“Ed’s Easy Diner” by Stephen Brook / 2020 / oil on canvas / 12″ by 12″

This has been a phenomenal afternoon, almost two hours with students in ARCH 771 and a great deal of discussion [most of it one-way, sadly, coming from me to them] about Agincourt and how it came to be. Did I, in fact, lay a foundation. Or — as may be far more typical of my m.o. — did I erode one that was already there. The Agincourt Project is a weird idea. But, hell, deciding to go to architecture school might be just as weird, so I have my hopes for the semester.

Aside from the general framework of the project — the intimate relationship between narrative and design, between story-telling and place-making, the very thing that architects do — there are some other caveats worth mentioning:

• The enormous difference between fantasy and imagination, for example. Willy Wonka is fantasy; Agincourt should be so real that you wonder if your mom and dad didn’t stop there for gas that summer you visited great aunt Helen. Agincourt should, insofar as possible, by hyperreal.
• Material culture, stuff, is more often than not how we will be remembered. For the first Agincourt-based studio in 2007, I as the students, What from Agincourt is being auctioned on Ebay right now? Ebay, the online auction site that has been both bane and benefit to the project, is America’s “garage sale”. Frank Lloyd Wright once said that, if America were turned on its side, everything loose would roll to Los Angeles. My guess is that discarded objects of every sort eventually find their way onto Ebay. Postcards, for example, have provided valuable period imagery for the period 1885-1930; I know because I’ve acquired a bunch of them. Go to Ebay today and you’ll find more that six million postings at this very moment. Now compound that with the wide range of detritus connected to our communities and ourselves: ash trays, calendars, high school yearbooks and letterman’s sweaters, ladies auxiliary church cookbooks, antique license plates, church windows, hardware. Its variety is endless. And there’s someone out there who’ll bid on it.
• Newspapers are a time capsule of small town life. They tell us who’s sick, who died, whose cousin cam to visit from Keokuk. The record the events of our lives: weddings and funerals, school graduations, crime and punishment. Advertisement illustrate varying tastes and trends; they record inflation. “Going Out of Business” sales and bankruptcies define the spectrum of business life. Likewise the restaurant menu: We are what we eat.

So their task for the next two days is to write a page about their presumptions about the semester. Looking into this strange short-term future, what do they anticipate? Hope for? What form might their semester’s work take on? Time will tell. And this blog may be the place to tell it.

INTRODUCTION

The origin of the Agincourt Project lies in an idle rumination on architectural history. Expressed here in the framework of logic — which is rare for me:

• IF Chicago architect Louis Sullivan designed a series of small-town banks during the years 1908-1919, and
• IF many of those communities were considering the construction of a Carnegie-era public library
• AND the clients for both projects were likely to overlap [civic leaders, bank presidents, etc],
• THEN why wasn’t Sullivan challenged the with opportunity to design a Carnegie era library?

But, perhaps more important, what would that building look like if Sullivan had that opportunity? Those thoughts crossed my mind during a commercial break — it was the summer of 2006 and I was watching summer reruns of “C.S.I.” — and before the program resumed I’d challenged myself to answer that question.

Clusters of particular building types are always interesting as variations on a theme: H.H. Richardson’s suburban railway depots for the Boston & Albany; Sullivan’s aforementioned banks; Nicholas Hawksmoor’s London churches. The phenomenon surely extends to the realm of art, also, where Sir Frank Brangwyn illustrated a series of historic windmills for a 1923 book by Heyter Preston. Not every mill discussed by Preston was illustrated, however, so one wonders how Brangwyn might have rendered others in the series. Are there sufficient clues in the illustrations to predict the artist’s response to another example? I’ll leave that question for students of art; the library proposition is more to my liking. Even literature is capable of the same enlightened speculation—not always with the best intentions: Mark Hoffman, a dealer in rare manuscripts, once created a fake Emily Dickinson poem and sold it, convincingly, for a bunch of money. He’s now in  Utah prison.

Louis Sullivan’s late work in dispersed in small Midwestern communities far from his Chicago office, places like Owatonna, MN, Sydney, OH, and Columbus, WI. Since there are five Sullivan projects in Iowa — three banks, one church, and a department store — and since that state enjoyed considerable beneficence from Mr Carnegie —ninety-nine grants underwrote 101 libraries — Iowa seemed to most likely place to imagine a Sullivan design. The next issue was site selection.

Any actual Iowa location would come with too much baggage, questions begging answers I couldn’t provide. Why not invent a typical mid-19th-century railroad town, whose form was nearly dictated by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. The town plat came before settling on its location. And the opportunity for that in Iowa history presented itself in the northwest part of the state when the Sac & Fox nation’s reserve was “opened” to white settlement. [As troubling as that process was, it was real and documentable.] So, before that episode of C.S.I. was over and Gil Grissom had solved the crime, my mile-square townsite was situated and named Agincourt.

The Townsite

As long as I was at it, why not add one more county to Iowa’s ninety-nine. Being the county seat meant an opportunity to imagine a 19th century courthouse.

This will look frighteningly familiar to anyone born between the Appalachians and the Rockies, where the cartesian grid is ubiquitous, except where either French or Spanish settlement occurred before English speakers arrived.

If ye seek precedent, look at the William Penn plan for Philadelphia (actually designed and laid out by his surveyor Thomas Holme). Or 150 years later, examine Col. Doty’s plan for Madison, Wisconsin. They bracket the period of cartesian influence, so Agincourt is very much a child of its time and place. Our task has been interpreting what happens when the ideal meets the real.