Welcome to Agincourt, Iowa

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.

There will be a special showing of the 1985 Argentine film “Desaparecidos” next weekend at the Fay Raye Theatre, 15 South Broad Street in Agincourt. Showings at 6:00 and 8:00 p.m. on Friday and Saturday; Sunday matinee at 2:00. Hope to see some of you there.

…but it sometimes does, when you least expect it.

Someone commented on the Agincourt blog on Saturday that the BBC History Magazine had mentioned the town of Agincourt, Iowa in its current (February 2025) issue.

The article concerns the invocation of Agincourt through history, its meaning and how it was intended to be understood. Imagine my surprise when I found the article (the last page of which is reproduced here) and discovered we’ve been mentioned. My shrink, Dr. Bob, always said that Agincourt was a healthy outlet for my creativity to the point where I begin to pack for the move there. Frankly, retirement in Agincourt would be a treat. And y’all could drop in whenever it was convenient and sit a spell.

If this is the last entry in the blog, my work has been done. And I hope, done well.

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.