These graphics and the types they represent (from a website called truity.com) are just too seductive. I’ve wanted to do more reading in Carl Jung, Myers-Briggs and other more “New Age” sources to understand the interpersonal relationships in Agincourt. The extended Tennant family should be my laboratory, don’t you think?

The internet auction site that cannot be named—America’s attic and garage sale—is replete with portraits, painted, photographed and otherwise, and virtually all of them are unidentified. Even more puzzling, however, is that many of them are named. How does that happen. For a nation so currently occupied with questions of family [what constitutes one and who gets to decide], you’d think the family structure and its lineage would be sacrosanct. Yet thousands of portraits—images of people who were presumably parts of a families—are tossed into rubbish bins, put on the curb for clean-up week, or offered at flea markets as the stuff of decoupage every day of the week. I know, because I buy a lot of them.

Two small but remarkable portraits showed up one day that were irresistible: Kenneth and Rachel Goodall, identified on the reverse (of the paintings, not on the backsides of Mr and Mrs Goodall) along with the name of the artist (Enedina Pinti Zambrini) and the date of the sitting. I was the only bidder. And even before they arrived, I was able to use google and ancestry.com to flesh out their biographies. Even Mrs Zambrini became a know quantity. Yet the story of how the painting came to be offered for sale was tragic.

The Goodalls had done well in life. Ken’s career had been in the military, and before he and Rachel died they had set up a trust fund for their only child Mike. Court records are readily available outlining the circumstances by which the trustee absconded with the bulk of the estate and left Mike (a well known chess player) with virtually nothing. He died a few years later (and much sooner than he ought), not quite derelict but several steps beneath the station in life intended by his parents. You could make this stuff up but it wouldn’t be nearly as poignant.

Enter this lovely woman, unidentified as to either artist or subject. How does anyone willingly divest themselves of such beauty? Whether you’re related to them or not.

Her quiet dignity found an almost instantaneous place in Agincourt’s story: She had to be Claire Ball Tennant, youngest sister of our anti-hero Anson Tennant; the person for whom Anson had built a legendary dollhouse as a Christmas gift in 1905, while Claire was not likely to survive a bout of diphtheria; and the “party of one” who trekked to Bordeaux in 1937 to bring her brother home from twenty-one years of amnesiac recuperation in Spain. Claire (Mrs John Michael Oliphant) was one of the earliest characters in the Tennant family story, but other than her marriage to Mike Oliphant, I didn’t know much else about her. The imminent arrival of “her” portrait changes all that, however, and Claire must become more than a two-dimensional cutout in the tableau of the extended Tennant family.

[#709]

So very many of the ideas I have for Agincourt, especially for the new exhibit this fall, involve skill sets that are simply not in my repertoire. Metalwork, for example, comes into play at several points: 1) the “wrought iron” wreaths on the exterior of the public library; 2) the weather vane that once graced the second county courthouse (destroyed by fire in 1966); or 3) the copper baptismal font at St Joseph-the-Carpenter.

What I had in mind is along the lines of this Newlyn beaten copper bowl, only much, much larger—big enough for a baby, for goodness sake. Do you imagine I could learn how to do this in a couple weeks?

[#708]

When Harlan Ormbreck retired from architectural practice several years ago, he came back briefly to teaching. In fact, he came back to the position he’d vacated in 1971 that provided an opening for me at NDSU. So, there we were, two Modernists dividing the spoils of architectural history between us. The university had already made the transition from quarters to semesters, so it could have been a toss of the coin that assigned ARCH 321 or 322 to one or the other. I asked his opinion and Harlan replied, “The Baroque is something that no good Lutheran boy should have to look at,” and the decision was made: He would do Egypt through the Gothic while I tended to the dreaded Counter Reformation.

Historical “blind spots” are easily understood. No male member of my family (there are remarkably few of us) had ever fought in an American war, that I’m aware. So “war stories” and memorabilia had not been a part of my childhood. Roy C. wasn’t at Omaha Beach or Anzio; Roy L. missed the Battle of the Bulge. My grandfather was too old for induction and my father had only one leg and was also an only child. As a consequence (and a product of the 1960s) my only interest in war is not getting involved in one, personally or on a national level. Good luck with the latter. That has not stopped me from writing about war and its own consequences—Victory Gardens, women on the home front, the G.I. Bill—but World War II itself has been left to the attention others.

On most large scale topics I do well enough. The Industrial Revolution, for example, has enormous consequence for the United States in the second half of the 19th century (the period of Agincourt’s formation and early growth and development) and the wage labor movement that grew from it would have shaped even a small agricultural community in northwestern Iowa. The Arts & Crafts also fascinate me, both as a reaction to industrialization and as a movement so broad as to include Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles Rennie Mackintosh. There are, however, styles in architectural history for which I feel no great passion—yet—and which therefore come as unploughed fields of investigation. Take the Greek Revival and Italianate/Eastlake, for example. No, I really mean that: take the Greek Revival and Italianate, because they are as foreign to me as Outer Mongolia.

A chance encounter this morning on eBay delivered an image of the Opera House in Rockford, Illinois. Wanting to know more about it led to the discovery that none other than Oscar Wilde had appeared there on the 2nd of March, 1882, one of more than fifty stops on his American lecture tour. It takes little else for the wheels to engage and to wonder whether he might have sojourned in Agincourt, filling the seats of Harney’s Orpheum, the Civil War-era opera house replaced ultimately by the Auditorium in 1895.

Two windows of opportunity opened just a crack: on March 1st, Wilde appeared in Dubuque, lecturing on the Decorative Arts. Later that month, on the 21st and 22nd, he was in Sioux City and Omaha on the other side of the state. Members of the Oscar Wilde Society may take exception to an unscheduled stop in Agincourt but I see it unfolding. And with that visit will necessarily come the Italianate ornamental excesses of Harney’s Orpheum, which I approach with fear and trembling.

Happily, we just bought the economy size bottle of antacid.

[#707]

Just two years ago I wrote “Intuiting Louie” as a reverie about growing up in Chicago when twice as much Sullivan work survived throughout city and suburbs. But even in the late 1950s (I was fifteen in 1960) a considerable amount of Adler & Sullivan work was either going, gone, or in places that should have scared the hell out of me but didn’t. Really, I was that geeky.

A question came up in conversation a few weeks ago—Do you believe in yourself?—to which my shoot-from-the-hip reply was “yes,” though that may have been more haste than conviction. As it turns out, shaking that faith is pretty easy, as recent events have shown. Two overheard conversations—one at morning coffee recently; the other mid-afternoon the same day—didn’t do my self-impression any good, and an e-mail discovered about 4:30 was the frosting on that day’s cake.

Architectural history (at least as I understand and practice it) has been my life for forty-five years, though academe has never been a good fit. But telling a great story is all that has ever mattered to me: so twice a week for an hour and fifteen minutes, that’s what I’ll continue to do, because it’s the only suit in my wardrobe.

Oh, about that cheating…

[#706]

Last weekend was a winner in many respects, not the least being a Minnesota Opera production at The Ordway. The rest of my twenty-four hours in the Twin Cities (the part that didn’t involve sleep) included lots of great conversation, excellent food and drink with fine company. I chanced to mention our next Agincourt exhibit and the gastric reflux that visits each night between midnight and 2:00 a.m. while I strategize the show.

That topic came up during my annual evaluation two weeks ago in a context I can’t broach here. Suffice to say the scale of the exhibit is daunting, but so is the question of a mechanism for its evaluation. So the advice I brought back from the Cities was simply this: seek help. But first things first.

AR371 and LA272 

About this time last semester, I approached the landscape faculty about an Agincourt-related studio, one that would attack all those large-scale planning issues that I’m unqualified to undertake. [When has that stopped me before, you ask.] And it was Dominic Fisher who took on the challenge. Dominic brought a gentle discipline to the task and the nine-student section completed their Iowa projects just before Spring Break. Once we settle on a plan for the three rooms available for the show, I’ll ask them to reformat their schemes for a wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling mosaic of treatments of private homes, cemeteries, fairgrounds, parks and whole subdivisions. You’ll enjoy their contributions to the project. That takes care of one wall out of twelve.

“Landscapes & Livestock,”  the show-within-the-show lending exhibition from Agincourt’s community art collection overfills four walls (the Gustavian or west gallery on the Rourke’s second floor), which brings it down to seven roughly equivalent walls.

The east or Burgum Gallery—centerpiece of our spatial sequence—will house several vignettes, clusters of objects and panels that tell short stories about people or institutions in the community (or do I mean people as institutions?): Rose Kavana, for example, a grade school principal; Father Emile Farber, priest at Christ the King; Hansa House, the German-American Insurance Company; “Little Ones,” the community’s first kindergarten; and of course the studio of Anson Tennant, the community’s first resident architect. [Do I seriously think I can get all that done?] That reduces it to three—contents as yet unknown, though some of it will come from the Spring Semester AR371 studio, which produced some remarkable projects.

Ultimately, I’m going to need some help from people who have far greater graphic skills than I. And, given the internet, that help needn’t be in Moorhead-Fargo. So, should any of you have abilities with Photoshop® or InDesign® and inclinations to help with posters and other graphic pieces, don’t be shy.

The real bottom line, I suppose, is that the hope some of you will attend the exhibit, especially the official closing on Sunday, 25 October 2015—the actual 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt! See you there.