Purcell and Elmslie, Architects

Purcell and Elmslie, Architects

Firm active :: 1907-1921

Minneapolis, Minnesota :: Chicago, Illinois
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania :: Portland, Oregon

Ye Older Grindstones

5/25/2006

South window
National Farmer's Bank
Louis H. Sullivan and George Grant Elmslie, architects
Owatonna, Minnesota 1905
Photograph by Tom Shearer

Progressive Report. Day three past oral surgery and as many molar extractions, I sit with some unsteadiness but less boredom down to my keyboard. No coding of web components with this hydrocodone haze. Nor much in the way of insight. No, cut-and-paste is my present speed, so I'm spending this recuperative period going through the huge array of images that have wanted to peek out here for some time.

All you need is a basket for picking berries.
Photograph by Tom Shearer
The living heart of glory becomes a light fixture.
Photograph by Tom Shearer

Just this week, Tom Shearer uploaded to the Organica FTP site a cache of new photographs of the National Farmer's Bank. The captions applied here are entirely my own responsibility, and may not accord with Tom's more practical inclinations. A number of the images have been placed in the existing galleries, but the quality of his lens has allowed some fresh close and personal looks at the very fine decorative patterning that is sometimes lost to the eye in the panoply of the space itself.

Frozen mysticism
Photograph by Tom Shearer
Tire tread of the gods
Photograph by Tom Shearer

A special gallery has been created to show off this generous contribution, which at this moment is only partially revealed. More will go up as I have time to study these images--and feel better. Looking at these pictures and remembering my own spiritual exaltation while in the place, it's hardly possible not to.

For me, the bank at Owatonna remains the most viscerally powerful architectural experience I have known. I have been in far grander spaces, but none were more glorious. What an incredible difference to pass through into the eternal springtime of the Owatonna banking room than step inside any of the countless contemporary banks lined with a permanent winter of white marble.

Charles A. Purcell residence
Oak Park, Illinois Still pawing through the digital traces of my trips last year to Chicago and New York. Those journeys came about through the very great generosity of a friend, and I will always count standing in the Little-Stevens living room at the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art lecturing to a crowd about P&E as one of the great moments of my life. I was so entranced with the Met, I confess, that I refused to leave for the Guggenheim. Too many museums, too little time. I've seen the Morris Shop in San Francisco, where the spiral first appeared, so I can wait until the next visit.

Other notes: In the course of all this technical upheaval of the past month I tried a new web log analyzer. I'm not really sure I agree with these numbers, but I have posted the updated site statistics anyway. There were some anomalous results that made me wary, even though the traffic shown was in some ways similar to earlier reports.

5/16/2006

Phasers are now real. What, you may ask, could this possibly have to do with P&E?

Seeing is Believing. The following is an excerpt from a study commissioned in 2003 by the ber-tech Air Force Research Laboratory, Air Force Materiel Command, concerning the physics of teleportation. The report examines the various theoretical and conceptual forms of the phenomenon, but focuses on those that can be addressed by mathematical rigor and empirical research techniques. While our good company will likely not want to plow through the entire eighty-eight pages, this paragraph pretty much says it all at taxpayer expense (well, at least we got something useful):

"Therefore we can actually produce four-dimensional phenomenon in our minds. So our consciousness is four-dimensional."

How lovely the fact that in order to engage the most modern of 21st century conversations they have to invoke mathematicians of the 19th century (e.g., Hinton and Mobius). Now we get to the bottom line here and figure out that movement in the fourth dimension IS the manifestation of consciousness. Taking the great leap of awakening, we can understand this to be the experiential realm of the spiritual. Such an awareness reveals the fundamental functioning of identity, the basis upon which P&E erected their entire design philosophy.

Most people who enjoy P&E are not going to be interested in this discussion, if indeed not find it outright meaningless. Who cares, really, for all this mumbo-jumbo? The answer is clearly that few do. The reason for making the effort, however, is simple necessity. Ignorance may be bliss, but that collapses two distinct things. Bliss may encompass far more than ignorance, at least if the spiritual perspective is to be gainsaid. To enter fully into the intention of P&E--and yes, they are plentiful those who still prefer the belief that there is none such intended--the greater being of the holism must be comprehended. How a physical thing is beautiful, why a palpable response bears meaning, what moves us, these considerations find unity of being only within the framework of the immaterial. The fourth dimension is verily immaterial, but could not possibly be more relevant to where we are! Even the military has figured this out. Enterprise, ready to beam up.

As always, look for the irony to find the cutting edge.

Other notes: Still working on the new software configuration, which is proving quite complex. These P&E pages seem stable enough for the time being, but the shift to the ASP.NET-enabled web server will restore the HyperFind portions of the site that are not presently working (e.g. Purcell Papers guide and the Progressives On-Line). This has involved coding entirely new web components and database linkages to replace the old "classic ASP" scripts, as mentioned in an earlier note below, with very cool results. The site will still be down here and there, mostly late at night and on weekends, for the next few weeks, as the technology upgrades are implemented. I appreciate the encouragement of everyone who wrote to offer condolence and support! The superior quality of people who share this virtual space in community always amazes me, especially evidenced when they actually do something to keep it going. The good guys know who they are, but thanks again anyway.

5/12/2006

Technical advance. The forces leveraging Organica onward have spoken. After researching the various issues that underlay the recent failure of the site server, it is clear to me that the bottom line is spending money ($200 for software, at least, though it ain't going to happen overnight from plain old lack of bucks). The various elements of Organica rely on several diverse forms of technology to produce the web pages, including plain old HTML, Active Server Pages scripts, databases, and, in the near future, web controls such as tree views and list views related to the redesign process. Since I built the original concatenation of technology that runs this site in the 1990s, the various platforms have long since moved on and need to be brought up to date

For the next couple of weeks, I will be rebuilding the invisible parts of Organica to align all the components into present day compliance. The "classic ASP" scripts will be abandoned and the data ported to new web controls in ASP.NET. The server is being replaced with Aprelium Technologies Abyss Web Server ($60), which will solve a number of problems related to Microsoft's IIS that have caused breakdowns in service for both Organica and HyperFind. Plus, security will be improved so that the initial cause of this mess can take a hike down the pike. The site may be down intermittently while all this is going on.

5/10/2006

Phaaaaccck. Last week there was an untoward security event in my machine which, among other things, messed up the permissions settings of the Internet Information Server 5.1 [IIS] that runs Organica. Whether because of a unknown hole in the firewall or web-based malware at work, I had to clean out a number of nasties. Even so, the web service was toast. As many people noticed, the site was down for the better part of a week. While I have been intending to abandon Microsoft's IIS anyway because of the limitation of having only one web site running, I had not gotten a number of problems with Apache server resolved. I still don't have them all worked out. For the nonce, these pages will be served by a freeware server. The Grinds will return when this is all sorted out. Isn't this fun? Not.

research courtesy mark hammons