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Purcell and Elmslie, Architects Firm active :: 1907-1921
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11/19/2002: A Matter of Personal Experience, or Believe it Or Not: 4-D is a Continuum
The pookie creatures are a patient lot when they urge forward. Earlier I said ix-nay to more introductory images on the greeting pages because of the download time. Now beaucoups images on the home page, just as a test for the idea. Whose idea was it, do you suppose?
I have decided to share an experience with you, which I will relate with the spirit of Christmas past. In 1980, when I was but barely eight or nine months familiar with the contents of the Purcell Papers, I answered a phone call directed to the Northwest Architectural Archives. Both people I deemed my superiors at the time, Alan Lathrop and Barb Bezat, were absent from the premises. The gentleman on the other end of the line was from the Smithsonian Institution, and he inquired about certain aspects of Mssrs. Purcell and Elmslie. I had been hired on work study to sort through the published manuscripts of William Gray Purcell, which all descended from the 1940s-1950s. These publications, which appeared in Northwest Architect (the organ of the Minnesota AIA chapter of the day), sometimes mentioned P&E and illustrated the work, but I had not really reached into the flat files and Hollinger boxes that constitute the "Purcell and Elmslie Archives." Beyond reading H. Allen Brooks' primordial (and mandatory) history Frank Lloyd Wright and his Midwestern Contemporaries and having returned unconsciously a year earlier from southern Minnesota with a host of pictures of the Merchants Bank in Winona, I had not really touched anything physical that was distinctly from the 1910s.
The man from the Smithsonian--and remember I am a late blooming freshman so I am really impressed that someone from there is asking me anything--determined I was well acquainted with Purcell, but that I lacked much practical knowledge of Elmslie. He asked me outright, and I admitted that I had not encountered much about the man to that point. So, the conversation ended with the brevity of my usefulness. However, one thing stands proven over the years. I am a writer. Writers, in general, are not graphically inclined. They deal in words. I have never learned to sketch. To my knowledge, I am without any graphical ability to draw. As a writer, I look to blank paper as a medium (consider well that term) to support words from my hand, not drawings. I had no habit whatever of doodling, because any paper was a precious opportunity for the written word. I might scribble words, but not pictures.
Anyway, when the Smithsonian hung up, I looked down to the answer pad on which I had intended to take a message for my betters. However, there being no such message, I was ASTONISHED to see a caricature of George Elmslie, complete with moustache and glasses, staring back at me. Underneath, in a narrow, stilted handwriting difficult to read, was the annotation "Eat me with a fine tined fork." I had no awarness of drawing this. I have the piece of paper somewhere, still, I think. It was just too strange to discard, but the whitewater of the past two decades may have consumed the frail green slip.
Thus began a series of events, each one more strange than the last, through which I became pre-aware of things that were documented in the Purcell Papers, but which records I had not yet encountered. Memory being what it is, especially after the turbulence of my mistakes in life, I can't recall where I later saw it, but I recall an annotation by or letter from Elmslie to Purcell where he says, "You'll have to eat that with a fine tined fork." GGE was remarking casually about some design detail. Even if in 2002, some 22 years hence, my memory fails on the location of the quote (as in many other things), I remember distinctly the icicle of my spine when I read that for the first time. I froze in place, goosebumps awakened. In 1980, I had not even learned to translate the hieroglyphic that is Elmslie's cursive hand, much less gone through all the P&E office correspondence or Elmslie's letters. I didn't read Elmslie's correspondence files until several years later, but there it was.
This was, as I say, one of more than a few instances of whatever-you-want-to-call-it. Perhaps I was psychometrizing (but I had not touched anything of his that I recall), perhaps I was only being clairsentient. Maybe he was present in some other way. I don't know. Only years later did I realize the undercurrent in everything about these people roots in a four-dimensional consciousness, the pure essence of the psychic. The crystallization most people accept as "real" is merely the shadowy slice through the processes of existence they called "continuities." That I am possessed by this consciousness is both a blessing and a curse, as it was to those who came before me (how many of them, Sullivan and Elmslie included, were incomparably greater souls than me yet died in penury!). I am neither an architect nor an artist (at least one of my artist friends declares writers are not artists and uses me as the prime example--I am however a [published] poet, which is Purcell's definition of the office in question). I just write. But I tell you, there is much more to all this than meets the eye--organic consciousness is all about the mind being past, present, and future all at once.
One day let me tell you about the Buddhist abhidharma classifications of consciousness, which are perfectly organic understandings of how this all works. Thoreau and Emerson had only the Vedas, which the Indian scholars have noted, but the American academics are loathe to engage in such difficult substance (as in actually learning Sanskrit). Just recall where Walter Burley Griffin died, for example, then tell me about "serendipity." But I digress...
11/14/2002
Why is this site like a hotel? There's a lot of housekeeping that goes on while you are not in the room. Doesn't really add anything new, but you'd notice if it wasn't done. Started to place thumbnails on the Residences and Selected Works pages, which adds value but also increases the download time to a prohibitive degree for those still on dial-up. If I do that eventually anyway, I'll have to create an entirely new class of thumbnails sized somewhat smaller than those shown on the current commission pages. I noticed, also, that introducing images on what are now pages of plain vanilla lists will want a new layout. For now, though, ix-nay on that idea altogether. [Okay, on 3/6/2003, I did it]
11/12/2002
Got up the second Elmslie letter to Frank Lloyd Wright, which delivers the very interesting recollection that Carl K. Bennett apparently expressed a preference for the pier-and-lintel Merchants Bank of Winona done by P&E in 1912 over his own 1905 Curve of the Arch (and if you haven't read Larry Millett's book by that title, you have a real treat waiting).
11/11/2002
As promised, I installed a web log analyzer and surveyed from 1/3/2002. To my astonishment, the Grindstone is the sixth most popular page (consider the modest placement of the hyperlink), behind the Elmslie and Purcell biographies, Residences, Selected Works, and the Compleat Commission List.
6,146 individuals have visited once, with 1,144 repeat patrons. 95 percent are from the United States, but the other 5 percent represent 71 foreign countries, including 5 from Iran and 1 from North Korea. One visitor who kindly corresponds occasionally with me from Wisconsin has spent the most time: 8 hours, 48 minutes, though two others are nipping at his heels: 8 hours, 20 minutes and 8 hours, 3 minutes, respectively. The average visitor, among those 5,002 who ventured here only once, spends 6 minutes. This site ranks number 1 on Google searches for Purcell and Elmslie, is listed 3rd on the Open Directory, and can be accessed from all the major search engines.
is the most popular architectural image (easy to believe).
The P&E Top Ten Commissions as of this date:
- Josephine Crane Bradley summer residence
- Henry B. Babson residence, alterations
- Merton S. Goodnow residence
- Josephine Crane Bradley residence #1
- Charles. I. Buxton residence
- Alexander Brothers, Factory for the International Leather & Belting Corporation
- Charles R. Crane residence, alterations
- Charles T. Backus residence
- Edna S. Purcell residence [aka Lake Place]
- Edward Goetzenberger residence
A bizarre artifact is the popularity of the Goodnow and Goeztenberger residences, and the fact that Lake Place (the most spectacular and restored) is in 9th place. Go figure. I can only surmise that comes mostly from the alphabetical sequence of the Residences and Selected Works pages, and some people quit before getting to Edna S. Purcell, but that isn't all of the answer on the face of it. Clearly, I need to put up an interpretive guide page--among the many other things requesting my attention.
Of additional interest on Organica as a whole, the related Guide to the William Gray Purcell Papers had 334 unique users, while the database-driven Progressives site had 622. George W. Maher is the most popular of those whose work is most fully presented. I am sure the Griffins would be more so, were more of their images in the database. Would that I had time to spend on the 500+ photographs waiting patiently to be added.
Now I suppose I can stop goofing off with this technical stuff and get back to transcribing those GGE/FLLW letters everyone keeps clicking on.
research courtesy mark hammons