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Patrick E. Byrne residence
Purcell, Feick and Elmslie
Bismarck, North Dakota 1909/1910
Text by William Gray Purcell
Parabiographies entry, Volume for 1910
Job Date (in Parabiographies): 1909/1910
P. E. Byrne
This is the first project carrying the new partnership title, "Purcell, Feick, and Elmslie, Architects." While Mr. Elmslie's characteristic designing is in evidence in our work before this time, the Byrne house is the first building for which he developed the studies and presentation drawings. The working drawings made directly under his supervision in the office closely followed his design studies, and the building followed the working drawings without changes.
1904-1909 Daily Contact Resumed:
This new relation with Mr. Elmslie in the continuity of my architectural progress was a welcome step in advance for me, and a rapid one--too rapid at times--as I was unable wholly to digest and interrelate the new forms that were arising from Mr. Elmslie's method of approach. He had an architectural life extending back for fifteen years as an intimate and vital factor in the work of Louis H. Sullivan from 1895 to 1909.My first acquaintance with George Elmslie had begun August 1, 1903, when I entered the Sullivan office after five weeks in the Chicago Post Office then under construction.
The laboratory work in architectural design and philosophy, which from small but sincere beginnings I had been doing on my own account for about ten years now, took on a different character as George Elmslie took over the creative work, and the increased volume of our business called for a large amount of my executive time, contact with the public, and travel. Mr. Feick continued to cover engineering and construction and divided with me the superintendence of specifications.
Such cooperation was required of me in establishing a liason [sic] between the client and his needs, George Elmslie's designing, and George Feick's preoccupation with the working drawings, made up an experience in which my view of the building world grew rapidly, and with great joy to me.
Reshaping the Day's Work:
As the basic concepts for each building took form, George Elmslie and I had many fruitful hours of discussion both over the drawing board and at home, for until his marriage in the fall of 1910, he lived with us or at my Grandmother's when he was in Minneapolis.
Whenever I was in the office I spent as much time as I could over the drawing boards. Feick wrote less of the highly technical elements of the specifications as the implications of our new approach got farther outside his range--more and more we were obliged to call in outside specialists on the various branches of engineering.
Reconsideration of Fundamentals:
Before this time, the development of my view of organic architecture proceeded in balance because I was obliged to conceive and carry out all parts of each project by my own efforts. I was thus at all times fully orientated, even if not facile in expressing my rapidly growing fund of ideas about architectural form. In the new partnership I was suddenly faced with a situation where the designs produced by Mr. Elmslie rested in an understanding and a facility with constructional, functional, and poetical integrations which he had enriched and perfected into a brilliant and unique personal expression through many years of creative effort.
Our intimate discussions and review of work in progress provided me with a clearer and perhaps more inclusive view of architecture, but I had only occasional opportunities to carry such a project through that creative process which lies between its original concept and its arrival at the working drawing stage.
Mr. Elmslie stated to me in later years that "our relationship was of such a frank and intimate nature, osmotic in a sense, hence mutually beneficial and rendering his art of expression perhaps more vital."
In this way I came to feel at home with out especial views of the building art, but obliged to concern myself more and more with thoughts about buildings and less about making drawings for them. In recalling the discussions which grew out of our daily work at the office, the talks we had as we walked to work in the morning or home through Loring Park in the evening; in thinking over these days and evenings together just before his marriage, and trying to recover something of the substance of these talks, Mr. Elmslie writes me in 1940:
"A building concept does not grow and develop, the IDEA expands to the full flowering of its germinal impulse, whatever it may be--austere, playful, poetic, or of beauty in all its serenity. Exactly like the orchestration of a simple theme in music, be it rich or poor, there are no steps in the process.
"Organic design does not exist in sections or in steps. If organic design, in its ultimate reach, does not primarily exist in the embryo it is valueless--it is one thing--as the oak exists in embryo ONLY, in the acorn. It could exist nowhere else. Likewise organic design in its complete integrity so exists. There is no formula, as such. If the work is not an emanation of the spirit (and alas! how seldom it really is!) it is not of primary importance. As an emanation it has no element of pretence, make-believe or supercargo of any kind, one process is of a static nature in its revelation, of its essence. The other is as dynamic as natural growth."
I began to speak in public about organic architecture and to explain the form and function relation to various clubs and small public gatherings. I began to write accounts of our buildings for periodicals, to write many carefully composed letters to prospective clients; and Mr. Elmslie and I together began to write about architecture and send an occasional essay to the magazine.
Collection: William Gray Purcell Papers, Northwest Architectural Archives, University of Minnesota [AR:B4d1.4]
research courtesy mark hammons