The world is an exceptionally small place and closing in on me a bit more each day. It’s getting hard to breathe.

Today in ARCH 321 we’ve been talking about the architectural traditions of China and Japan. As is my wont, its far easier to set new and unfamiliar material against and related to the stuff I know somewhat better. So, our discussion of Japanese design quite naturally (for me) was linked with the Columbian Exposition of 1893 and the Japanese exhibit there, the Ho-o-den or “Phoenix Pavilion”. And that was a natural lead into Frank Lloyd Wright’s fascination with Japan, his subsequent first trip there in 1899 (with friends who were also clients), his likely visit to the Katsura Detached Villa near Nara, and its immediate influence on work following his return. Here’s where Kevin Bacon enters the picture.

The Ho-o-den was designed Masamichi Kuru, a pupil of J. Conder, an English architect invited by the Emperor to establish the first modern school of architecture in Japan. The Ho-o-den was one of the first traditional structures designed by an architect who studied Western design. It doesn’t surprise me that Conder’s name is unfamiliar; he invested the remainder of his professional life in Japan, married a native woman and had one child, a daughter, who married the military attaché connected with the Swedish embassy staff; I’ve corresponded with his grandchildren, scattered across the globe from British Columbia to the Canary Islands.

Conder’s name had come to my attention in connection with John Scott Bradstreet, an interior designer in Minneapolis who had travelled to Japan on a two-year cycle where he was introduced to both architecture and landscape design there by Conder. Bradstreet’s showroom and design studio stood in downtown Minneapolis amid Japanese-style gardens and the building itself was decked with various motifs drawn from his Oriental experiences. Bradstreet was among the first Americans to import Japanese art objects to the Midwest and went so far as to employ native Japanese craftsmen at his Twin City workshops.

Josiah Conder’s name came up again in connection with my interest in the early architects of Dakota Territory, in particular British emigrant architect George Hancock, who had come to Fargo, DT in the spring of 1882 and remained a part of our community until his death in 1924. Hancock was born in Gloucestershire but worked as a stone mason in London where he also claims to have studied architecture at the South Kensington Institute (now morphed into the V&A). The 1881 UK Census list him (just before his emigration to the US) in a North London neighborhood, living with a much younger brother Walter and an unmarried sister Caroline as housekeeper. Who should be his next-door neighbor in London but an architect named Roger Conder, coincidentally the older brother of Josiah and an architect in his own rite, designer of Retiro railroad station in Buenos Aires. It seems unlikely that Hancock did not know Roger Conder and that he may have learned of the Conder sibling educating young Japanese in the skills of Western architecture.

So, it works something like this:

• Architect Louis Sullivan designed the Transportation Building at the Columbian Expo and his young protege Frank Wright supervises construction at the fairgrounds.
• Wright witnesses the Ho-o-den under construction and very likely visits the completed building designed by one of Josiah Conder’s earliest students, Masamichi Kuru, architect of the Ho-o-den. Did Masamichi come to Chicago to supervise construction?
• Wright is impressed sufficiently to plan a trip to Japan six years after the fair had closed.
• Meanwhile, Conder’s younger brother Roger was practicing architecture in London and living on Wyndham Crescent in the Tufnell Park neighborhood of North London.
• Roger Conder, living at #2, Wyndham Crescent, lives next door to the Hancocks (George, Walter and Caroline) at #1. They were neighbors.

Hancock’s home at #1 Wyndham Crescent is the building behind the scaffolding.

• George Hancock and subsequently younger brother Walter emigrate to Fargo, Dakota Territory (George in 1882 and Walter by about 1890).
• Hancock designs many building in the Red River Valley and the eastern part of the Territory, including several on the NDAC campus, where I’ve taught for the past fifty-two years.
• John Scott Bradstreet became a force in Twin City culture, spreading the Japanese aesthetic of shibui and designing gardens for homes at Lake Wayzata.
• Joined by his brother Walter, Hancock Brothers branched into Montana, opening an office in Bozeman—until the collapse of silver in 1893 and a return to rebuild Fargo after the fire at about the same time.

The world is, indeed, exceptionally small.

[From the Community Collection, a public trust in Agincourt, Iowa]

CAILLIBOTTE, Mari Oanez [born 1931]

Rooftops in Red and Blue

ca1950

oil on canvas panel / 26.9cm x 36.1cm (10.6 inches x 14.2 inches)

The family of Mari(e) Caillibotte were natives of Saint-Brieuc, a coastal town in the French province of Brittany. Marie came to the U.S. early in World War II for temporary refuge from the impending arrival of German forces; her family were involved in the growing French underground and feared for their minor children. The connection to Agincourt, Iowa was not through the Catholic church, as we might imagine, but a humanist organization connected with her parents and The Why, a group of “Freethinkers” active in our community. On her return to France at the conclusion of the war, Marie sent this painting to her host family the Anhausers, Ernest and Estelle, who subsequently gave the painting to the Community Collection, along with a cluster of the letters exchanged between these two families in the years following.

The subject of her painting is unspecified, though presumably urban, perhaps from unfamiliar images experiences during her travel to and from the U.S. The color palette of red, white and blue, may relate to the common colors of the American flag and the French tri-color. When Marie married (in about 1955, we believe), she named her first child, a daughter, Estelle.

A PARABLE [for Mr Johnson]

Not too long ago nor very far away there were two churches. To the harried eye, they may have appeared quite different. Other than their common date and purpose, one of them seems more than simple, unadorned; stripped of ornament that might otherwise entice the eye. The sort of building which gains its dignity through the avoidance of sham or pretense in favor of honest and forthright economy. The other church gains its appropriateness for Divine Service through the conscious choice of style, one distinguished by the artful recognition of function and constructional necessity. This example is more easily placed in the spectrum of style; the other less so, achieving that aspect through subtraction, rather than addition. But step within either church and be surprised.

Like the architecture of Early Christianity, the exteriors are secular, of this world, while their interiors afford us a glimpse of reward for the life well lived. Such is the first example. The second comes as greater surprise and a different reward, less readily explained. The differences between them are a small matter; their similarities, another thing altogether.

The likeness of these two churches reveals a common origin — for it is a single source, derived from the 15th century church of Ste Cecile at Albi, in central France, a building shaped, like so many others of its era, by the genius of Gothic engineering, but additionally by the religious unrest of its particular place in time: the Albigensian Heresy, when God’s “mighty fortress” had become both spiritual and physical defense. Here the famously “flying” external buttress had become the weakest link in the otherwise structural rationality and soundness of the mature Gothic style. The builders of Albi had foreseen this need and, with a few other churches of southern France and northeastern Spain (Catalunya), turned these vulnerabilities inward on the lofty walls they support; removed them from the advance of catapult or siege machine. The nineteenth century exercised its heresies in other ways, so the Albigensian ploy served other ends.

In dense urban areas of industrializing Europe and Britain and the overabundance of excess emigrant population in North America, church sites were expensive and therefore tight; they could ill afford the dramatic outward splay of buttresses and the waste of valuable space and useful volume. The Albi experiment was applied this way in Victorian Britain, but less so in North America. Where and whenever it was, however — as at our examples in Chattanooga and Kansas City — it served both economy and the expression of spiritual power. How or why our architect William Halsey Wood chose this pattern is unclear. He did it just twice, so far as is known, one of few American architects to do so.

POSTSCRIPT

Good architecture is the product of multiple contributions to design and construction. So, here we cannot ignore the role of client: the Reverends Henry Jardine and G. W. Dumbell (whose name I imagine was pronounced “DUM-ble”, as in Dumbledore).

Father Dumbell was an emigrant from the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea. His origins are neither less nor more unusual than other 19th century Anglican clergy, though, and local lore has it that those slightly “Georgian” features of his church at Chattanooga have their origin in a ruined fortification near his birthplace, though images of that source are not convincing. Seeking more information on the Dumbell family, however, provides a far simpler explanation: the churchyard site of the Dumbell Family mausoleum is adjacent to Braddan Kirk, outside the capital city of Douglas. Old Braddan Kirk is preserved as a cemetery chapel just south of the newer church, whose bell tower almost certainly inspired its reference in Chattanooga.

The story of Father Jardine, Halsey Wood’s client in the early stages of the project at Kansas City, is far more than a nostalgic case of homesickness. Jardine’s churchmanship was, like Dumbell’s, a match for the Anglo-Catholicism of his architect, though it had more often come to be an issue with both his bishop and parishioners, in ways Wood may never have experienced. Jardine’s situation at Kansas City quickly devolved into defrocking, legal recrimination, imprisonment, and ultimately suicide. The good father’s ashes are interred beneath the high altar of the church he inspired and some claim his spirit resides there today.

Every building tells a story — of its imagining, its endurance, its demise and its progeny. And each of these stories is worthwhile, though some are more disturbing than routine.

[From the Community Collection, a public trust in Agincourt, Iowa]

HOWEY, Robert Leslie (1900–1981)

“After the Gale”

woodcut

Look at the very fine print in the lower right corner: Künstlerpresse Worpswede.

It’s happened before. It’s happening now and undoubtedly will again. And again. That’s just how I roll.

A chance encounter with the rural community of Worpswede in Lower Saxony (between Bremen and Hamburg), has drawn me into another of the many rabbit holes that consume too much time. What I really mean, of course, is how happy I am to jump into those holes again and again.

The word itself piqued my curiosity and a quick internet search confirmed my suspicion that this was the tip of an interesting opportunity for an Agincourt connection.

“Notgeld is a form of emergency currency created by small cities, towns, and municipalities under German control during the period following the First World War. In the context of post-war currency shortages, these cities supplemented what the government was unable to provide. The notes include a wide range of imagery that represent local identities, traditions, and cultures. Notgeld are often colorful and heavily illustrated, depicting landscapes, cityscapes, historic monuments, people, and local folklore/mythology.” — The Smithsonian

A good many communities during the Great Depression printed their own scrip for local use only. Here in the U.S., it was more often than not the general store or “provisioner” who did this. Which, of course, pleads the question of what this might say about Agincourt during that stressful period. I doubt that regional graphic design would have tended toward the “Expressionism” used at Worpswede but it could have been just as colorful and festive. Not being a graphic designer in any sense, this will nag me until I find an answer.