“So it is written – but so, too, it is crossed out. You can write it over again. You can make notes in the margins. You can cut out the whole page. You can, and you must, edit and rewrite and reshape and pull out the wrong parts like bones and find just the thing and you can forever, forever, write more and more and more, thicker and longer and clearer. Living is a paragraph, constantly rewritten. It is Grown-Up Magic. Children are heartless; their parents hold them still, squirming and shouting, until a heart can get going in their little lawless wilderness. Teenagers crash their hearts into every hard and thrilling thing to see what will give and what will hold. And Grown-Ups, when they are very good, when they are very lucky, and very brave, and their wishes are sharp as scissors, when they are in the fullness of their strength, use their hearts to start their story over again.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

…eventually comes down.

Agincourt was founded after the passing of braced-frame construction, though it’s hard to imagine a substantial home like this being dismantled because it was out of date. There has to be a story here. I just haven’t figured it out yet.

“there is a loneliness in this world so great
that you can see it in the slow movement of
the hands of a clock.

people so tired
mutilated
either by love or no love.

people just are not good to each other
one on one.

the rich are not good to the rich
the poor are not good to the poor.

we are afraid.

our educational system tells us
that we can all be
big-ass winners.

it hasn’t told us
about the gutters
or the suicides.

or the terror of one person
aching in one place
alone

untouched
unspoken to

watering a plant.”

― Charles Bukowski, Love Is a Dog from Hell

“Remember, Red. Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies….” — The Shawshank Redemption

Some time in the last few years — unnoticed by me but it should have been — the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing (better known to us as Shakers) officially closed itself to the World (the rest of us). That is, they made a decision to not accept converts to their sect. At the time of writing this, there is only one remaining member of their community, which once numbered 30,000 spread from New England to Ohio and Kentucky, living out the ascetic Shaker life at Sabbathday Lake, in rural Maine. I have visited Shaker communities in New York State and across the line in Massachusetts. The time may have come to visit once again, this time as pilgrim, rather than tourist. Today, I think of another thing whose passing will go little noticed; whether it’s a good thing is up to each of us: the end of Agincourt.

What began as a personal quest has morphed into a (for me) large collaborative effort among students, faculty, staff, as well as non-university participants including composers and musicians, artists and artisans (no distinction being made here), friends and practical strangers, husbands, even. Now past its peak, long past, each subsequent iteration has been less that its predecessor. Not in quality, necessarily, but in its embrace, the enthusiasm, the resonance with which it has been entertained, accepted, explored, incorporated, collaborated, enlarged, enhanced. Don’t mistake me here: it is as much a challenge as it ever was. But the question is no longer “how?” Instead, it has become “why?” And that makes all the difference.

What began as a curious academic exercise grew into an investigation into the relationship between narrative and design, between place-making and story-telling, will return to its origins and carry on so long as I do.

It’s become Chromolume #8. If you must ask, please do.

I have little idea what’s going on here. There’s a message on the back but it doesn’t help. Does it suffice to say there needs to be a story being told?

The card, BTW, is far too expensive for the project budget.

I might have guessed Sammy Davis, Jr. wrote the lyrics for Shirley McLain’s number in “Sweet Charity”, a 1969 film. As yet another birthday peaks above the horizon, retrospection might be expected, especially for someone whose career has been focussed on history. Well, at least it’s supposed to have been. But that’s another question for anther time.

So, it was September, 1951, probably the day after Labor Day; that’s the way we used to do it in the era before T.V. And Marge walks me to the neighborhood school, then only grades one through four, and enrolls me in First Grade. I was in the care of Miss Mary Hletko, who I liked very much. My class might have had a dozen students, really, or at least that’s the way I remember it. O.K., now I’ll cut to the chase.

The rhythm of my life has been regulated by education, multiple sequential levels of it, from there through grad school — a couple of them, and one of those a couple times; I’m kinda slow that way. My point is that I have been at school of one sort or another for seventy years. Those rhythms of class sequence, alternate days (MWF versus TTh); semesters then quarters then semesters; holidays and their variants — we used to get both Lincoln’s and Washington’s birthdays off; now we get neither — and the irregular flow of time through those lazy summer months (slow at first, then increasingly rapid as Labor Day drew nigh) have regulated my life since that day when Marge dropped me off. [Eighteen months later, by the way, Marge herself packed a suitcase of lingerie and loose cash and lit out, never to be seen again, but that, too, is another story.]

Follow a pattern, any pattern, long enough and it becomes part of who you are. But then what happens, what replaces it, when you’re no longer a part of the pulse? I guess I’m gonna find out.

For Agincourt, the response is simple: I’ve long been aware of the diverse rhythms that can govern our lives and tried in my modest yet anal-retentive way to build them into the story.

[#1524]

Anson Tennant, the reluctant hero of our story, returned to Agincourt from three years of training in Chicago — classes at the Art Institute, some time on the boards with J. L. Silsbee and perhaps some other unnamed offices, the sort of practical experience which was still the rule rather than the exception. While I build a model of his office (scale ½ inch equals 1 foot), it occurred to me that he would have had an open house to celebrate the beginning of his professional life. And that, obviously, requires an invitation. Time to dust off “The Little Guy”, an illustration from a building journal circa 1915. So, I’m fudging three years to make it work for Anson. What font do you think would complement this charming image?

Anson Tennant’s World of Work

It’s almost impossible for me to imagine architect Anson Tennant apart from the studio-apartment where he worked: Suite 205-207 in the Wasserman Block. This quick (i.e., hasty) perspective was my first graphic impression of what I had in mind; the sort of place a young man might begin his career as an architect — at the time, Agincourt’s only resident architect, though not the first to serve the community. [His predecessors have yet to be determined.]

As an enthusiast of the Arts & Crafts movement into which he’d been born, and nurtured in his parents’ architect-designed home on East Agincourt Avenue, the general character of the space — renovated by Tennant in 1912 — would have reflected the ideas of Gustav Stickley, perhaps even inspired by ideas he found in Stickley’s monthly periodical. For the present, I think the time has come to develop this space along A&C lines and make a model as my contribution to ARCH371 this semester. Put up or shut up.

PS (07NOV2021): Looking for A&C inspiration, I ran across this image of an interior by British architects and planners Parker & Unwin — probably one of their houses at Letchworth Garden City.