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

Fortunately and generously, a former employer recalled me to their office and has made every effort to ensure that my life gets up from the prone position where I have been gasping for air. I am deeply grateful for this re-turn of events, but the change into being back in a busy architectural office has also been something of a challenge. Promising myself that I would remain healthy and deter a repeat visit to the dark side of hypertension, I have been resting when tired--as I usually am when I get home. Hence, I have had to let this web site and all the others I maintain simply take rest alongside.

Our Caravan is indebted to Susan O'Connor, who contributes the adjacent photograph of this Purcell, Feick & Elmslie apartment building in Chicago. Located just two blocks from the Robie House in the Hyde Park neighborhood, Susan's research showed that the Apartment Building for H. H. Newman and G. L. Marsh was even nominated in 1973 for the National Register. Further, it appears in the Chicago Landmarks Historic Resources Survey, deemed "Too altered for architectural or historic significance." What news to me that it was built at all!

Aside from the four sketches in the P&E archives, there was just one other scrap of paper to indicate anything had ever been built. A small, approximately six inch square sawed wood diagram exists in the Purcell Papers, marked with this job number. Given there were no working drawings, specifications, or any design development documents at all, we took the best guess that the diagram might have been mislabeled in the 1950s, as sometimes things were from time-dimmed memory. Oops. My recent search of the P&E office correspondence yielded a single letter from Elmslie to the "Citizens" of the Minneapolis office recounting a meeting with the University of Chicago professors who were striving to supplement their non-tenured positions with a little land development income. Elmslie reported that these gentlemen were uncertain of the investment capital, and as yet I have found no further mention of the project in subsequent communications.

I must mention that during these past months I had the delight of a visit with John Panning, proprietor of The Prairie School Traveler website. I think I need to get out more. His kind comments about this site are a heartening encouragement to continue in what has been, sometimes, a lonely journey. I yapped endlessly in joy of a fellow Traveler in the Caravan being present.

Alas. Paint stripper and some bits of wood are needed to set this right, but it's a long drive to Home Depot, apparently. And to think that in the 1970s this little banking institution prided itself on keeping up what they could.

George Elmslie walking in, circa 1911. I wonder if he was thinking about Parker Berry.
Source: Glass negative in the William Gray Purcell Papers, Northwest Architectural Archives (two-fer, see ghostly child).

Even with new construction hitting the emergency brake and the pipers lining up to be paid for the piranha frenzied engorgement by corporate banks on the greased sleaze of sub-prime lending, people deterred from moving site altogether will still seek "improvements" (a technical term used by building departments to indicate change, purely in the sense of amendment, to a property; only the hopefulness of language implies intrinsic betterment as a result).  As they have been for years now, architects are overloaded with work. Competition for a good set of helping hands is stiff. This is true both for what are euphemistically called "production offices," meaning firms that crank out boilerplate drawings for strip malls, fast food restaurants, and cookie cutter residential subdivisions, and those firms, large and small, who want to actually practice architecture by adding some sort of design value, with whatever degree of commitment to principle and expression of talent they can muster.

Of course, architects that work within a particular vein of practice like organic design are fishing in an even smaller pond. CAD crews in Indonesia or Malaysia that can knock out a set of construction drawings for a 10,000 square foot faux Spanish Revival or Tuscan villa at twenty four hours notice and a charge of $20,000 (invisibly marked up by the American architect to $60,000 for the client) are not going to work out well for firms dealing with uniquely expressive forms related to local site, client, and circumstance. Such is yet another trench in the hoary battle between historical revivalism and honest indigenous architecture, this time bent into the pretzel of globalization. Small stateside firms, whether yacht or dinghy-like, have to contend with the deep pockets of supertanker-sized enterprises that can afford to sweeten the dogged bitterness of soul-less design with high end medical, dental, and optical insurance, 401K plans, four weeks of paid vacation a year to start, and maybe a signing bonus or relocation package worth two or three months of salary. The annual cost to a firm for even a minimally skilled CAD drafter starts at $60,000 and goes up rapidly, particularly if the candidate happens to work with the right CAD software package (AutoDesk dominates PC platforms like tuna in a can but there are boutique programs such as VectorWorks and ArchiCad for those who want salmon or smoked oysters with their Apples).

What, you may ask, could such present day hiring dilemma have to do with Purcell & Elmslie? Are we off on another one of those goofy grinds, like the one that discussed real phasers and teleportation (and generated more email from readers than most)? No, indeed. What could be more relevant than the effort to recruit members of the Team? Even without computer-aided graphics being in the mix, it could be hard to get someone into the office who had that special mental hook required for mutual benefit in the process of progressive design. The successful candidate for the position at my office, for example, will have to fit comfortably with an approach to design derived from over a decade of association by the senior principal with Frank Lloyd Wright (as well as be VectorWorks proficient). Where and how, we may wonder, could P&E have looked for people similarly already in the mix?

Parker Noble Berry 1888-1918

Interstate National Bank Parker N. Berry, architect Chicago, Illinois By George, I think he got it.

As it happens, there were two places. One of them was the same tank, Frank Lloyd Wright's establishment at Taliesin. In fact, after surviving the murders and fire there in 1914, Wright's drafter Herbert Fritz asked for work at P&E and was immediately hired. The other place, naturally, was the office of Louis Sullivan. This brings us to the touchy business of what has to be called plainly for what it is, the poaching of able bodies. Most architects have a certain deportment amongst themselves, however thin the patina may be, that bears itself in words and ways which would never, ever be seen (in the sense of getting caught) shoplifting studio help. Nonetheless, drafters no matter how gainfully employed can develop a certain undercurrent of dissatisfaction in their situations, often from brooding over various real or imagined slights of being underappreciated, disregarded without proper acknowledgement, or taken for granted. This can lead to conversations and correspondences that vibrate through the network of their peers, and attract the attentions of other architects like spiders tending to their webs.

Thus we arrive at an interesting case study. Over the first four months of 1911, Mssrs. Purcell and Elmslie attempted, jointly and ever so delicately, to leverage Parker N. Berry out of Sullivan's office in Chicago and into their own fold in Minneapolis. The first in a series of letters shows this to have been a happy aspiration on the part of Parker Berry, one given hope by an initial conversation with Purcell. After navigating the shoals of self-esteem and putting a price on himself, Parker gets the offer he wanted. There are seven letters in the sequence, six of which are now posted. The last one from Elmslie is taking a LONG time to decipher.

Debris Washes Ashore. Some of what is apparently the Merchants National Bank of Winona furniture is up for auction at Sotheby's, although the sofa form is new to me. The estimate runs from $10,000-$18,000, but the original rich dark forest green leather is long gone. Whoever recovered the three pieces (2 chairs and a sofa) could not have chosen a more inappropriate and ugly color, at which misjudgment one can only shudder. Worse, whoever wrote the description for the sale catalog really ought to know better. While I read most everything that comes to my eyes on P&E and sometimes disagree for reasons of opinion, in all my years in the Caravan I have never seen such a ridiculous and malformed statement pretending to be fact about anything P&E as accompanies this sale. After regurgitating the obligatory introductory truths, whoever penned this takes a flying leap into an abyss of pretension, heedless of everything that is documented about this chair form (underlined below):

Sofa and two chairs (reupholstered, badly) Merchants National Bank Purcell, Feick, and Elmslie Winona, Minnesota   1912 Source: Sotheby's

"The Minneapolis-based architectural firm of Purcell, Feick and Elmslie was one of the leading proponents of the Prairie School style. In addition to being distinguished for their residential commissions, the firm designed a large number of banks throughout the Midwest. Their bank buildings demonstrated a new and progressive architectural vocabulary distinguished by box-like structures, steel frames, brick facades, stylized terracotta ornament, pier-and-lintel framing, arched entries, and integrated interiors. The sofa and arm chairs in the current lot follow the 1912 design for the Merchants Bank of Winona, the firms most celebrated bank commission. In addition to the architectural plan, the firm provided designs for all aspects of the interior, including leaded glass windows and a large sky light, grilles for the tellers, lighting fixtures, and furniture. The progressive design of this seating furniture is suggestive of the modular, geometric designs synonymous with Austrian furniture of the period, notably by Koloman Moser. Purcells travels abroad and exposure to Austrian design likely served as the inspiration for these forms. Variations of this iconic chair design were also used in the living room of Purcells own Minneapolis residence, the Edna S. Purcell House, which was named after the architects wife."

What utter rot, as an Englishman might say. Or, perhaps, bollocks.

• First, William Gray Purcell didn't design these chairs. The drawings for these forms are all from the hand of George Elmslie, and anyone even superficially acquainted with either the existing literature or the P&E archives would know that. The original sketch for the solution of this specific chair type, which I exhibited with one from the bank director's room in the Minnesota 1900 exhibition in 1994 and accompanied with a significant comment in the monograph published by the University of Delaware Press the same year, has a full discussion of the where's and why's of the design in Elmslie's own cursive hand.
   
• Second, Purcell was in Europe in 1906 and later in 1928, but George Elmslie had a one way voyage to America in 1885. While Elmslie read voraciously and kept abreast of a wide range of journals, there is not a shred of evidence that I have ever seen where Elmslie mentions the Secessionists as relevant to his thinking in any way. This maladroit line of description about the Winona chairs, which now rests eternal as a reference at Sotheby's for any future sale of the pieces, is truly an appalling insult toward the integrity of P&E concerning their design principles that, after a half century of scholarship on their behalf, should not be happening.
   
• Third, the effort to shift authorship from native American genius to being derivative of European sources shows the extent to which some people still presume, for whatever gratification, that creative force can go only from east to west in early 20th century design. Eurocentric thinking is obviously, and obliviously, alive and well. I'll leave it to the reader to meditate on Anthony Alofsin's views in Frank Lloyd Wright: The Lost Years, 1910-1922.
   
• Lastly, mysteriously and perhaps disgracefully, there is no provenance given for this furniture, which is telling for the obvious reasons. The sale label for the suite is merely "A SOFA AND PAIR OF ARMCHAIRS, THE DESIGN FROM THE MERCHANTS BANK OF WINONA, MINNESOTA." Where has this furniture been? How did it get there? Who is responsible for the grisly defacement of the current leather covering?

Just call me Mark Quixote, I guess. While I attribute the intellectual slag of the above underlined pronouncement to one blinkered individual, I have only praise for Sotheby's in general. I relish each new catalog I receive, and access to their web site is a research paradise of educational images. If you haven't signed up for a free account to get their emailings, you should give yourself a gift. The "American Renaissance" is a periodic series of auctions where objects from Frank Lloyd Wright, the Griffins, Maher, and P&E appear with some regularity; some of these have already been noted here on Organica. The Winona furniture is being offered in "Fine 20th Century Design & An Important Private Collection of Art Deco Figures" [Sale L07670] on May 2, 2007, as Lot 113, in London. Another reason to look forward to coming into money, as if I needed any more: I could rescue objects like this and send up a nice special order to Garrett Leather.

Coming up. Due to the impetus of an archaeological dig through a couple of my many storage boxes occasioned by the recent visit of Prairie School Traveler John Panning, I am about halfway through an inventory of my research materials. The Parker Berry letters turned up as part of this process, wherein I am putting everything in protector sleeves and thence into three ring binders (which the original P&E archivist John Jager once remarked are "a mighty lever in the work of the historian"). Photocopies and not a few originals received as gifts from the Purcell family and his surviving friends over the past twenty years have proven to contain far more than I ever realized. A few years ago, as well, Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer kindly sent me copies of a two inch thick pile of P&E office correspondence and related documents not present in the Purcell Papers, drawn from years of research by Bill Marlin before his death and including more than a few letters by George Elmslie and a much suffering Alphonso Ianelli about the Woodbury County Court House. There seems to be an increasing momentum here, and for the foreseeable future such is likely to form the content of the Grind. That, and I am finally getting through other documents long stalled out in the typing queue. Looks like an update about every two weeks is a good schedule. See you on May Day.