10/15/2006

Desktop Image by Tom Shearer National Farmers Bank Louis H. Sullivan and George Grant Elmslie, architects Owatonna, Minnesota 1905 Right click and "Save as:" or link opens new window for full view Download for 1027 x 786 screen resolution Download for 1280 x 1028 screen resolution Precision.  Still into the guts of Visual Studio Web Developer 2005, so again musings about my P&E book. These comments are the last in this line, as they deliver me to a threshold. Offered above, a new desktop image in two exciting resolutions contributed by Tom Shearer. I vote yea! In Pat Gebhard's kind acknowledgements of Organica as a resource in the recently published Purcell & Elmslie: Prairie Progressive Architects, which is a redaction of David Gebhard's 1953 doctoral thesis, she says: "Hopefully this book will be an introduction to the firm's work, leaving room for Hammons' more exhaustive treatment later." Pat Gebhard called me before she started her endeavor and asked me about my approach. I gave her the nickel tour, indicating that my interests and focus were more intent on the philosophical and historical rather than the architectural, per se. I said that I intended to continue the direction indicated in the first pages of the Minnesota 1900 monograph published in 1994. I spoke of Sullivan and Bragdon, Einstein and Minkowski, and shudder of shudders, the fourth dimension. As I mentioned last week, these indicators are bulwarks in understanding the spiritual nature of design found in work by Purcell and Elmslie and thus discerning their true motivations -- anathema to many minds, then and now. Having been in this line of fire for more than twenty-five years, I am well aware that for many people who might approach an "exhaustive" treatment of P&E looking for every doorknob, such metaphysical discussion could prove less than satisfying. During the last few months my thoughts have been occupied with discerning and articulating the true purpose in pouring my energies into a book that has wanted to be written for an extended period. Often my inner critic has both shamed and lamented the quarter century involved with thoughts that there was something faulty in me for requiring a lifetime of experience to rise to the maturity of being able to write their story with fidelity. There has also been the absence of my training as an architect. How can I presume to discuss the work of architects, especially intensely gifted ones, without having their same frame of professional reference? And, lastly, the real kicker, trust: who is to say that what resonates in me from beginning to end in everything I have ever encountered from their hands, whether built or written or drawn, is actually the same thing they intended to convey? Postcard Open Air Theater for Thaddeus P. Giddings Anoka, Minnesota   1914/1915 Source: University of Minnesota Libraries online U Media Archive, University of Minnesota Libraries Assuming for a moment that I can reconcile all those issues, and work remains to be done which we get to below, there is another major consideration: Do I produce an "exhaustive" study that sets out their production with the finality of a tombstone, inarguably precise accounts of when "who did want to whom" resting upon inviolable caissons of footnotes?  Or, do I go for something "exhaustive" which, forgive me, has an actual comprehensive relevance to our present day lives? Do I report their message as a static dispatch from a battle fought long ago, or do I seek out the still vital dynamic tendrils of their cause so as to shift consciousness forward rather than backward? If I go the latter route, which has always been there like whatever is in Loch Ness, that raises the question of the vehicle. If I produce a scholarly text, what audience is there for the 1500 copies, perhaps, of a hard cover printed once? And, importantly, is that audience the same one that P&E would mean to reach? Do I want to have spent all this time getting to the sticking place only to address a sprinkling of academics, architects, and already interested lay people? Or, how about a modified Devil and The White City approach? Shall I report the War as a mystery yet to be solved, la The Black Dahlia? (I mention that only because I was last night in the building, for a dance performance, where her dismembered body was discovered -- write from your own experience, they say. Everyone was asking me if I could sense the ghosts. There are apparently more than one. Sorry, no juice.) Thankfully, the coffee table approach has already been taken. Having sat my share place holding in various living rooms, I know how those books get used to kill small interruptible segments of time. Detail, perspective view Service Buildings for Henry B. Babson Riverside, Illinois 1915 Source: HABS Pictures are pleasing, of course, but the appearance of beauty alone does not explain the nature of the intention nor the substance of the effect. To perform properly in conveying the mind beyond the surface, words must be more than a mere technical reflection. Not only must the depth of beauty be rightly encompassed, but also integrated with understanding that plumbs past the visible. The only way to do that is by establishing a viable metaphysical framework within which the discussion of P&E can be unfolded. The conundrum is doing so without triggering modernist rejection. The truth is that many people I have encountered in tendering these considerations lapse to a default position derived from the hard core conditioning of material reductionism which says, "There is no such thing." Some correspondents who respond to these Grinds complain when I "wander off" into the kind of discussion that turns on this issue of spiritual intention. "Let things speak for themselves," was one admonition. To me, that is just the problem. The artifacts illustrated in books or electronically are not the actual perception of the thing in person, nor when arrayed like the Black Dahlia in galleries can many P&E objects be experienced as living things anymore. In the past through extraordinary circumstances I was extremely privileged to live with P&E furniture and artwork for years. When I look at chairs I once sat upon daily now shelved on the pedestals of museums, I hear a distant, ghostly lamentation for use. (The only answer to preservation seems to be reproduction, and in copies there is always the whiff of the fakery against which P&E were so adamantly opposed.) The book, through words, has to provide that missing element. What I propose to write must answer the call to living function, not be a virtual museum of facts and analysis that lets anyone stray anywhere their personal palette prefers. What it boils down to is that P&E created a whole environment. That was their design goal, and such was possible because they related to the context of the surrounding world as holism. The P&E book must be a form of discovery that bears the reader beyond fragmented mental pigeonholes. Larry Millett, a newspaperman whose The Curve of the Arch remains the best exposition of George Grant Elmslie yet produced, once critiqued my very earliest 1980s essays on Purcell as verging toward "hagiography." No nonsense, those newspaper fellows. He was probably right, though that wasn't my intention. What he detected was the upwelling of my fledgling recognition of virtue in the cause P&E pursued -- and you know how the hammer of epiphany can make everything a nail. These same essays form the core biographical content so far on this site, so you can judge for yourself whether I was proselytizing for saints or just heroes. Cover Published by the Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1985 Education was a primary function in the work of Purcell and Elmslie, a task Purcell carried on for the rest of his life in the many publications and correspondence he produced. If I just report all that as curriculum, like a ledger with a nice gloss, easy enough. But I believe I would fail in revealing the real essence. In that failure would arise another: meaningful relationship to our own present moment of experience. How do I chop the wood and carry the water in such a way as to avoid hagiography and the dusty well of historical reminiscence? For a few nanoseconds I considered novelizing the continuum, but instantly the ability to point directly to the underlying source would be lost. To think I once despised footnotes and now cajole them to remain present.  I have ever been a novelist at heart and, heading that way even now, this production for P&E may well be my final scholarly efflorescence. Since neither love poem or dry gulch is appropriate enough to be effective, I am left with the organic solution. Whatever form I come up with is going to be designed and executed in the here and now, fresh and relevant to our own time and place. P&E are not fodder, either, for my own inclinations. As I noted above, there is the question of projection. After this long on the trail, however, I have come to accept my insights with enough respect to find sincerity in their expressions. That's the best I can do. George Elmslie might have turned it out thus, with a line drawing shaken out of his sleeve which I must, alas, borrow:   A minstrel shall I be, for the twenty-first century.   As for the "writing about architects without being one" question, I think I have come to an acceptable answer. Many architectural historians are not architects. I've been around a wide variety of architects, organic and otherwise. I have worked with them, in and outside of their offices, for a long time and learned who they are as a class. Even considering variance from personal idiosyncrasies, their attitudes and behaviors are pretty consistent. I go with a sense combined from historical documents and personal acquaintance that they have mostly always been of a kind. A number of architects have been interested in pointing out to me (their view of) what P&E were accomplishing from a technical perspective, so I get that end of things several times over. Perhaps my view from the outside looking in possesses a desirable neutrality. In reverse order, as it turned out, there is my question about the length of time it took. In truth, I now possess the confidence to tackle the whole shebang in the terms outlined above. There was no real error or failure to perform heretofore, despite the mileage of the journey. Life was what it was, abiding. This book is not about me. True, the knife got sharpened. I am a vastly better writer, my experiences have taken me into many relevant lessons, and I have clarity and capacity for discernment that was formerly obscured though not really absent. My efforts are not rooted in the necessities of an academic career. The real issue turns out to be this moment in our cultural lives, where a renewed call to spirituality as a practical moral function may serve to do as P&E meant to do, demonstrate the way to a better future, only now as examples from the past that show it can be done. As it turns out, serendipitous decades and all, I came to be one Johnny on the spot. No, I didn't have the awareness to plan things out. Mark 0, Pookies, 1. Fireplace detail, banding finial Edna S. Purcell residence [aka Lake Place] Minneapolis, Minnesota  1913 Last Grind I noted that the scarcity of persons in my acquaintance who had read the Minnesota 1900 monograph. True to synchronous form in the way of my experience in the Caravan, the very next day I happened upon a citation of my effort with the adjective "superb" applied in a footnote of "The Prairie Spirit in Landscape Gardening," a reprint of Wilhelm Miller's classic introduced by Christopher Vernon. I remember taking Chris around Minneapolis when he came to visit the Purcell Papers in the early 1980s, before he emigrated to Australia. Every time we have corresponded something has happened to interrupt the flow, such as my last contact with him just days before fleeing -- er, leaving Taliesin West five years ago. I remember he asked me about Wilhelm Miller, too, and P&E, to which I failed regrettably to respond. I see he was able to find out. So, the Caravan works in mysterious ways. Lastly, there is the matter of finances. Somewhere, somehow, the resources to support production of this book are going to have to be manifest. Life has been clear that I cannot simultaneously struggle for a living and write at the level required for the P&E endeavor. Sorry, I just ain't Superman. Gone, too, are the days of grants come (often) unsolicited from Purcell's friends, who have mostly passed on. And the income obligations of grants since Reagan's tax law change of 1987 mean you have to get a third more than you actually need in order to have enough. A careful estimation of the research and travel costs, and support of the writing time, are bottom lined at $30,000 on the church mouse standard. The theory of having a year or so to work uninterrupted on this one project seems fantastical, but a book I have been reading, Ask And It Is Given, insists that all things are possible with the right heart. The question is, of course, who to ask. As my dear friend Mardik Martin, who wrote Raging Bull among other Scorcese films, says, "We shall see what we shall see." And so we shall. Since these are concerns now aired and settled sufficient to the need, the Grind hereafter shall be in a more traditional vein. That'll make some readers happier, I know.