the virtual blank slate of a raw new community. So it made sense to have found him in Dakota as one of a string of priests at Fargo’s Christ Church (it would later be named Gethsemane). Cooley was here from 1881 into the fall of 1885, when he somehow ran afoul of the congregation and left town with the faint whiff of tar and feathers on the wind. The Fargo Argus is so circumspect about the reasons that we may never know. In a clerical career of nearly fifty years, however, Rev Benjamin Franklin Cooley served parishes in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Maine, Dakota, Illinois and Wisconsin, returning ultimately to his hometown of Granville, Massachusetts where he died and was buried in 1913.

The priestly life had taken its toll on Rev Cooley. His marriage failed (they separated; clerical divorce being out of the question); he was driven from two parishes for unspecified reasons (Fargo and Eau Claire); he was hospitalized at least twice for fatigue. He and his wife Ellen Josephine (Hodges) Cooley had no children and he left no written legacy: letters, diaries, photographs, etc. But, oh my, he did leave churches in his wake!

At a dozen localities, he could legitimately claim to have organized a parish, raised funds, secured a lot and, at a time when the architectural profession was still forming, to have practically designed a half dozen churches independently or with benefit of architectural consultation. Cooley played a strong design role at both Lisbon and Casselton, as well as communities in Wisconsin and Massachusetts. And his hand can be detected elsewhere. So why not borrow him for a few months in Agincourt, Iowa?

To be more architecturally interesting, I had imagined the parish of St Joseph-the-Carpenter to have had an Anglo-Catholic orientation. And the time would ripe for Cooley’s presence: a few months after his departure from Fargo and before his appearance in Milwaukee. And those months would be more than enough to set the course of construction firmly on a path toward liturgical authenticity.

It’s comforting to think that the good father channelled a bit of himself through me in the design of St Joe’s.