Static

The clock is blinking a radioactive mercurochromic orange “12:20” and I wonder What was that dream I just had? I’m still having? and realize I’ve only been asleep for an hour and a half. But my eyes are wide and there’s a churning in my head telling me sleep is not an option right now. My thoughts about the Beebe project are jostling one another—colliding random nuggets about that hideous courthouse in Park Rapids and how to say something charitable, anything at all, about the House Wing of the old State Capitol which is a building best forgotten, whose history is a mashup of all that can go wrong with public architecture, and also about what might be his most important building, the Fargo Masonic Temple, so long-gone before my arrival here that the Gate City parking lot must always have been there, and then there’s that idea for an Agincourt character named Sharon who drives taxi and ferries people from here to there—from the market to their apartment, from home to the dentist and back with no charge for waiting at the curb with the meter off—but whose services also include lifts to the afterlife—and all these thoughts are so muddled in here like shit and piss and used condoms at the sewage treatment plant, that I wonder what the fuck the difference is between “sewage” and “sewerage” and make a note to look that up in the morning, as this churning leaves so little room in here I might have to vacate the premises and let them have my head for as long as it takes to work things out.

So I reach to my left—where there’s always a modest heap of books; I sleep with books like Imelda Marcos probably did with shoes—for David Mitchell’s Bone Clocks and read forty or fifty pages or so, so clearly that I understand what reading is for the very first time, like that time I couldn’t sleep and decided to vacuum my room, with Schönberg’s Piano Concerto on the phonograph—do they even make those anymore?—and freaked when I thought there was someone outside my window on that stifling August night in Norman, Oklahoma at Mrs Starr’s house, humming along with the music and realizing it was me humming along with Schönberg and that there actually is a melody there, and that I’d just had the sonic equivalent of that visual shtick where the two profiles suddenly become the candle stick, and the out-of-body experience teaches me how to read for the first time since I may have picked up a Golden Reader at the age of four or five, and with that comes the dread that I love writing more but certainly never will write anything of meaning or consequence to anyone else, and I think That’s OK because it’s better to get it out there and make room for something new.

Maybe I’ll read another few pages.

Cliff Pherson ran one of Agincourt’s earliest gas stations. My friend Howard worked there once while he was in high school. And Cliff’s station—at the corner of Broad Street and May—was the place where Howard hung out and met some exceptional characters, like Willie Simmons.

I used a real photo postcard of a gas station in Ogalalla, Nebraska as the basis for Cliff’s station. But his can’t have been Agincourt’s only facility. We saw a wonderful historic gas station in Duluth a couple weeks ago, and then I found this one from Carrington, North Dakota.

It’s all about early corporate imagery, isn’t it.

Agincourt is likely to undergo more change in its corporate infrastructure during the next ten years than it has seen in the previous one hundred and fifty. Next semester’s Landscape Architecture studio may resolve most of its past; the future can care for itself.

I often tell the story of Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahoney Griffin, designers of Canberra, capitol of Australia, as a case study in infrastructure. The Griffins had won an international competition for the design of a new national capitol, intent like the Brazilians fifty years later on opening their country’s interior by removing the seat of government from the coast (Melbourne for the Federation of Australia and Rio de Janeiro for Brazil) to the interior. In each case the chosen site had been either grazing or farmland. In each case an international competition generated new ideas. And, I suspect, in each case the authorities soon had second thoughts.

Things went well enough for the Griffins, who emigrated to implement their plan, until a change in political parties put the project in jeopardy. Sensing the winds of change—and certain compromise of Canberra’s underlying ordering systems—Griffin strove to do with the limited time and financial resources what would assure the greatest level of implementation. You or I (though I shouldn’t speak for you) might have gone for the money shot and built the Parliament Building, symbolic heart of their conception, but that would have been a hollow victory, for the plan’s genius lay in its adaptation of Ebeneezer Howard’s “Garden City” principles to the needs of a modern government center. The Griffins’ solution: lay out the sewer and water lines, a financial commitment so extensive that its underlying order could never be abandoned. That’s why you and I (again, I should speak only for myself) are unlikely to be remembered by history so well.

For five years or more, I’ve wondered how many of my nitpicky design decisions would eventually be undone by not having had such Griffin-esque insight. How would Agincourt’s water and sewer lines have been placed? At whose expense and in what order—the squeaky wheel traditionally getting lubrication before all others? And what about electrical service? Private or public? [You can guess my sympathies.] The collection of waste is one thing, but what the hell do you do with it? Somewhere there will be treatment plants for water (from the river and or from wells) and human waste. Everyone understands the need, but no one wants it in their back yard.

Your thoughts on waste in a 21st century context will be, as always, most welcome.

Women in the Work Force

World War II materially shifted the roles of gender in the American work force. Rosie the Riveter is probably the most iconic example. There was also another time, earlier, when secretarial staff, artisans of the stenographic art, were men rather than the so-called fairer gender.

There are any number of reasons why a woman might be preferred for certain tasks: Those which have traditionally been “women’s work” like sewing, cooking and domestic chores (however fair you think such distinctions might be); jobs requiring tiny fingers, small bones or the ability to access confined spaces. If others come to mind, let me know.

I found this postcard recently and was immediately curious what sort of work might be awaiting these women who are obviously on a break of some sort. Is it industrial or agricultural? Could it have been in a smallish town such as Agincourt? Are they single or married? Do they work from choice or necessity? Whatever their circumstances, they seem content, a condition I hope for us all in days to come.

The likelihood of contracting a disease can sometimes be proportional to class: the poor are more vulnerable than the not-so-poor. A significant exception to that rule of thumb has been tuberculosis, whose contraction in the 19th and early 20th centuries was pretty cavalier with regard to class lines and social distinctions. I was reading last night about the Open Air School movement of the early 20th century in the United States and its connection the McCormick family of International Harvester fame. The loss of a twelve-year-old child in that privileged family resulted in the establishment of the Elizabeth McCormick Memorial Fund and a wide variety of initiatives to minimize the threat of TB for us all. [On election eve 2014, I also offer this as testimony to the noblesse oblige that has become an endangered species in these latter days.]

Sanitaria—places set aside specifically for the treatment of tuberculosis—sprang up all across the U.S. and Canada, especially in locations more salubrious to the health of patients: higher elevations, woodland and mountainous settings, anywhere away from the damaging atmosphere of industrialization. Colorado Springs got a leg up in just that way. And needless to say, it created a whole new vocabulary of architectural forms, details and materials. Just today I ran across this image of the Woodland Sanitarium in California that is especially picturesque and worth your attention.

And if you’d like to see what tuberculesque architecture looks like in North Dakota, take a gander at San Haven:

My old teacher Fred Shellabarger couldn’t say “Christian Science” without appending the parenthetic editorial observation “…neither Christian nor scientific.” There’s a Christian Science church in Agincourt—though a congregation whose numbers have probably shrunk to unsustainable levels; CSs have a low birth rate, which the Mother Church in Boston is loathe to admit—so Agincourt’s hybrid Arts & Crafts-cum-Neo-Classical building is apt to be occupied these days by someone else. Let’s hope it’s not snake handlers.

Mary Baker Eddy may have been onto something, though. My years have demonstrated a capacity to make myself sick, so why shouldn’t the converse be true; at least a few Agincourt residents seem to have been persuaded.

Christian Science, Adventism and several other religious groups, however, often claim special dispensation with regard to medical treatments such as vaccination or blood transfusion. Stephen Jay Gould to the contrary, the notion of “non-overlapping magisteria” is usually replaced with a broad overlap or even the nesting of Science within Religion. The medical history of Agincourt is already peppered with references to alternative treatment and even a smattering of faith with regard to healing. So, with the prospect of a hospital design, I wonder about the community’s broad acceptance of current medical theories.

Med•sin

The history of health care and medical treatment in Western culture, even during the last two hundred years, has been a shifting landscape of supposition, claim and counter-claim that muddles the conversation and mystifies laity. Today the dominance of an organization like the American Medical Association creates (or tries to) a unified face that belies the seemingly endless experimentation of the 19th century. One branch of 19th-century American medicine derives from the theories of European physician Samuel Hahnemann [1755–1843], founder of Homeopathy. Hahnemann’s influence has already been manifest in the careers of Doc Fahnstock and also his cohort in herbal medicine Sissy Beddowes.

If Louis Sullivan was right (and Form does follow Function), how would the interior arrangement of a Hahnemann-based hospital—like this one from San Francisco—differ from a more orthodox AMA-related institution? Rooms, wards, double-loaded corridors, nursing stations, treatment-consulting rooms, operating suites, dispensaries, kitchens and other support facilities: these would have been standard program elements, regardless of the underlying medical basis. How might they have been adapted to the theories current at the time and the circumstances of a town like Agincourt?

The public image of banking and bankers has changed dramatically in the 150+ years of Agincourt. During Louis Sullivan’s time, for example, the small-town banks of his acquaintance were run by people in and of the community they served. Their boards of directors came from among the commercial interests of the town—doctors, pharmacists, news editors and others whose own financial wellbeing rose and fell with these locally-owned and run institutions. Carl Bennett, for example, was president of the National Farmers Bank in Owatonna, Minnesota, and tremendously interested in the public persona represented by Louis Sullivan’s design. Bennett and his wife also commissioned a single-family residence for themselves, but its country-club-like atmosphere conflicted with the far greater approachability  of the bank design. As interesting as it might have been for historians, the Bennetts wisely decided on a residential scheme by Purcell & Elmslie.

At the other end of the image spectrum were those banks anathema to Sullivan’s vision of a democratic (small-D) America, Banks that displayed the very wealth they housed and protected in statements of august, even imperious, power. Neo-Classical piles of masonry or terracotta invoking the grandeur of ancient Rome, such as this bank entrance from Kittanning, Pennsylvania—whose proportions I happen to admire, by the way. My own neo-classical conception for the Farmers, Mechanics & Merchants is a far cry from this.

Would that I could have done so well.

It’s embarrassing to admit that Agincourt was created with contours in mind but that we somehow lost track of them. Landscape architecture students in the first seminar gave it shape and definition: the Muskrat River on the west, Crispin Creek to the south and contours at an interval I can’t quite recall. That original drawing (in CADD) has long since been lost/misplaced, and as a consequence many of its subsequent architectural projects have a “flatland” quality that may not reflect reality. Next semester’s L.A. studio may remedy those deficiencies—and in consequence they may also cause a revision of several existing projects.

We shoult assume that the Mighty Muskrat would now and then escape its bank and attack the city with a vengeance. Floods might have been an annual event during especially wet cycles with many consequences for basements of brick masonry and other city services such as water and sewer. Those part of the urban narrative may be delineated in the Spring semester. Their existence has been assumed all along, however, but that doesn’t eliminate the possibility of revisionist history. Time will tell.