Agincourt lost one of its principal contributors on August 22nd, 2022. If you have to ask, an explanation is going to take a long time.

Some Thoughts on MSY

While working on a current project, I found this quote from Claude Monet: “To see, we must forget the name of the things we are looking at.” [It probably sounds better in French.] He seems to be saying we cannot find our way to design solutions while hemmed in by nouns on every side, because architecture is a verb and needs room to breathe. Names get in questing’s way.

Reading this a few weeks ago, I was inclined to link this notion – how we see — with something Cecil Elliott told me, more than once, about Bruce Goff. Cecil had worked with Goff a few years in Oklahoma and said that you never dared take Bruce into a hardware store, because you’d never get him out. Goff would roam the aisles, grazing bin to bin, fingering every nut, bolt and widget, imagining how each could be used in some wondrous way, totally outside the manufacturer’s intent. There is someone, someone we celebrate today, another architect living without bounds, without strictures, who also thought outside the box. Like Goff, I’m not certain Milton believed there was a box. If there were, it was certainly such a disquieting space that no one could endure it for very long. Clients valued Milton for that very reason; students grew in his tender care. Colleagues like me depended upon Milton’s ability to help us back away from the dead ends of orthodoxy. Life is too short. His surely was.

His energy came from that marketplace of ideas. I saw it firsthand during our old summer foreign study tours. Whether it was Stockholm, Berlin, Prague, or Vienna, Milton would disappear from the group, only to be found in a hardware store or flea market: using “stuff” to explore ideas. But, really, it was an opportunity for him to engage people and explore character. I once dissuaded him – by moments – from buying a radial arm saw in Berlin.

We grazed the offerings at Stockman’s department store in Helsinki, deBijenkorf in Amsterdam, and KaDeWe in Berlin, where neither foreign language nor pre-euro currency discouraged his engagement with the locals: staff a patrons alike. Once, in Reykjavik, Milt enjoyed an extended conversation with a produce clerk at the Pétursbúð grocery about hydroponic vegetables and the benefit to Iceland’s gene pool of wrecked Iberian cod fishermen who had to be “warmed” after being pulled from the freezing North Atlantic: look for black eyes, she said, and olive complexion, a sure sign of rescue. Education was never more “liberal” than with Milton.

On another occasion, in Dresden, he began conversation with a stone mason busily restoring the cathedral (the Roman one). We observed his skill at replacing deteriorated stone with a new piece chosen for its subtle color, then to give it both shape and surface texture, achieving weathered familiarity through the next three hundred years — yet practically unnoticed thirty meters above our head. Who would see it? That craftsman shared his craft, grateful for an impromptu audience, I think. Lou Kahn said the first school happened beneath a tree between someone who didn’t know he or she was a teacher and others who didn’t know they were students. It happened that very afternoon through a chain-link fence in what had only recently been East Germany.

A poem is “a safe place for a difficult thought.” Twice poetry has rescued me from moments like this, helping explain the intensity of our loss: first, almost twenty years ago for my lifelong neighbor Marilla Thurston Missbach and now for our friend Milton.

In 1912, at age twenty, Edna St Vincent Millay wrote “Renascence”, her first published poem. I commend to you its consideration of “human suffering, death, and the refreshing rain” that will soon enable us “to experience joy and the rebirth of life”. She concludes with these three striking stanzas:

The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide;
Above the world is stretched the sky,—
No higher than the soul is high.

The heart can push the sea and land
Farther away on either hand;
The soul can split the sky in two,
And let the face of God shine through.

Only then does Millay warn us:

But East and West will pinch the heart
That can not keep them pushed apart;
And he whose soul is flat — the sky
Will cave in on him by and by.

I’ve known few hearts big enough to counter that pinch of East and West. And fewer still are those sky-piercing souls. We gather here to celebrate such a friend, such a treasure, to tell the World it may not see the likes of him among us very soon.