Reincarnation.
The winter of 2007-2008 proved dark, even here in southern California. For
many of these recent challenging years, working on Organica was an antidote
to the vermin ridden shadows, a bridge across
the abyss that opens with age and weariness. Not so much this past season.
I
succumbed to a form of life exhaustion, pure and simple. Like many, I got
the usual cycle of colds, and this go round that wretched flu everyone
seemed to get in my case turned into walking pneumonia. Naturally, at no
time did the rent clock stop ticking, and mere survival was the best I could
manage. Even producing such a simple thing as a short biography of
Henry Babson proved almost insurmountable. Over six months have passed since
my attention turned to this web site, even though the gifts of the many fine
men and women who wish this venture well continued to accumulate in the mail
reader. Thanks to the usual suspects who check in on me when a Grind fails
to appear, and sorry for the lengthy delay in an update. When I win the
lottery....
Wall sconce
Henry B. Babson residence
Louis Sullivan and George Grant Elmslie, architects
Riverside, Illinois 1909 [demolished]
Collection: Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Light on the Subject.
Speaking of the Babson biography, while it took forever to get through the
work, the outcome has proven well-liked by the editor. The version that will
be shown here next update indulges the maximum number of illustrations and is linked to the
various Purcell manuscripts that form the core of the available information.
For a long time I have wanted to write something here that at least was of
similar quality to the photographs being contributed by Tom Shearer. Maybe
in this little piece I came a little closer. While
my poor health these last months impacted the production of this contribution to the forthcoming
Babson biography, the delays were fruitful. Details not at hand during
the first pass arrived, and the editor kindly allowed me time to integrate
fresh details into the essay. I did not know, for example, why the Riverside
house was remodeled out of existence, as it were, over such a short period
of time. Turns out that Babson became president of the Tobey Furniture
Company, a firm that produced upscale "traditional" furnishings. By the
early 1920s, the above light fixtures are reported to have been stripped from the walls of
the house. Babson had employees of Tobey Furniture in to redo his house with
the company goods (if that is the right word in this context). The interior
desecrators --er, designers got right to work. I always presumed that such
beautiful things as these bronze lights would have hung in place until the
very bitter end, but indeed by the available reports it seems that they were amongst the first fixtures to go.
Source: Urban Remains web site See below for unapologetic
praise for Urban Remains.
Elmslie liked the lamps enough to
contribute what was probably a sample piece to the
decoration of the Purcell, Feick, & Elmslie office in Minneapolis.
These magnificent fixtures were likely
cast by Winslow Brothers, who did most of the cast iron designed by
Elmslie for Sullivan buildings like the supreme example of the Schlesinger & Mayer Dry
Goods Store. Winslow Brothers did sometimes mark their work, and recently a
rare, indeed perhaps unique plaque was salvaged in Chicago underneath a
stair tread.
A client of
both Sullivan and P&E, which is really to say George Grant Elmslie,
Henry Babson was adept at surfing the time in which he lived. Like
Purcell's father, Babson was born in Nebraska. He moved to Chicago at
the behest of a mentor to become a cashier in a phonograph arcade at the
World's Columbian Exposition.
Whenever you handle original documents, and certainly when processing
something as large as an archival collection such as the Purcell Papers,
there will always be something, however small, that catches your special
attention for no particular reason. In my case, it was a ticket that
Purcell had kept for Chicago Day, October 9, 1893, for the World's
Columbian Exposition.
I've seen several of these; in fact, a
number of them have turned up on eBay, usually part of a group. The
originals are a pastel green in color. There is one, a ghostly white, in
a memorabilia case at the Glensheen mansion in Duluth, so the University
of Minnesota holds at least two. So, it was with some glee that I
stumbled upon the matching poster.
As it happens that came about during my
Henry Babson research. Babson went to Chicago from Nebraska to work at
the Fair. From there his fortunes continued only to rise in the world.
Quite likely it was his exposure to the international marketplace
atmosphere at the Chicago Fair that encouraged him to travel abroad in
Asia selling phonograph machines, turning a very tidy profit that served
to underpin his later ventures -- and eventually the creation of the
Riverside house and the Edison Shop.
Considering the importance this event
assumed in retrospect as a key moment in American life, the hyperbole
seen in the poster text doesn't seem as grandiose as might have been the
case.
Skylight Madison State Bank Purcell and Elmslie Madison, Minnesota 1912 [demolished] Photograph by Tom Shearer, 2008
Made by Edward
L. Sharretts in his Mosaic Arts Studio (a garage in the back of his
house in suburban Minneapolis,) these panels, including the one below
left, are in my estimation among the very best rendered for a P&E
building in terms of glass quality.
Edison Shop Purcell and Elmslie Chicago, Illinois 1912 [demolished]
The first audio file on Organica
debuts:
If you had perchance gone
through the doors of the Edison Shop to explore the possibilities of
owning one of these technological marvels, one of the first things that would
have been played for you can be heard here:
"I Am The Edison Phonograph"
Demonstration recording, 1906
Source: The Internet Archive
While researching the Babson chapter, a
number of things new to me came through various helping hands. One
package included a PDF of the HABS report for the Edison Shop containing
the most astounding statement imaginable (at least to someone like me,
who honors this superb achievement in commercial design):
The impression was always with me,
given the landmark status accorded this building by the City of Chicago,
that the demolition was opportunist due to a brief lapse in the statute
covering such properties. True enough it was, but not spontaneously. This statement from the HABS report (which can
be read in full either on the Library of Congress web site or by
downloading the PDF here) shows clearly this major piece of cultural
vandalism was premeditated far enough in advance to give at least four
years notice to a government program that duly incorporated the
information for the historical record.
The report also discloses the building had
suffered especially from remodeling, starting in the 1930s, and that
little of the original entry created by P&E survived. The former second
floor listening area was a private dining room. There is in the Purcell
collection a slide taken just prior to the demolition that shows, I
vaguely recall, the state of the building entrance. A second slide,
added after Purcell's death, shows the empty parking lot that remained
afterwards. There is also the curious note that the name of Babson
Brothers doesn't appear on any of the land ownership records.
An early advertisement for
the Babson Company in Chicago. Note that it is Fred K. Babson whose name
appears as Vice President, not his brother Henry. Fred Babson is more
memorable for having P&E build a farmhouse for him,
one that was just the plans for the
Charles T. Backus residence
(Minneapolis, Minnesota 1915) the slightest sleight of hand. And of
course, it was Fred
Babson who stopped the one chance P&E had of getting a building
built in New York, on Fifth Avenue no less.
Redemption.
In a world long ago and far away from this present moment, there were promised some essays by Purcell on Elmslie.
This slowed in part because I started adding images, something that
proved even more time consuming than typing the manuscript pages. I
think hereafter that I will skip the illustrations. The first of these
essays bears some interesting comments about the mixing of Sullivan,
Wright, and Elmslie in the Auditorium tower; remember these were written
as review to comments made by David Gebhard in his doctoral thesis.
These essays have probably been read by
a few dozen people over the years. Myself, I first encountered them
while organizing Purcell's writings during the 1980s. Clearly, like so
much else, I was not yet conscious enough to take in everything. On this
recent reencounter, I have been delighted with the richness of
observation beheld within this particular set of manuscripts. Although
sometimes mangled between first and third person, since Purcell was
trying to nursemaid along the book intended to come beyond Gebhard's
doctoral thesis, the pages contain countless informing moments about
both people and events not to be found elsewhere.
While over the past several decades a
few people have insisted on adding a shaking of salt to Purcell's
reportage (usually, they said, because he was writing long after the
fact), I have found that even his off-the-cuff recollections are
frequently pretty accurate. Like many writers, he learned to use what
was currently around him as a stirrup. True, his irrepressible urge for
commenting on foibles in contemporary design inspired by the content of
professional journals (Architectural Forum was a favorite) can
detract from the sense of purely historical memoranda. Yet he is often
only trying to find a way to place the value of earlier events in the
context of the moment when he was writing. That's a natural, if
sometimes smug effort to show both continuity and relevance, as well as
offer a way for the reader to get a foothold in what he means to
explain.
In particular, these Purcell essays are
a mix of personal recollections, critique of other reports, and his own
analysis of design by both Sullivan and Elmslie. He also recounts his
efforts to find the son of William D. Gates, the owner of the American
Terra-Cotta Company that made all of the P&E ornament in that medium.
And, in the curious way of things, Neil Gates turned up right next door,
so to speak, living in Pasadena.
Handy Dandy. That brings us to the
Urban Remains: Antique American
Architectural Artifacts web site, which I heartily recommend to your
browsing. And, for those with the means, acquisition. While the
continued destruction of buildings remains ever deplorable, in many
cases it is also inevitable -- some of them, anyway, are just falling
apart. Urban Remains, like counterparts found in
many cities nowadays, goes in before the wrecking ball arrives to salvage
the portable finishes. They have performed a remarkable service to
scholarship, as well, by mounting images of objects with clear
identifications and insightful comments. Pages often remain up after
objects are sold, too, which is extremely helpful to those who can only
aspire to study, rather than own, these fragments -- and who in all
likelihood would never otherwise ever see them.
Stove Plate
Transfer decorative
design by Louis H. Sullivan
1920s Source: Urban Remains web site
Among the most important things to be
discovered at Urban Remains is a photograph of one of the rarest and
least known artifacts attributable to Louis Sullivan. Purcell himself
mistook this design on an American Stove Board Company plate as one done
by Elmslie for a P&E building and re-used (read: copied). As he writes a
Parabiographies entry:
"I also walked into a desert cabin in Palm Springs in 1930, and there,
under the sheet iron stove, was a square of galvanized iron stenciled
with a pattern taken from the terra cotta of one of our banks
[Annotation by WGP on draft: I have since learned that this was
actually an L.H.S. design, the last he ever made. The Stove Co. paid
him $10 for it!"
To me, this is a
moving discovery. In all honesty, I never expected to see one, given the
nature of their use and the long since obsolescent form of technology
for which use it was made. Yet here it is, all thirty square inches of
it. Imagine that at the same time he was working on this, Sullivan was
probably also in the throes of completing the illustration plates of his
A System of Architectural Ornament. A final flicker of the flame
applied to practical use as a fireback. You have to admire the poetry of
the thing.
Front window panel Madison State Bank Purcell and Elmslie Madison, Minnesota 1912 [demolished] Photograph by Tom Shearer, 2008
Pot Luck.
Finally, as happens, some cool
things are about to be auctioned at
Sotheby's. If you are
interested in body parts, a free subscription to their web site generates
valuable regular emails in the areas of interest you specify, and also
allows you to search a large database of previously sold objects. While
their periodic "American Renaissance" sales are the main attraction for
Prairie School art works and architectural fragments, miscellaneous lots do
turn up in American design sales. For the "Important 20th Century Design" to
be held in New York on June 14, 2008, an Adler & Sullivan window from the
Auditorium Building is on the block, as well as an important Frank Lloyd
Wright desk from the A. W. Gridley House and one of those overly tall copper
weed vases. Of great interest to P&E Caravan members, however, is the
exquisite charger by Douglas Donaldson, with an estimate of $10,000 to
$15,000.
Advertisement, showing the plate (right)
Circa 1916
Source: Sotheby's
Charger
Douglas Donaldson
Source: Sotheby's
The short but succinct sale text is very
well written, and illuminates for me some connections that earlier had not
been clear. Donaldson was a life long friend of Purcell's. Early on, even
while working with the Handicraft Guild in Minneapolis, Donaldson was
connected with the California art scene. The gift of this charger by
Donaldson to photographer Edward Weston, which descended down in the family,
shows that the move by Donaldson from Minneapolis to Hollywood, where
Purcell visited periodically, was not a shot in the dark. The fact that
Brett Weston later took some portraits of Purcell also comes to mind.
Donaldson was a frequent visitor to the Westwinds estate where Purcell
retired after 1936., often bringing movies from the Hollywood studios where
he worked as a set designer and color consultant. Ervin Jourdan, a
photographer whom Purcell helped financially and whose connection with WGP
originated in the Portland era, told me that he had arranged for Brett
Weston to meet with Purcell. Since my last memory of Jourdan is his sly
theft from my hands of a rare pamphlet while visiting Westwinds in the early
1980s, I may be more inclined to believe that Donaldson, who remained a
friend of the Weston family, might have brought about the portrait session.
Still, without intending offense to Jourdan's beautiful daughter Cecily,
named after Purcell's second wife, who knows? Anyway, the Sotheby's on-line
catalog provides a superb sparkle on this exquisite piece. Be interesting to
see what it fetches.
Coming up.
Beyond the completion of the remaining Elmslie essay, two things are
pressing forward in the works. The first is a tribute to the contributions
of Tom Shearer to these pages, all given happily by him with true heart and
personal out of pocket. In working on a dummy for the Prairie Treasure
book, I realized that the electronic equivalent could be made here easily
enough; that is coming once I have decided what technology to use,
Javascript or Flash. And secondly, less happily, I report and review a letter from Elmslie to a friend in the 1930s,
one that caused me to perceive the dark side of William Gray Purcell for the
first time and, sadly, to lose some respect for him. A hard but necessary
thing at this late date, apparently. I have always thought that one
distinction between Frank Lloyd Wright and P&E was to be found in their
personal deportment and relations with people, but alas there now emerges to
my eyes incontrovertible testimony that Purcell could be profoundly abusive
with all the self-righteousness of a zealot.
Surprise, surprise,
though why should it be? The terra-cotta always seemed monochrome in the
archival shots, and now this revelation to turn the world upside down.
Diastro, Redux.
On October 18, 1996, an early incarnation of
this site suffered a
catastrophic loss when a hard drive crash joined with a failed tape backup
to consume the hundreds of images that constituted what was then known as
Progressive Architecture On-Line (the shadow of this event can still be
found at the Wayback Machine).
Nearly eleven years later, shy only by a matter of three weeks, an external
hard drive containing the well of raw data accumulated since then dried up
with a
corrupted file allocation table on a 160 GB I/Omega external hard drive.
Fortune favors the prepared, who may in this instance be defined as those
who practice regular backup. While much of the data was, indeed, resident on
DVD copies, the summer had been long and prosperous with receipts from the
field, as it were, and the last backup was dated July 17, 2007. Need I
point out that Mercury went retrograde on October 11th? Took a month to
start up here again.
A view from the
universe where this is a temple, with God in the aspect of a Cyclops.
OM!
Relieved of scarce cash for some file recovery
software and a great deal of time tediously spent, I was able to regain about 95% of the
data not stored in the interim. This included a range of documents, mostly
research PDFs and image scans, among them a tidy number sent to me concerning the Woodbury County Court House,
the Lawrence Fournier house in Minneapolis, writings by Claude Bragdon, and other research materials, plus about 200
yet-to-be-Ground images, mostly from Tom Shearer. Being the stand up guy
that he is, which is to say a Minnesotan, Tom leapt into the maelstrom of my
distress and dispatched by earth mail another hard drive loaded with his
entire catalog of Prairie images--from which stock the Grind is again
generously illustrated. Tip o' the hat to Providence and the native charms
of Minnesota. More about Tom and a promising project arises below.
The
arrowhead slices, embraced by a grid, are always a static geometric line
pointed downward, into the fecund dynamic of phenomenological
possibility. The realm of the unchanging eternal principle is assuming
expression in the ever plastic substance of material being. The result
of this penetration is a crystallized moment in life, evoked by the sire
of movement implied in upwelling arcs. Sometimes the result is
polychromatic leaves and berries and flower pods, other times it's a
pure hemisphere of white light, as above.
Woe betides those who can't believe this
had intended metaphysical meaning. I am always stunned when people say
that I am just imagining things, as I really don't think I have that
vast of an imagination. George did.
Other Prairie architects, be they
named whatever they maybe be, I think missed expressing an important
substance when their lines remained purely angular. To my eye, anyway,
there is always something missing, an incompletion of understanding and
alignment. Always so determined to be the messenger...unable to receive.
Babson Biography. In reference to
the above image from the Edison Shop, news came of a biography being put
together for Henry Babson. Elizabeth Dawsari, a breeder of Arabian
thoroughbreds who happens also to be the librarian for the Frank Lloyd
Wright School of Architecture, contacted me about the P&E connection.
Considering the total omission of any mention of the firm's highly
significant work (2 major houses in Madison, Wisconsin, and the
extensive Juniper
Point estate buildings along with the Bradley Bungalow in Woods Hole,
Massachusetts) in the biography of Charles R. Crane a few years ago, I
was heartened that the Babson project was interested in being inclusive.
I have been asked to contribute the essay.
Turns out there is an unexpected
connection between Crane and Babson, beyond being critically important
P&E clients. Both men imported Arabian horses to
America. Babson bought his in Egypt, and the line still exists as Babson
Straight Egyptians. At one point, some of the Babson horses and the
Crane horses crossed bloodlines, and this breeding will be mentioned in
the forthcoming biography. I will use the excuse to wave the banner for
the contribution of both men as captains of democracy in their
architectural pursuits, thus correcting, if only a little, the failure
of the Crane tome.
The Fountainhead.
During his short time in the
Sullivan office, Purcell was put to drafting a landscape plan,
specifically a rose garden, for Louis Sullivan's summer cottage in Ocean
Springs, Mississippi. As most regular readers already know, that
structure was completely destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, but a nearby
house that Sullivan designed (collaboratively with Frank Lloyd Wright)
for James Charnley and a third cottage also part of this historic
cluster were severely damaged. Tony Walker, an Apprentice during
my tenure at Taliesin, sends along an interesting link that shows the
stymied progress of possible restoration. The
article on Bloomberg.com notes
that the Charnely Cottage in Ocean Springs was completed before the more
famous house for this client in Chicago (now owned by the Society of
Architectural Historians), and therefore may be of critical pedigree in
the claim to the title "first modern house in America."
A Spout.
A leader to this Sullivan article appears on the much-to-be-lauded
Prairie Mod site,
which is what I would be doing if I had the opportunity. An emporium for
ideas, information,
podcasts, and derivative products (both reproduction and
contemporary), Prairie Mod subtitles itself "The Art of Living in the
Modern World." Developed and maintained by the "PrairieMod Squad...a
collective of twenty and thirty-something designers/entrepreneurs based
in and around Chicago, Illinois," the site offers free goodies,
including a Prairie font, along with a steadily accumulating archive of
blog entries and articles. Ah, still to be young, filled with ambition
and energy in the wonder of it all. Design has pretty much worn off of
me, and I am left with just history.
No, I don't normally plug
non-historical sites, but this
one is really a living, breathing example of Progressive intelligence
at work. They do have a quality perspective that deserves furthering,
even if I don't always embrace their particular verge in Modern design.
My bad.
There is in this
image everything good you need to know, on all levels, everything
rendered perfectly in the metaphor of geometric ecstasy--even evil is
represented by the unnatural intrusion of the florescent light boxes.
Prairie Treasure.
A number of
constraints have always been placed on Organica, and on the Purcell &
Elmslie pages in particular. Something else wants doing.
First, the site was originally built and
served as part of the HyperFind information management system prototyped
for the University of Minnesota Libraries Archives and Special
Collections during the 1990s. The database containing both many P&E
images and texts, as well as about 1,000 images and numerous research
articles found at the sadly flagging Prairie School Exchange, also holds
a wide array of finding aids and facsimile documents from the
Social Welfare History Archives,
Children's Literature Research Collections,
and, added later when I tried to extend Apprentice access at Taliesin
West, the inventory and many digital images of the Frank Lloyd Wright
Archives (these obviously cannot be opened to public access here, even
though they still reside in the system). The arrangement has always been
oriented primarily toward the non-commercial goal of facilitating
research, a direction that lent itself to simplistic graphics design
that was also spawned out of the code generating the web page returns
out of the database. This now primitive effect is especially visible in
the 1994 vintage
The Prairie
School On-Line.
Second, there is no
place in such an architecture for interpretation and commentary beyond a
minimal amount of wink and nod. While the Grind is a popular blog, it
was not intended to be a vehicle for my own formal musings, such as
there ever may be more here beyond the
Minnesota 1900 essay; indeed, the P&E pages were always meant as
votive offerings on my part, not droppings from walking the dog. The
Grind has sort of been a catch basin, rather than a vessel for what I might call
real writing. The opportunity for the lyricism in my heart is limited
here.
Third, there is a wide array of events,
products, books, and related materials that are worthy of being brought
up (like Prairie Mod does), but which do not fit the reference idiom
driving Organica. Plus, with the wolves pacing outside the door of this
hard-to-pay for LA apartment, I'd like to get some kind of revenue
stream that supports the $1200 or so a year it costs my pocket to keep
serving these web pages. My bad, and never mind my many hours of labor.
For a number of years I have wanted to
write commentaries on the panoply of books, articles, and other media
that form the literature of progressive American architecture. I have
also wanted to make it possible for people to point and click in order
to acquire these books, something that Amazon makes readily satisfied.
These days many wonderful products are becoming available, too, that can
bring some support to this endeavor through various affiliate programs.
None of that is appropriate to Organica. Then along came Tom Shearer
with all his tremendous gift for seizing the soul of not only P&E
buildings but
also the passion still burning in those of Sullivan, poor old vacillating George Washington
Maher, and all the rest.
I have
felt drawn strongly to collaborate with him to produce a book that
supports the power of his photographs to convey the idea behind the
objects. Like me, Tom believes in the democracy of information that is
at the heart of the Web. His idea to use a published book as,
essentially, a portal to link with a larger presentation in a web site
matched my own instinct and general intentions. So we are in the process
of creating a separate domain where these functions can be grown in
proper manner. The proposed book, together with other iterations of his
photography in the form of limited edition prints, posters, cards, and
so forth, in conjunction with my writings and reviews, are to be
served at
Prairie Treasure. While only a raw construction page is up at the
moment, we are hopeful of regular if perchance modest continuing advance
in the near future. Wish us luck, and keep us in your bookmarks.
Sunday School room
Westminster Presbyterian Church,
alterations Purcell, Feick, and Elmslie
Minneapolis, Minnesota 1910
Source: Images, University of Minnesota Libraries
Bits and Pieces.
John Panning,
proprietor of the extremely valuable resource of
The Prairie School Traveler, builds
and repairs organs for a vocation. This gets him into churches a lot,
imagine that, and
a recent travel to Minneapolis saw him standing in the remains of the
Sunday School room designed by P&E
for Westminster Presbyterian Church. The
notion of remains is very apt. There are
missing doors and bookcases, and nothing at all survives of the original
finish save some wood, a little glass, and the brick and stone of the fireplace. Stencils have been
renewed, but I wonder at the drab palette, though maybe they did
reference the original stencil boards and I just have a jaundiced eye.
There is the strangest lattice containing a clock mounted above the
mantel, something that bemused me no end and which John guesses must be
some reference to the great sawed wood grille in the breezeway of the E.
S. Hoyt house in Red Wing. He has shared
photographs on his site. No luck yet on finding any of those little
chairs stashed away anywhere in the attic. Keep looking!
More shards are being
generated in Chicago, this time from the Plymouth
Building designed by architect Simeon B. Eisendrath, who had been in
the Adler & Sullivan office. The balustrade parts being auctioned last
month bear a resemblance to the Guaranty Building, said the seller, but
were notable for the addition of a grid (which is also seen in the
Schlesinger & Maher panels). Made by Winslow Brothers, the black
paint was added in the 1940s. Lurking beneath is the original copper
plating. The link won't last forever, but at this
writing you can still view the original
eBay description. If you've got $1600, I bet one can be scared up
for your holiday gift giving (or receiving).
Another bit
directly involving Purcell turned up for sale on the Internet recently. A bronze
door plate from the Union Trust Building in St. Louis designed by
Sullivan was offered for $800. Since the building was constructed in 1893,
there was a shade of mystery about why a drawing by Purcell for this very
door plate, executed during his time at the Sullivan office in 1903, remains in the Purcell Papers. Some solution
is suggested by a nice little article,
tutored by Tim Samuelson concerning another doorknob in the Auditorium
Building, with note of Purcell chiming in to Richard Nickel.
I think it very probable that Purcell sketched the Union Trust door
plate from a sample lurking in the Auditorium Tower like the one for the
Saint Nicholas Hotel as an exercise, since there was otherwise little
billable work to do. That is, of course, when George and William weren't
keeping their hands from the devil's work with entries into various
competitions by Purcell.
Staircase
Plymouth Building Source: (left and above): eBay listing
Doorknob
Union Trust Building
Louis Sullivan, architect
St. Louis, Missouri 1893
Source: Antique Door Knobs
Passageways Resumed.
One effect of
living on the edge of the abyss is that long term intentions are often
submerged by the exigencies of immediate survival. Like
the recently rediscovered city at the
bottom of the Bay of Cambay (and carbon dated to 8500 BC, so go
figure), I was surfing through the P&E pages and found an array of tasks
left incomplete from antediluvian times BCE (Before Current Employment).
The early essays written by Purcell as an account of his childhood,
education, and apprenticeship years are now up in the
"Review of
Gebhard Thesis" (1950s) manuscript. Those heretofore stalled out
accounts
include his year long tour of Europe and Asia Minor
with George Feick in 1906 (William Gray
Purcell - Part VI) and out-of-chronological-sequence notes
concerning a 1902 stint in the Oak Park offices of Ezra Roberts, which
Purcell takes as an opportunity to remember the talents of Roy
Hotchkiss, chief designer in the Roberts office (William
Gray Purcell - Part VII). In this latter section I have also started
to revise the formatting to include a sidebar for footnotes, related
links, and illustrations; and the line widths now match those of the
original manuscript.
Title lobby card
4D Man (1959) Universal Pictures
Who knew it
was even possible there was life after Bragdon?
New Resources.
If
wishes were horses, Babson Straight Egyptians or not, everyone would
eventually want to ride. A great equestrian advance for researchers is taking place
through the many digital initiatives emerging on the Web to provide
access to rare periodicals and scarce journals of great value in deeper study
of the Progressive period. While the world might seem divided and thus
conquered between
the commercially supported ventures of Google and Microsoft, who pay for
digitization of library collections in exchange for certain restrictive rights, there was
recently been announced the participation by eighty major libraries in
the
Open Content Alliance
hosted at
Archive.org for "building a digital
archive of global content for universal access." A reading of
the New York Times piece describing the
philosophy and technology of this collaboration is well worth your
while and gives hope that all is not lost for democratic thinking.
Among the
periodicals now available as (hefty, 100-200 MB) PDF downloads through Archive.org are
complete or near complete runs of The Architectural Record,
American Architect, and House and Garden during the late 19th
and early 20th century. Project Gutenberg, which early on nobly provided
access to text files of important monographs, is now searchable through
the Archive.org portal, but this valuable effort was always limited by
the lack of included illustrations. Book scans added in the new paradigm
of PDFs maintain the relationship between text and graphics that is so
essential to many architectural publications, now with color, be they monthly or
monograph. Search is easy, and I'm sure you'll find many worthy of the
bandwidth to acquire, but here's a few of my own favorites with the
two original 4D Men upfront:
Six Lectures on Architecture
([c1917]), filed under the name of Ralph Adams Cram for the
iteration of Gothic art, but containing
Organic
Architecture and The Language of Form, by Claude Bragdon (PDF, 27 MB).
Louis Sullivan: Prophet Of Modern
Architecture (1935), by Hugh Morrison, whose volume
inscribed with a dedication of the work George Elmslie remains in
the Purcell Papers (PDF, 49 MB).
And it was really nice to see that
the very, very rare biography Life of
Abraham Lincoln. For the young man and the Sabbath School
written and published by William Cunningham Gray in 1867 through his
Elm Street Publishing Company is also available. This book by his
grandfather was undoubtedly among the very first Purcell read about
this martyred President, whose life was still conversation around the
Oak Park dining table as Purcell was growing up (PDF 12 MB). I'm going
to try and get Dr. Gray's quintessential Musings by Camp-Fire and Wayside
(1901) added directly.
Among other search terms on
Archive.org that return
a Lydian wealth of period information related to the Progressive era
are "Columbian Exposition," and "American architecture"
(which will kickstart you toward to all those wonderful magazines
abovementioned).
With that, this Grinds to a halt for
the time at hand.
Coming up.
Five essays by Purcell about George Elmslie, full of interesting
observations concerning how George worked and his relationship with
Sullivan, plus all of Elmslie's publications (or at least those I've ever
seen), all embraced with more lensing effects from Tom Shearer. And maybe,
just another plug for
Prairie Treasure.
Navigation ::
Home
research courtesy mark hammons