Purcell and Elmslie, Architects Firm active: 1907-1921 Minneapolis, Minnesota :: Chicago, Illinois Philadelphia, Pennsylvania :: Portland, Oregon

[Note: The format presented here replicates (more or less, given the different medium) a typographical layout created by Purcell in a draft date October, 1952.  The original manuscript was composed between 1938 and 1940.  The version here is taken from the 1952 draft.  Some minor editing for clarity in reference to other P&E work has been added.]

Own home Sold in 1917 for $17,500   Early window-wall 9'' x 28'            "Relation between building and site is half of Architecture,” say the Chinese Where new ideas germinate See our plans for Babson Estate (1915) and Bennett gardens

"The Little Joker was a term of affection which George Elmslie bestowed on this, the second of six homes I have built for myself..." (Lake of the Isles [Catherine Gray house], Lake Place; Moylan, Rose Valley, Pennsylvania; Portland, Oregon; Banning California; and Pasadena [remodeling]). For this project Mr. Elmslie developed a wholly fresh and original idea for a small dwelling. It did not stem from any of the sequences which we had been cultivating, nor is there any building in the post-Columbian Exposition world to which its plan or forms refer. It was a brilliantly successful project in every way and stands today perhaps the most complete dwelling we ever did together.  For one thing, there was enough money spent on it (about $14,000 at the pre-war $ value) to do it right, and these new world machine age forms needed beautiful materials, perfect workmanship, and very complete details to tell the story with satisfaction. Indeed, there has always been a yearning within me to design a full equipment of furniture for this house. Some day I have thought I might even buy it back and do this very thing, one of those dreams, but at that, more reasonable  than restoring an old Colonial, for this house is in step with the best of today, indeed watching the non-functionalism streamlinism [sic] of 1940 now on the zoom, it is not unlikely that "The Little Joker" will come into its best days another quarter century hence. The house was handicapped by a very narrow lot. We discounted this by locating it on the rear of the property so that its various significant front lines, of pool, sunken walks, and great decorative front window were from fifteen to twenty-five feet back of the two adjoining houses. The rear overlooked Lake of the Isles with a view between old houses in broad lawns facing the Park Boulevard, so that the prospect from the rooms, north, south, and west, was unimpaired. This question of correctly locating buildings on conventional city property had received practically no attention from anyone.  Householders, like automobile drivers who will not allow anyone to pass them, were so eager to get out in front of their adjoining neighbors that they never realized how they were really getting in the way of their own best interests. A few years before, our warm friend Walter Burley Griffin had produced a plat plan for a community of low cost houses on narrow lots, in which he paired the houses in groups, with the service sides close to that lot line which was common to each pair.  The alternate group of pairs was pushed forward on each two lots and well back on the next two lots, so that instead of 11 feet maximum space between houses and each one looking into his neighbor's windows, he secured 105 feet between houses, with living room windows looking into adjoining gardens, -- one pair looked over the front gardens, the next over the rear.  We were eager to put this idea to work, and made it part of the studies for a number of projects, but this house of my own was the first one to materialize.  In 1923, in Portland, this principle was applied with gratifying success in locating the Campbell and Bergeron houses. The current interest in town planning leads the younger generation to believe that they are the first to have given this science serious consideration, in this country, at least.  They know about Port Sunlight and other planned cities of the 1900s, but the serious student should know the work of Walter Burley Griffin because it was his practical experience in city planning which provided him with fully integrated ideas for his brilliant solution of the Canberra, Australia, Capital competition, thus enabling him to win First Prize in this international architectural competition in 1912.  Winning a competition is, of course, dependent upon the intelligence of the jury, or lack of it, and, therefore chance is likely to be a large factor in any decision.  Regardless of how the element of chance may have affected the remainder of the awards, Griffin's winning design demonstrates, with competence and justified self-assurance, a new world of planning which not one of the other 130 architects had envisioned, and which was not generally explored for another quarter of a century. Along about 1910, Griffin got in touch with the owner of a subdivision which had just been laid out by civil engineers on the northwest side of Chicago, now part of Trier.  It was the conventional grid, laid out on a rolling terrain, which resulted in many practically unusable lots.  Griffin told the property owner that he could replan the same area with more lots, none of them of smaller area.  Further, he could reduce the sidewalk, curb, sewer, paving, light, water, services and cost by 20%, and could eliminate practically all of the unsalable [sic] lots amounting to some eight or nine percent of the whole.  He assured the owner that the increased sales of lots would cover all the loss occasioned by replatting and the necessary repurchase of some few lots which had already been sold... [more to come]