8/1/2006

Purcell & Elmslie: Prairie Progressive Architects David Gebhard Edited by Patricia Gebhard Hardcover: 144 pages Publisher: Gibbs Smith, Publisher; 1st edition (June 30, 2006) ISBN: 1423600053 Interim Thoughts. The past ten days have been spent relocating an architectural practice to align with a new business model. Specifically, the firm decided that a traditional office establishment was not cost effective. $30,000 a year in physical overhead in exchange for what? A place to receive cell phone calls and for people to collect coffee mugs? Instead, the architecture of telecommunications allows projects to be developed and progressed through a dispersed network of independent contractors. There is even talk of sending the work of construction drawing sets to overnight firms in Indonesia and India. Everyone involved with the office welcomes the opportunity to work at home and avoid the nightmare of Los Angeles traffic. Email, phone (75% cell) and fax are the heavy lifting of an architectural office these days, or at least this one. Thus far, the change bodes well, even though assimilation of the business end of the practice into my home office is taking an effort. Pat Gebhard most kindly sent me a copy of the new P&E book she produced, as editor, from David Gebhard's 1953 doctoral thesis on P&E. Her two paragraph acknowledgments of both my own work and the resources of this site are very generous. I will review the book here once things have settled down into a more reasonable pattern (i.e., there are fewer boxes and dislocated architectural drawing sets underfoot). Released on June 30, 2006, copies of the book are now available on Amazon and eBay. With this brief note let me express my appreciation to the regular readers who send emails asking how things are going for me when I miss a week or two here. I remain amazed at the readership this boutique blog continues to evidence. The financial pall that made harsh my existence for the past year is lifting, if in seeming slowness. I look to September to be the best month in a long while, and trust that I will finally be able to liberate a critical cache of photocopied materials from a (shamefully) longstanding bill at the Northwest Architectural Archives. Sometimes there are years I wish I could just skip. I intend to reignite regular Grinds next week as we resume our journey with Purcell and Feick in pre-World War I Europe and Asia Minor.

research courtesy mark hammons