This is the Seigneurs Branch of the Bank of Montreal, built in 1894 in what I’d call the Hanseatic style. Having visited Hamburg and Lübeck in the last year, I’m even more comfortable with my undertanding of a style not often encountered here in the Midwest. I discovered the Montreal building quite accidentally, but was instantly drawn to it for the “confirmation” it gave for the Hansa House building I had designed for Agincourt—and posted, incidentally, some years ago. Thought I’d share it with you and append my scheme for the German–American Insurance Co. still standing on the west side of Broad Street a few doors north of the FM&M Bank.

Many of you will know that our friend and sometime collaborator Mr Johnson has been involved with a focused on local food-sourcing. Called The Common Table, it evolved into an award-wining exhibit at the Minnesota State Fair—something that will be enlarged and kept current next year and, hopefully, for many years to come.

Some years back I tried my own hand at this when Howard and Rowan became property owners. In their care, the old Wasserman Hardware building became a bed-and-breakfast on the second floor, above The Periodic Table, a new restaurant that found its food sources with a fifty-mile radius of Agincourt. I haven’t checked back, but let’s hope that chef Rosemary Plička has been successful with her well-intended environmentalism. All of which leads me to wonder how Agincourt was supplied with foodstuffs a century ago. Who were its earliest butchers and greengrocers? And whence cometh that meat and produce? As you might imagine, a certain on-line auction site afforded us some tempting images. I may never own them, but that won’t inhibit copyright infringement.

I feel a story coming on.

Exactly four years ago today, I wrote about the patent medicine enterprises of the late 19th century: the realm of hucksters who preyed upon the vulnerable and gullible in an unregulated environment. It seems we’re on our way to a similar model, the future envisioned for us by those who see regulation of purity for  food and drugs as just one more intrusion by Big Government in our otherwise idyllic lives.

I think it may be time for that story to take hold here. Deregulation, its benefits and consequences.

Nina Köpman—my Nina Köpman—is imaginary. But even her rudimentary story was repeated thousands of times in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Irish girls, young women from Italy and Scandinavia, they came for many reasons. But marriage and opportunities for work were near the top of the list. The previous installment of Domestic Arrangements elicited a response from Joel Stromgren [Class of ’87], whose grandmother took much the same path as Nina—the real path represented multiple times in our own family narratives.

Ok, you made the mistake of opening the door in your “domestic arrangements” post:

My grandmother “far far” came to the U.S. At the age of 16, her older sister “Ina” had come a couple years earlier and found her way to Chicago. My grandmother, Margaretha, a.k.a. “Greta” who was a Swenson but became a Swanson at Ellis Island because they thought it sounded more American, followed her sister to Chicago, and worked as a maid on Michigan Avenue. Later she worked in a sweatshop sewing for twelve-hour shifts. She always retained her sewing ability, making my sister full snow suits that looked professional. She married my grandfather, who left Sweden to avoid conscription for WWI and worked his way thru Canada as a logger and carpenter. They met on the south side [of Chicago], and lived in Evergreen Park, where my father was born and raised. She continued her ridiculous work ethic running a bakery in the depression and raising chickens after their move to Minnesota for “retirement.”

Thanks, Joel, for sharing your own family’s story with us.

There has been considerable comment on-line about Santiago Calatrava’s design for the Port Authority station at Ground Zero. Such a prestigious site may put this project in a category by itself; this ain’t no simple suburban commuter station in Greenwich. Admitting its special status, why is it so far beyond budget and behind schedule? The current price tag: over $4 billion, double its original budget. Yes, you read that right.

An article in The Atlantic offers a balanced assessment of the project and asks the very legitimate question “Form and function was an achievable balance 100 years ago, as the lasting grandeur of Grand Central proves. Why can’t we do the same today?”

I’ve been sleuthing images of utilitarian buildings, 19th and early 20th century industrial and agricultural buildings that reflect a twist on the old Vitruvian trilogy “Utilitas, Firmitas, Venustas.” From a modernist perspective, it’s possible to transform its meaning with two arithmetic symbols, imagining beauty (venustas) as the natural sum of the other two. Address function and structural economy and you have, by definition, resolved the third. My education in the 1960s inclines me toward that understanding, and my ongoing involvement with architectural education during the last forty-plus years only reinforces the point. Call me old fashioned—I am—but it seems an eminently defensible perspective.

One of my colleagues shared a position paper with me this week, one that resonates with all of this and causes me to wonder about continuing to teach. My inner child would enjoy a hissy fit; my outer adult tells me to stick it out.

Among the images I’m gathering as inspiration for Agincourt’s vernacular buildings [there’s an ongoing challenge: to design the undesigned], is this one from the Kendall Square neighborhood of Boston. Built for a manufacturer of boilers and tanks, there is an unselfconscious honesty, directness and modesty oozing from these forms that I find instructive—in a positive way. There may be, on the other hand, lessons of a different sort to be gleaned from Mr Calatrava. Never met the man. Unlikely to. I’m sure he’s a fine human being who loves dogs and treats his employees with dignity. But there is a level of hubris in his work that exceeds any cost-benefit analysis.

There is much to be learned from each of these buildings. You can guess where my sympathies lie.

I can look at Agincourt now and then with objectivity. Not often; just now and then. Objectivity and I are sparing partners, not friends.

What the project needs now—desperately, I should add—are contributions in the areas of landscape and infrastructure. Landscape concerns include the cluster of cemeteries (Catholic, non-denominational and Hebrew), the two public squares (what I view as its primary manifestations to testosterone and estrogen), and the Fennimore County fairgrounds. I could do these but you wouldn’t like the results. Trust me.

Then there is the Highway 7 Strip, the northern edge of the Original Townsite where the state highway skims past on its way from Pocahontas toward Storm Lake. It originally routed through town on Agincourt Avenue, but that’s the half-mile divisor of the section, not its edge, where highways traditional locate. At some point, that northern edge of the O.T. went from ragged to rugged, as commercial development (auto and implement dealerships, for example) moved from breathing room; where the drive-in movie set up shop and the Tastee Freeze located. The municipal maintenance garage was already there, so its transition to Yellow Brick Roadhouse was a simple one.

Less impulsive and largely unseen, but no less important than traffic, would be the various civil-engineered aspects of development: municipal sewer and water systems; sewerage treatment, and bridges.

I’ve mentioned bridges before. There would have been several for different sorts of traffic: horse-drawn wagons and carts, automotive (cars and trucks); railroad; pedestrian and a very special bridge across the Muskrat for the trolley system’s seasonal service to the fairgrounds.

Nineteenth-century bridge engineering was more often than not a seat-of-the-pants operation: if it stood, you knew you could do it again; if not, back to the drawing board. I liked the bridge photo shown above, both for its off-handed technology, and also for the creek bed and entourage. So with very little tweaking, this image will serve as the Milwaukee Road bridge across Crispin Creek coming in to the city from the southeast.

One down, several more to go:

1. Avenue Bridge—Agincourt Avenue extends westward across the Muskrat.
2. Broad Street Bridge—Broad Street bridge extends southward across Crispin Creek.
3. Fairgrounds Bridge—NITC trolley tracks extend westward from Ralph Avenue to serve the Fairgrounds across the Muskrat.
4. Gnostic Bridge—From the intersection of Thoreau and SE Sixth Street, Gnostic Bridge crosses Crispin Creek and connects with the section-line roads.
5. Highway 7 Bridge—Highway 7 at the northern edge of the Original Townsite continues westward across the Muskrat and runs along the north edge of the county fairgrounds.
6. “Lovers’ Leap”—Pedestrian suspension bridge across the Muskrat between the Normal School / NIN and the fairgrounds.
7. Railway Bridge—Milwaukee Road mainline tracks run along the southern edge of the Original Townsite and then cross the Muskrat near the Old Mill.

“Time is a game played beautifully by children.”
― Heraclitus, Fragments

“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.”
― Plato

“The way things work” is an umbrella. Entries with that title are peppered throughout the blog, my attempt at explanation—sometimes current; sometimes long after the fact. In most cases, they’re written for my own ends. But today I’m writing for the students of ARCH 371, part of an invitation to play.

I wonder tonight if “Domestic Arrangements” might offer a convenient way into the project. Each of the links below will take you to the complete blog entry and the chronology of an evolving train of thought.

DA 1.0 began as a meditation on Lawrence Buck, one of the also-rans of architectural history. My choice of Buck as a subject says as much about me as it does about Buck himself. In fact, I’d be surprised if you recognize his name or his work. The rendering above is an example of both his architecture and his presentation style. He was good.

DA 1.1 included a better scaled ground floor plan of the Archer’s house, but it was also a rumination on how to interpret such an artifact: Sure, the Archer family lived there, but I wondered if a small room at the northeast corner of the house—the sort that would have been set aside for a live-in domestic—offers another view of domestic arrangements a century ago.

DA 1.2 developed the history of the Archer family a bit farther and explained their move from Rockford, Illinois to Agincourt in 1909.

DA 1.3 integrated the Archers, Aidan and Cordelia, with their community: each of us is multi-faceted and linked with our communities in various ways, perhaps in proportion to their financial resources. [If this labels me a Liberal, guilty as charged.]

DA 1.4 is underlain with doubt. I’ve never been a servant; I’ve never had a servant. I’m not a woman. But do those truths disqualify me from exploring such a character? [Let’s hope not.]

DA 1.5 not only identified Miss Nina Köpman as the occupant of that ground floor bedroom, it also tried to make her migration from Sweden to the U.S. both logical and interesting.

As with most stories, many questions are raised while few are answered. Each character deserves more attention and the house itself is “incomplete.” For the time being. Could its interior be a project for someone in Interior Design; its gardens be worthy of Landscape Architecture appropriate for the period?

It’s been sixteen months since my refurbishment: June 11th, 2013 was the date of the surgery that gave me more life, something that colors each day a bit differently than it might have been. Of all the factors which contributed to the 96% blockage in my arteries, diet was certainly a factor, and it would be convenient to blame the one meal I’ve had at a new burger emporium in southwest Fargo for more than a few of those percentage points. To any of you half my age or less, let this be a caution to steer clear of the fashionable eateries where food is delivered 1) on an absorptive pad to soak up all that grease, or 2) on a table that must be hosed down with 409 following each patron’s sitting.

All of this is, of course, the long way round the barn and a way to introduce the latest narrative-inducing image in the Agincourt story:

FIVE GUYS

You gotta love these dudes and have to wonder “What’s their story?”

I think this cluster of three commercial venues must be in the 600 block of South Broad; west side of the street. Until the card arrives and I can scan it in high resolution, the signs aren’t quite legible, other than “Van”–something-or-other and “Meats” on the right.

This neighborhood is near the Milwaukee Road depot, the as-yet-unnamed lumber and coal yard, and the beginning of Agincourt’s industrial quarter. There must have been a budget hotel-boarding house located in the vicinity for all those single guys—some of them standing right here—who off-loaded box cars, shoveled grain or who were teamsters in the movement of freight around the city. My kind of people. My great-grandfather Peter Markiewicz was a teamster in Lemont, Illinois, and though I never met him, those genes are a part of my makeup. They may, indeed, be among the reasons for my surgery. Do you think?

The Supreme Court’s decision yesterday to not hear several appeals on the question of same-sex marriage has changed the U.S. map once again. Sixty percent of our people live (or soon will) in states that allow it. Today’s FaceBook® feed includes an article about one religious group that invested more than $40 million trying to pass Prop 8 in California, only to have it overturned by the U.S. Circuit Court and now rebuffed by SCOTUS. The group has issued a terse statement on co-existence, but pardon me for not buying into it. Suffice to say that the map of the United States grows ever more complicated and contradictory. And it’s likely to get worse before it gets better.

This folderol puts me in mind of our battle nearly a century ago with Demon Rum: that issue was corralled by an amendment to the Constitution and then another to undo the first. You’d think we’d have learned how unsuccessful—not to say expensive—it is to legislate morality. Waste of paper and ink, if you ask me.

Funny thing: on the question WWJD in each of these situations, I have my suspicions.

LIQUOR

A postcard of the Schlitz Palm Court in Milwaukee entices me to look into Iowa’s history of dealing with alcohol and its regulation, about which I know very little at present. The demographics of the state are heavy with Germans in the northeast, roundabout Dubuque, for example, where Pickett’s brewed one of America’s finest beers before shutting down some years ago. Like the ill-fated Coors, Pickett’s refused to pasteurize and in so doing limited their market area. Its shelf life and, therefore, its distribution network were seriously affected by that decision to make a beer that actually had flavor, but not sell it more than 100 miles from Dubuque. TASTE or TRANSPORT, take your pick.

I have always presumed that beer, at least, was readily accessible in Agincourt until the interruption of Prohibition; that places for its civil and therapeutic consumption were open and aboveboard. I also know that a town of Agincourt’s size would not have afforded anything so grand as the Palm Garden. But this image speaks volumes (or do I mean gallons?) for the social atmospherics of pre-WWI America. How have we gone so wrong?

There was a beer garden beside Adams’ Restaurant, a narrow landscaped slot between it and a bar facing Broad Street around the corner. Perhaps it’s time for that beverage emporium to have a name and identity at long last.