Trying to Pinpoint Pinpoint: The Value of Diverse Significance
You probably have not been there, and if you have you would probably pass through it thinking it was no different than any other little old settlement anywhere. But Pinpoint, Georgia, just off the Diamond Causeway overlooking Shipyard Creek is a special place. Or at least that is the triumphant designation as of mid-November when the community received a historical marker from the Georgia Historical Society, a new multi-million dollar Pinpoint Heritage Museum, and a 30-minute documentary video.
Pinpoint Historical Marker Unveiling (courtesy Lominack Kolman Smith, Architects)
Pinpoint Heritage Museum
Nobody saw this coming. As a member of the Chatham County Historic Preservation Commission that designated the small coastal community of Pinpoint as the first historic district in unincorporated Chatham County, I definitely thought the community deserved local recognition, but was almost surprised when it actually went through. As an architectural historian, I recorded, and included the Varn Oyster Factory in my guide, Savannah and the Lowcountry (1997), and many tours, but I always sensed it was just unfortunately sinking in the mud like so many others like it.
Why is this place important? There is certainly no refined or dignified “disegno” there that’s for sure. Traditional aesthetic judgment would entirely dismiss it. It would be easy to point to native son Clarence Thomas, now a chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, but that would only be part of the answer. It’s certainly valuable property looking over open marsh to the same views that the Landings enjoy, but real estate interests would only celebrate this community as a tear-down.
Varn Oyster Factory Mural
What Pinpoint and the Pinpoint Heritage Museum do offer is a classic opportunity for understanding architecture as existing in multiple spheres of significance. While fancy drawing leaves this place cold (and indeed ignores most of the built environment), it is vital nevertheless. A famous individual may have been born here, but no single person could give this place its vitality. There is a larger story of many people, a community, activities and enterprises. Or put another way, Pinpoint’s significance comes from its being part of many stories relating to many people over long periods of time.
*** Story 1 ***
It really is an interesting Lowcountry coastal community, but perhaps not in a picture-book manner. Thought of by most as a residential village today, it has actually always been part of a commercial economy. A. S. Varn Sr. founded the A.S. Varn & Son Oyster Seafood Factory in 1926 as part of the rise of the commercial trade in canned oysters, aided by gasoline powered engines. Ironically, the ease of using gas engines helped centralize much oyster processing in bigger places like Thunderbolt rather than far flung settings, but in this case it helped an independent producer get a foothold in the industry. Pinpoint gained a livelihood. Ironically again, the same petro-chemicals (or similar ones) that helped make Savannah the cove or canned oyster capital of the world ultimately also shut down oystering by the mid 20th century. In 1971, A. S. Varn Jr. filed a federal suit seeking to halt the use of mirex, a fire ant spray claiming that it killed oysters and blue crabs.
While seafood harvesting declined in fits and starts, suburbanization rose up with a bang. In 1967, the new Diamond Causeway led to the just built Skidaway Island Bridge transforming a remote barrier island into the Landings, an exclusive gated community courtesy of the Branniger Corporation, the real estate arm of Georgia Pacific. Similar transformations occurred across the Low Country, with Hilton Head Island’s development being the most dramatic. In 1973, A. S. Varn Jr. filed a suit in superior court seeking $50,000 in damages to his business caused by silt buildup caused by the Skidaway Island Bridge. Desegregation also played a part as it tended to spark the growth of exclusive institutions as well as neighborhoods among affluent whites, while it undercut majority black neighborhoods and businesses further fracturing Pinpoint’s traditional community strengths. The Varn Oyster Factory closed officially in 1985. Pinpoint was well on its way to being another Hilton Head.
*** Story 2 ***
Out of the hard scrabble of the oyster days of Pinpoint rose a shining pearl. The appointment of Pinpoint native Clarence Thomas to the United States Supreme Court in 1991 shed light on the small and eroding community. Ironically, Thomas, born in 1948, actually only lived there until school age when his mother moved him to Florance Street on the western edge of Savannah, an area he described as hating—“there were no cousins there.” For years you could enter Pinpoint and pass a small sign indicating that it was home to a Supreme Court justice, and then drive through wondering what in this world of squat bungalows and single-wides related to him. Pinpoint was the world he narrowly escaped.
Clarence Thomas
Also ironically, it is not just Thomas’s accomplishments but also his notoriety that have risen to tell this story. Hurt by the stigma of being seen as the product of affirmative action, and crucified in his Supreme Court confirmation hearings, he has distinguished himself as taking the most extreme originalist perspective on case after case before the Court. Such advocacy has drawn critics and supporters. The billionaire Harlan Crow, a member of a Texas family that was once the largest landlord in the nation, actually built the Pinpoint Heritage Museum. Crow is a particularly active supporter of Thomas and conservative causes in general and previously donated generous sums of money for the Clarence Thomas Room at the historically segregated Henry Street Carnegie Library, where a young Clarence Thomas had spent many hours studying, as well as smaller gifts for Thomas such as Frederick Douglass’s bible. Thomas’s personal role in fostering the charitable donations, and his clear participation in accepting the very public honors are both aspects that are not traditionally allowed for Supreme Court justices. Thomas’s wife is most in the news lately as she leads organizations that are actively promoting causes argued at the Supreme Court. She was present at the entire sequence of Pinpoint celebration events at her husband’s or her step-mother’s side, and the couple’s physical and ideological closeness makes some question his ability to be judicially impartial.
*** Story 3 ***
But Pinpoint’s celebration is much bigger than Clarence Thomas, even if his notoriety helped put it on the map. Due to increasing acceptance of African-American history, Pinpoint is now officially accepted as part of Georgia’s Heritage and is even starting to be appreciated as part of Atlantic and even World History. Founded by African slaves who moved from Ossabaw Island after the end of the Civil War, Pinpoint is now a centerpiece of the National Park Service’s new Gullah-Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, a just recently appreciated landscape of retained Africanisms running from Georgetown, North Carolina to northern Florida. In this community, Clarence Thomas was “Boy,” just one of what seem like a hundred cousins making their own games, eating their own foods, singing in their own church, and speaking in their own language. Thomas described going north to Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts and later Yale Law School as being an endeavor to “conquer the [English] language.” Dr. Emory Campbell, a Gullah from Hilton Head was another that made the trek from coastal barrier island to a pinnacle of professional achievement and has devoted his life to telling the story. White historians like Dr. Barbara Fertig have joined the long line of scholars going the other way actively uncovering Africanisms.
***
And so, Pinpoint is a special place, but what special quality is most significant? A people and a place whose history, whose very existence was for so long ignored if not actively maligned has become imperative to appreciate for a modern awareness of our—all our–places in the lowcountry. But which story is most important?
It is fair to say that traditional architectural history has not caught up with these multiple webs of significance. Too often we still search for the isolated mansion or the equally precious piece of folk tradition, or just a well maintained building with a nice neat style. How irrelevant to the history that was and is really being made! It is so refreshing that we can appreciate the greatness of Savannah not just by admiring a square in the historic district, or by looking at a particularly shiny gold dome, or a tall spire but by looking at another center out on the edge of the marsh in the shadow of the causeway but very alive in the world of history.
Varn Oyster Factory Historic Photograph and Returning Shuckers (courtesy Lominack Kolman Smith, Arch's)
What is there to learn? Clearly, there is no single, universal “art” defining a pure and perfect value, but rather there are multiple cultural values invested in any and all works of art or buildings or settlements by all the people that interact with it, including those who preserve it, and think about it, and write about it. What really is an oblong concrete building sticking out into the marsh with a row of scoops along the top of the outside wall, and a series of angled shoots along the base? Who is the artist of this creation? Arguably it is Algernon Varn, the 3rd generation of the Varn family who resisted development to keep the property intact. Equally worthy is Harlan Crowe. Thomas referred to him again and again as “just a good man” who he had tried hard to dissuade from engaging in the project. Or is it Varn Sr. or Thomas’s mother who worked in the factory picking crab? Clearly Thomas is a convenient figure-head, but is this museum his work? Ultimately, and I think very elegantly, the museum sidesteps the question and celebrates the people and culture of Pinpoint as a whole in all its diversity. But is this accurate?
Perhaps it is best to end with just one of the more dramatic intersections of history and culture that Pinpoint showcases: the formidable honorable Clarence Thomas stomping his feet and clapping loudly with his immediate and extended family to the joyful call-and-response of the Macintosh County Shouters for all the world to see. The most traditional of Gullah with sticks and bandanas and overalls face to face with one of the most powerful intellects of the law coming together to share a dream that a defunct factory can be born again as first-class heritage tourism, and that it in turn can help revive a community in peril—amazing!
Architecture for the 1%: Thoughts on Education
Let me start by saying historians should be able to study what they wish, free from coercion. That said, Fall of 2011 was been an incredible time for rethinking architecture education. This post will discuss three seemingly disparate news items.
Thing 1.
September 17, 2011 saw the beginnings of a loose movement to finally recognize decades of wage inequality. The unfocused rage of the “Occupy Wall Street” protests emerged as recently published studies verified beyond doubt that for most of the United States (and the World), there has been a frightening and rapid expansion of what economists call the Wage Gap. This is characterized by the stunning global (not just U.S.) statistic that the top 1% (actually .1%) of the population controls around 40% of wealth. Of course, as the image below reveals, this has been a 40 year trend.
Thing 2.
In October, “star” architect Frank Gehry announced that, due to a slow economy, he was having difficulty finding work in the United States. Given our housing crisis, decaying cities and all the “work” that might be done, this in itself is a stunning announcement. Although, given the price of such an architect, the announcement is none too surprising. To drum up business, the architect is traveling to the Persian Gulf and to China, in search of wealthier commissions. (One might argue that Gehry is merely fleeing the 2007 lawsuit for the many failures and poor detailing of his relatively new and failing Stata Center at M.I.T., completed in 2004 at the “low” cost of $300 million, for which his firm was paid $15 million).
Thing 3. Finally, on October 31, the United Nations estimated that the World welcomed its 7 billionth global citizen.
These three seemingly disparate news items are connected, and have some potentially dire ramifications for Architecture and Education.
What is 20th C. (Modern) Architecture?
Architecture and Architecture History educators frame a shared past. In architecture survey courses across the Western World, architecture of the modern period, late 18th C. to the Present is largely taught as an evolution of style, form and context—a history of unique one-off buildings and ideas by influential, singular individuals created within a varied sensibility for urbanity, art and politics. Any student of architecture history remembers passing a course that required memorizing the dates, names and locations of authored, avant-garde structures, carefully curated and edited over the decades.
Yet, what have we gained from this art historical frame for the history of the built environment? Has architectural history in the classroom helped to shape the architect? Or worse, for all its visual acumen, has it contributed to a professional blindness towards society, hiding rising inequality, environmental degradation, and economic fantasies? Even with a light sprinkle of the vast diversity of complex building cultures within a broader historical landscape, has architectural history and its broader educational meme been a failure?
Architecture students currently graduate from college with, on average, $140,000 dollars in debt, and they enter a job market where even Frank Gehry cannot find work.
The question we should ask, is why?
Architecture historians have invariably pursued an endless and productive stream of important research on building environments at all scales and for many peoples. Yet, for all this remarkable scholarship, the contents of survey courses and increasingly irrelevant textbooks, with rare exceptions, remain largely unchanged. I have yet to see a textbook (or many lectures) that assess the real cost of architecture within its context.
For example, at the beginning of the 20th Century, a brand new mail-order home was designed to cost the equivalent of one years wage for most Americans. During the past 40 years of wage stagnation and design elitism, the cost of a standard house grew to more than 5 times median income. That remains true as housing prices are contracting along with wages. The average cost of a fancy new avant-garde museum (the favorite subject of studio and star-chitects alike) is somewhere between $200 million and $1 billion dollars.
Which of these is vitally important characteristic of 20th C. architecture?
What about social, environmental, and social costs? Over the past few years I have asked students in modern survey and in my own studio courses if they have ever been asked to design a project with a limited or even austere budget. Almost all have answered in the negative.
Architectural historians would likely recoil from the suggestion that the way they frame history in some way shapes the selection of limitless-budget, avant-garde projects in studio. Yet, think hard about the exemplary architectures and architects we teach—in any era. How many historians know the cost of the building in the slide? Or how much the architect was paid? Or who paid for that project? Or where the resources to build that project were harvested?
I once asked a venerable and respected scholar of the Baroque period if the creative financing of costly new St. Peter’s in Rome might have contributed to the dawn of the Protestant Reformation. He replied that it was a stunning question, and the answer, if anybody bothered to research the topic, was probably yes. Given the invention of the bond market in Venice and the origins of Medici fortunes in currency arbitrage, how many Renaissance scholars have examined the social and economic costs associated with the lovely villas and edifices erected and studied in this period?
More importantly, what if an architectural history course is the only history of culture course a student, or even a future-architect, takes while in college? What have they learned about human history, building cultures, and the totality of the built environment? If you only have 20 lectures for a given time and place, how much of your time is dedicated to the work of singular individuals? How much time do you give solely to the Bauhaus or Le Corbusier or Louis Kahn? Is that biopic focus really representative of 100 years of building culture?
Demographics and the Failure of Architecture History
The population of the earth took hundreds of thousands of years to reach its first billion people, in 1800, the arbitrary beginning of the modern sequence at this school and many others.
By 1900 (the transition between the 19th C. course and the 20th C. course), the world’s population doubled to 2 billion people. England alone went from a 40% urban population to 80% urban population in that period. London grew from a city of 100,000 to 4.5 million in 100 years.
In October 2011, at the “end” of the Modern II sequence at SCAD, the world became home to 7 billion human biengs. How are the ideas of Eisenman or Venturi, or CIAM or Kevin Lynch, or New Urbanists going to help house those people or address the enormous environmental and economic crisis that is linked to providing for their shelter in rapidly growing 21st C. cities? Where was this population explosion in our history of 20th C. courses?
If architecture is a history of building cultures as conveyed through shifting meanings, power structures, and symbolisms, is it not also a history of people, shelters and cities? Is it not also a history of community-formation and destruction? What about the people who must build and occupy the built environment? If we map architectural history over the history of a rapidly growing humanity, what does it look like? What are we missing?
If the task of the historical scholar is to study the past, what is the task of the educator? Do we not have a responsibility to continually update our lectures with new research, particularly in light of where we are? I am not asking for revisionist demographic determinism. Rather we must insist on a critical reappraisal of course content and the methodological re-organization of our scholarly responsibilities.
The History of 20th Century Architecture, particularly how it is framed for students in the classroom in most universities and textbooks, must be more than a story of authorship, form and connoisseurship.
The population of the world grew from 2 billion to 7 billion from 1900 through today. The shelter requirements alone reduce past aesthetic developments, from “turning the corner” to the postmodern façade fetish, to an indulgent and elitist conceit. How does the multiplication of humanity inform our understanding of cities, urban migration, the use of materials, and the understanding of shelter within the broader cultural landscape? And who is going to build that future? Gehry aside, there is obviously plenty of “work” to do.
Architecture for the 1%
Perhaps we should rethink our original problem: Gehry’s inability to find “work.” Given the amount of work that should be done and needs to be done, his “struggle” is less about a structurally weak economy than it is a symptom of a failure of architecture education.
Defining and redefining architecture has been a vital component of architectural history for centuries. Yet, that dialogue is largely ignored in modern survey courses, beyond shifts in avant-garde and reactionary formalisms.
Increasingly, architects are involved in less and less of the world’s built environment—current estimates range from 2-5%. Thus, despite mountains of research on power, gender, poverty, and all types of building cultures, architectural historians of the 20th C. who continue to emphasize the importance of authored structures in a consequence-free, unlimited cost, historical narrative risk framing themselves ever more rapidly out of a job, following a tendency to not be able to work (and build) already at a crisis point within the architecture profession.
Architecture is history. That history has a pedagogical frame, particularly within professional architecture programs. We must begin to come to terms with how its narrow pedagogy has enabled a dangerous historical tendency towards ignoring extreme wealth disparities and the long-term consequences of avant-gardism in a resource constrained, economically challenged and demographically accelerating world.
How many small schools, or water treatment plants, or low-cost sustainable houses or “invisible architecture” could have been built for the cost of Norman Foster’s $500 million museum in Boston ? For an environmental comparison, it costs $500 million dollars (and counting) just to remove (but not process or store) contaminated soil from 20 miles of polluted river (1 of 41) on Lake Michigan due to pre-1970s industrial activities.
How many architecture students could have gone to school for free for the cost of Moshie Safdie’s $1.2 billion Walmart-heiress-financed “crystal masterpiece” in Arkansas? Would this alternative be better or worse for the future of architecture than another “glorious” museum masterpiece? What is the true cost of High Culture?
Given the patron of Safdie’s project, we should (finally) ask: where did that money really come from?
It came from exploiting a stretched and stagnating American middle class desperately trying to cling to a decaying standard of living amidst rising costs—one low-cost deal at a time.
Is limited aesthetic development without cost or consequence the only architecture that matters? To most of the Architecture and Architecture History profession, the answer seems to be a resounding, and unfortunate, yes.
Architecture in Context: What can we afford?
When U.S. Housing collapsed, it sent the global financial system and its economies into a tale spin. One year later, Dubai, the architectural playground of the world for the past decade defaulted on almost $20 billion of nearly $80 billion debt.
Dubai World, Inc., had to refinance, sending risk careening, yet gain, through the international financial system—especially the British banks that lent them money and whose balance sheets exceed the total value of the British Economy by a factor of 10.
Currently, sovereign debt burdens are crushing long-time social democracies in Europe and Japan. What is the relationship of a prolonged credit crisis to leveraged finance?
Fantastic buildings by super-star architects can only ever be built on extremely large amounts of borrowed money, leveraging financial schemes at a tremendous cost to to democracy, transparency and ultimately, humanity.
Meanwhile the demographics of basic human needs demand at the very least access to hope, food, and shelter in ever-increasing quantities within an ever-shrinking resource-constrained global environment.
In a world awash with Debt, as nations unwind a massive Credit Crisis whose origins have remained tenuously hidden for decades, is it time to think once again about the role of architecture in society?
What can we afford to build?
More importantly, what can we no longer afford to build?
The United Nations predicts that one out of three people will live on a dollar a day by 2030.
70% of them will live in Urban Conditions.
I asked my students a multiple-choice question on their final exam this past quarter that questions the elitist housing pretentions born out of 20th Century Modernisms.
Which of the following is now the DOMINANT housing typology in most of the world’s fastest growing cities?
a) Mass Housing
b) Residential Towers
c) Single Family Homes
d) Informal Settlements
The answer, both now and in the coming decades is D.
Given the contents of Modern History courses, how many of architecture scholars or students can answer that question correctly?
This is not about so-called liberals versus conservatives, radical anarchist theories versus pragmatists or utopians. This is about History.
Baron Hausmann, Daniel Burnham, City Beautiful, CIAM, Kevin Lynch, and New Urbanism—they all FAILED by focusing on the Aesthetics of the Diagram in the absence of Human Cost. They ALL prescribed elitist formalisms and costless assessments of how something appears over how it works, for the “good” of architecture and the public.
History tells us they have all failed to account for the only thing that really matters in cities, and indeed, in all forms of architecture: People.
This is the 21st C. Metropolis:
And THIS is its Architecture:
What are we teaching? What are architecture students learning from us? How can we provide good historical value for their $150,000 in student loan debt in a world where Gehry can’t get work?
More importantly, what are we teaching our students as we ask them to understand the totality of the built environment over time?
To borrow from an old Woody Guthrie song: Which side are you on?
P
lease join for this year’s first Department of Architectural History Lecture:
Thursday, January 26, 2012
5:30 pm
SCAD Museum of Art Auditorium
601 Turner Boulevard
Savannah, Georgia
Professor Sexton will be speaking on: Cracks in the Façade: Renaissance Palazzo, Renaissance Self
Americans are obsessed with houses as were men of the Italian Renaissance. The magnificence of Renaissance palazzos seems to celebrate the individual self-expression and autonomy of the great patrons who lived in them and the architects who designed them. It is somewhat disconcerting then to discover that many of these dignified facades end abruptly just after turning a corner. The stately residences frequently displayed their superficiality flagrantly, as if they were merely wearing the façade. How can this indeterminate condition be reconciled with the illustrious individualists and acclaimed “Renaissance men” for whom these palatial residences were made? In addressing this perplexing question, this talk focuses on the nature of the Renaissance individual. If the residential palazzo facade was indeed a representation of the self, then perhaps it is our understanding of the Renaissance self, rather than the palazzo, that ought to be modified to conform more closely to historical reality. Far from revisiting the autonomous Renaissance individual of Burckhardtian extraction – and yet equally far from the fragmented, self-fashioned ego of postmodernity – this exploration approaches the facade through new theories of Renaissance individualism and the tourist gaze. In so doing, it suggests that the cracks in the facade may reveal a crisis of self-representation rather than a panorama of self-assertion.
Professor Sexton teaches architectural history at the University of Arkansas. She has received numerous awards and has published articles on late medieval architecture in Italy. She is currently completing a book manuscript entitled, Loggia Culture: Spatial Practices in Medieval Italy which positions the loggia or portico in cultural history.
Department of Architectural History lectures are free and open to the public. This lecture is part of the School of Building Arts lecture series. For more information email: dgobel@scad.edu
Two alumni publish journal articles
December has brought not one, not two, but three articles published in notable architectural history journals by departmental alumni. Nathaniel Walker (M.A. 2006), currently pursuing his Ph.D. in architectural history at Brown University, published an article, “Savannah’s Lost Squares: Progress versus Beauty in the Depression-era South,” in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH), vol. 70, no. 4 (Dec. 2011): 512-31. The article is based on his M.A. Thesis project at SCAD and is the first time one of our students or alumni has had an article published in this prestigious journal. He also published “Sister Cities: Corporate Destiny in the Metropolis Utopias of King Camp Gillette, Thea Von Harbou, and Fritz Lang,” in Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 23, no. 1 (Fall 2011): 41-54 — also a first-time appearance.
Kelley Stroup (M.F.A. 2011) published an article, “‘Where the Church Is, There is the Spirit of God’: Coptic Orthodox Architecture in the Southern United States,” in ARRIS: Journal of the Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 22 (2011): 70-85. The article is based on her MFA thesis and is only the second time one of our students has had an article published in this notable journal.
textbooks
As another academic term approaches I am required to select textbooks. This is always a dilemma because there are no good textbooks for most of the classes I teach. With the rise of digital media there is a consensus that the textbook, at least in its traditional form, will soon be obsolete. However, I find that the textbook still serves an important role in the classroom. To begin with, many students want a textbook. It seems to provide a sense of security, a fixed source of incorruptible knowledge. I have even had students withdraw from a class simply because there was no textbook for the class. Secondly, it provides context. The textbook includes a wider range of monuments than those presented in lectures, and importantly, monuments that were not selected by the professor. Finally, it presents an alternate interpretation of the material. It may include elements that are not addressed well in lectures or present scholarly opinions that are not shared by the professor. A common goal of higher education is to develop analytical and interpretive skills, and this is not accomplished through a monolithic approach. As a college student, I once took a course from a professor who had authored the textbook for the class. The class was miserable.
The main problem with the textbooks I employ is the avaricious textbook publishing industry. Most of these textbooks were written years ago by truly brilliant scholars, and in their original form they are pretty darned good. Over the years revisions were made resulting in new additions, but increasingly the new addition has been employed as a tool of planned obsolescence. It is now an industry standard to introduce a new addition of a textbook every other year, regardless of whether the text needs revision. The monuments included are switched back and forth: now this monument is removed and another put in its place, then in the next edition, the old monument is put back again and so on. The same technique is employed with dating: now this date is given based on a particular theory or dating system, then the original date is re-introduced in the next edition. The text itself is constantly “updated” with insignificant revisions. This results in two problems. The first is the introduction of material that might be new and different but has not been accepted by the mainstream academic community. Such material is often superfluous to the fundamental nature of the textbook and is better suited to an upper level seminar class. The other problem with such constant revision for the sake of revision is that the original, brilliantly composed text becomes virtually unreadable, especially for the non-specialist – the student for whom the textbook was created. The reason for this nonsense is greed: the new edition makes the old edition obsolete, forcing the student to purchase a new and outrageously expensive textbook, all the more expensive because it will have little resale value when the class is over and the next edition comes out. Eventually I will probably abandon the textbook but for now my policy has been to ignore the new edition. I specify that the student can use any edition of the textbook they can find, with the understanding that it may not exactly correlate with the material presented in class.
CFP: Symposium on Spanish Architecture
Spanish Architecture: History, Criticism, Practice, and Propaganda (1950-1990)
Call for Papers: New York University-King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center is organizing a symposium on Spanish Architecture, April 12-13, 2011. Proposals are due Dec. 16, 2011. KJCI_Call for Papers_111511
Rethinking the boundaries of architecture
Long before I came to study architecture and history, I had the chance to visit the historic port city of Trincomalee, a center of Tamil culture in northern Sri Lanka, where I came upon one of the most memorable buildings I have encountered. The building was not the very ancient Koneswaram temple which was destroyed by the Portuguese and recently rebuilt, nor was it the 17th century Dutch trade fort, the largest in south Asia. It was a small house on the outskirts of town, into which I was invited to share a cup of tamarind tea and a few moments of conversation.
The house was a comfortable single room structure, built entirely out of flattened cardboard boxes. The boxes were cut into shingle-like sections and tied with bits of string and wire onto a thin framework of saplings, twigs and a few pieces of lumber. In the corner was a stove made from a five gallon cooking oil tin, and along the far wall were low wooden shelves lined with storage bins, tin containers and folded textiles. The floor was soft clean sand and a single low window looked out towards the distant beach. The Hindi printing on the cardboard sections were purposely arranged in patterns along the walls and a well weathered batik cloth hung from the ceiling.
There was nothing ingenious about its construction, but the young owner seemed proud of his creation. And why not. It provided shade from the overhead tropical sun and let the cool Indian Ocean breezes filter into the space. It furnished privacy and a respite for me and a group of his friends, who ultimately joined in our conversation. The earthen tones of the cardboard blended with the sand and wood, and formed an aesthetically pleasing contrast to the colored print and faded blue batik above. In its basic form, it appeared to meet the owner’s needs.
In the 25 years since, this house has come to mind often. For me, it seemed to represent a fundamental quality or basic principle of architectural design derived from necessity, expediency and circumstance. It connected the builder to the built form in a way I had not considered or experienced before, and helped me realize the importance of looking at buildings as a way to understand the world and the people I encountered.
As the weeks and months past, I thought often about this house and wondered if it would survive as the monsoon season began. As the years past, I wondered if the owner was able to upgrade the cardboard sheathing to flattened steel cooking oil tins, which rusts to a dull ochre patina from the ocean mists and formed the ubiquitous building material among his neighbors. Maybe then the house would have survived a few more years, possibly a decade or two as I was told. Eventually, if the owner prospered further, these walls would have been replaced with more permanent concrete blocks and corrugated steel roofing, a true symbol of success in such informal settlements, the “slums”, which fringe the modern cities throughout the Asian subcontinent and the developing world.
Today, I still wonder about this house, and whether it or the owner survived the 2004 tsunami which left 35,000 dead in northeastern Sri Lanka, or the devastating war with Tamil separatists which raged for 26 years, ending only recently with the crushing defeat of the Tamils.
Such a flimsy house surely. A house which now likely exists only in my thoughts. But one that left me with a lasting lesson about architecture.
Squatter Dwelling- Calcutta, India
Mad about Castles (part I)
Mad about Castles (Part I)
Last Spring, I had the good fortune to teach at SCAD’s Lacoste campus, a magical place where you wake up one April morning to find that the entire valley floor has turned white, rimed with cherry blossoms. Magical too is the château that crowns the summit of the steep hill the village clings to, but its magic is of a darker ilk. The château’s legacy is colored, some would say stained, by its last Ancien Régime owner, the Marquis de Sade, author of such controversial works as Justine and The 120 Days of Sodom, who used this building for some of his infamous assignations and built a theater within to stage his own scandalous plays. And although Lacoste lies close to prehistoric and Roman sites and played a significant role in the Protestant history of the region, people are primarily interested in the Marquis and his hedonism, an interest that the present owner, Pierre Cardin, has breathed new life into by partially restoring the castle and extending (both physically and temporally) the Marquis’ interest in the theater by adapting the adjacent quarry for performances that draw record crowds annually.
Living daily in the shadow of the château, I grew increasingly curious about the appeal of this mixture — one castle (partly ruined), one deranged man (the Marquis de Sade) and spectacle – and wanted to learn more about how this building fit into the broader picture of the fantasy-driven association between madness and castles that starts to appear in the second half of the 18th century. Prior to that time, castles were usually viewed quite simply as aristocratic homes and therefore locations of refinement and polite behavior (though there were exceptions as I discuss below). The walls around the castles were meant to keep the wealth and luxurious trappings securely inside so that the owners could enjoy a relaxed, privileged lifestyle, safely protected from all of those annoying things like the Plague or people with poor hygiene.
About as “mad” as castle-dwellers got during the French Renaissance, was, for example, emotional eccentrics like Louise de Lorraine at Chenonsceau. By today’s standards she would be considered “super-emo” and Europe’s first and best “goth girl” since the Migration Period invasions — although she wore all white – the color of mourning at that time – rather than black. Louise, a quiet, pious woman came to live at Chenonsceau after her marriage to Henry III of France and was a devoted wife. When he was murdered in 1589 she was overcome with grief, became extremely melancholic and never recovered. The poignancy of her sadness was apparently unforgettable because it was so unusual.
She even went so far as to refurbish her bedroom to suit her mood. The room we can visit today has been reconstructed around the original ceiling. It was painted black and decorated with objects associated with death and mourning: grave diggers tools, lachrymatory (vials to collect tears), and thorns in the shapes of H and L, the royal couple’s initials. After she ordered this room redecorated, she packed up all of her velvet and satin dresses, wore only white and spent the last eleven years of her life murmuring prayers to, one imagines, secure heaven for Henry’s soul and precipitate her own demise. Yet, Louise de Lorraine’s behavior was atypical and it wasn’t until after about 1750 that her sort of behavior became more fitting in castles, a break that coincides with the rise of Lacoste’s infamous libertine.
Stayed tuned for Part II of “Mad about Castles” and in the meantime, let me know what other exceptions of mad castle dwellers prior to the 18th century that you’ve come across.
The Death of Disegno
![Michelangelo, Studies for a Staircase, c. 1524-25 [Casa Buonarroti]](http://architecturalhistoryscad.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/big-peoples-building-2010.jpg "Michelangelo Studies for Staircase")
Is architectural drawing dead? Perusing student work on the walls of an architecture school or flipping through the pages (or scrolling through the screens) of the latest trade journals might convince you that hand-drawn representations of architecture are, indeed, a thing of the past. Slick, and often dazzling, digital images dominate contemporary architectural design, making the occasional hand-drawn sketch or measured drawing seem quaint or crude by comparison. The ascendancy of electronic media in the production of architecture, it seems, has left little room for traditional drawing by hand. Will the next generation of architects be incapable of drawing with a pencil or pen? What will this mean for the art of architecture?
It’s no exaggeration to say that the modern profession of the architect was founded on the art of drawing. In Renaissance Italy, where the profession was born, drawing was equivalent with what we now call, “design.” Indeed, the Italian word, “disegno” means both design and drawing. Our understanding of design has been shaped by such institutions as the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence (1563) and its chief theorist, Giorgio Vasari, who proclaimed that disegno was the “father of our three arts of architecture, sculpture, and painting.” Vasari’s theory of disegno has shaped artistic and architectural practice and education for nearly half a millennium. The vital connection between drawing and design was famously expressed by the premier architect of America’s Gilded Age, Richard Morris Hunt, who told his students “to draw, draw, draw, sketch, sketch, sketch! If you can’t draw anything else draw your boots, it doesn’t matter, it will ultimately give you a control of your pencil so that you can more readily express on paper your thoughts in designing. The greater facility you have in expressing these thoughts the freer and better your designs will be.” Drawing by hand continued to delineate the architectural design process in twentieth-century modernism, postmodernism and even deconstructivism—think of the drawings of Mies van der Rohe, Louis Kahn, Michael Graves and John Hejduk–but now, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, drawing seems to have become estranged from design.
What would Richard Morris Hunt say to architects today? What would John Hejduk say? Can design survive without drawing? Or, is architecture entering a new phase? These questions motivated the creation of a paper session at next week’s meeting of the Southeastern College Art Conference (SECAC) here in Savannah, entitled “Drawing and Design Method in Architecture.” The Session will feature papers by Robin H. Prater (Georgia Institute of Technology) on “The Architecture of Peter Harrison: Two-Dimensional Translation;” Michael Kleeman (Art Institute of Atlanta) on “Hejduk’s Icon(s): Mediating Habitation Through Drawn Construct;” and Mikesch Muecke and Miriam Zach (Iowa State University and University of Florida) on “Drawing Architecture and Music in Contemporary Rome: How to Be an Academic Tourist.” If you’re attending the SECAC meeting please come to hear these papers on Friday, November 11 at 8:00 am and join us for a lively conversation about the role of drawing in architectural design. If you haven’t registered, on-site registration will begin in Savannah at 7 am on Thursday, Nov. 10 at the registration desk in the DeSoto Hilton. http://www.secollegeart.org/annual-conference.html
The annual meeting of the Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians this past week in Charleston, SC, showcased the diversity of topics and approaches embraced by architectural historians. Given that the conference mainly attracts scholars active within the southeast region of the United States (it is the only regional chapter that mounts an annual conference), some of the topics have a distinctly regional flavour: slavery, southern architects or southern buildings, and several papers focusing on the host city Charleston. (One regrets that there were no papers addressing non-western topics.) However, the new frontiers of the discipline were amply on display, with papers on such topics as:
- the impact of the fictional home “Tara” from the film “Gone with the Wind” on actual architecture
- the relationship between architecture and anatomical dissection in the architecture of Michelangelo
- the architecture of airborne disease prevention
- the use of FormStone (a faux stone made out of concrete) as a barometer of taste
- the ceramic tile decoration in the Lisbon metro system and how it shapes the public perception of a city’s history
These papers, among several others, reflect not only the growing range of topics and methodologies, but also the openness of architectural historians to embrace the approaches of related disciplines, like cultural anthropology, biology and economics.
New Direction for our Departmental Blog
Since creating this blog two years ago, I have seen it serve mainly as an announcement board for events and opportunities in our field and accomplishments within our department. The problem with a blog, however, is that as soon as something is posted, it pushes the last displayed post off screen. Announcements will be spread to our students via various other methods, leaving this space more open for what a blog ideally should be — a forum for the discussion of issues, articulating of opinions, and sharing of insights. Each week, one or two faculty in our department will submit a post. We invite your comments and feedback.
And a good (modern)))) time was had by all… 
WHAT:
There was a night of 5 5-minute lectures and a spooky-cool flashlight-led tour of Savannah’s highschool version of the Airforce Academy.
There was a day of discovering the completely unknown (modern))) in the land of Oglethorpe leading to fun, inspiration, fun, and a new heritage, and more fun.
WHO:
Combine the President of DOCOMOMO GA, Tom Little, with Daniel Carey, President of the Historic Savannah Foundation and you get fire and sparks. Add a bit of Bob Ciucevich, of the Preservation firm Quatrefoil Consulting, some Daves Rossell, Professor of Architectural History at SCAD (me), some core members of the staff of the Historic Preservation Division in Atlanta, and Jerry Lominack, with over 40 years of experience as an architect in Savannah, and you get a powerful punch of information and excitement. All this was great benefitted by over a dozen SCAD student volunteers—Hip, Hip, Hooray! Great job everyone!
WHY:
To see Great Architecture! Tim Jackson and Capris Rosenberg, both SCAD Art History profs opened their great house as did Bret Bell of the Savannah Morning News (my new favorite structure in the western hemisphere) as well as nearly a dozen other generous individuals with inspiring properties—all culminating at Richard Lane’s incomparable Palm Springs in Savannah.
We learned that Savannah does not end at Derenne.
We learned that downtown is not all 18th and 19th-century.
We learned that architectural history is not all work and no fun.
HOW TO RELIVE:
1) Contact me for a copy of the guidebook that Ciucevich and I wrote and Tom Little designed.
2) Look to the Savannah Morning News reporting (All Photographs in these articles and in this blog are by Diane Harvey)
http://spotted.savannahnow.com/photos/index.php?id=6131878&page=1
http://spotted.savannahnow.com/galleries/index.php?id=389688
HOW TO LIVE IT NEXT TIME:
Join DOCOMOMO! DOCOMOMO GA: http://docomomoga.org/
Thoughts on Successful PowerPoint Presentations
As I prepare my own conference presentation for the upcoming annual meeting of the Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians (SESAH) in Charleston, SC, and recall the many presentations I have attended, I have been reflecting on some of the characteristics of successful formal presentations.
For architectural historians, visuals are essential and using them in a formal presentation should enhance and complement the content of your text. It is critical that every image packs as much of a punch as possible. Make the images as large as possible and fill the screen; there is no benefit to using the valuable visual real estate for space around the images or for a repeating graphic header. Crop images to remove unnecessary or distracting borders or to “zoom” in on the key focus of the image. Create the illusion of some animation by repeating a slide and then adding some highlighting, arrow, circle, or other technique of drawing attention to the whatever it is you wish your audience to focus on. To relate a new image to a previous one, consider “stacking” it on top of the previous image so that part of it is still visible around the edges. PowerPoint allows for the presentation of multiple images simultaneously on a slide in a way previously impossible with even dual 35mm slide projectors. Make sure that the images are large enough to be legible; if conveying a sense of the great frequency of some phenomenon, then the legibility of each image is not essential, but the pattern created by group is.
Text is another vital component, when used in moderation. A title slide is important, in that it can prepare the audience for your presentation while you are being introduced or while some technical issue is being addressed. It should include at a minimum your name, professional affiliation and your talk title. Within the body of the presentation, captions are helpful, especially for unfamiliar image subjects. Including a source for the image, in a small font discretely located in a lower corner is useful, but not essential. Avoid large amounts of text.
As we transition to different kinds of screens for presentations, laser pointers cannot be counted on to be useful. Plasma screens do not show the laser dot very effectively. Build highlighting, arrows or other devices to draw attention to a part of an image into your presentation.
Architectural History department welcomes new faculty member
For the first time in seven years, the Architectural History department at SCAD has hired a new faculty member. Dr. Patrick Haughey, who joined the department in August, received his Ph.D. in the History and Theory of Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and most recently taught in the department of Architecture at Northeastern University. As a post-World War II/Contemporary specialist, Haughey brings the scope of expertise in our department at SCAD up to the present day. Equally important, he expands the range of methodological approaches with his interests in Architecture and the Political Economy, Cultural Heritage and the Production of Citizenship, and the History of the American Landscape. Such interests also grow out of his previous academic degrees — a Masters of Architecture from the University of Washington in Seattle and Bachelor of Science in Landscape Architecture from the University of California, Davis.
Coastal Heritage Society lectures on the Siege of Savannah
October 4: “‘A very unexpected alarming and serious scene:’ James Wright, the Southern Strategy and the Siege of Savannah” by Robert Brooking.
October 11:”Glory of Ireland: the Dillon Regiment at the Siege of Savannah” by Ruairi James Regan.
October 18: “Naval Power during the American Revolution” by Scott Smith.
TIME: 6:30 for refreshments; lectures begin at 7:00pm and typically end around 9:30pm.
VENUE: Savannah History Museum
WhatWasThere.com and H-Net Listserves
I recently received the following message on the H-Net listserve H-Urban.
2 Questions: 1) what do you think of the site that Richard Harris is mentioning here?
And 2) What do you think about H-Net and all the listserves there?
Hope you have a nice day/blog!
egdr
—–Original Message—–
From: H-NET Urban History Discussion List [mailto:H-URBAN@H-NET.MSU.EDU] On Behalf Of Sebastian Haumann
Sent: Monday, September 26, 2011 4:33 AM
To: H-URBAN@H-NET.MSU.EDU
Subject: WWW/GIS: Historical photos with Google street views
From: Richard Harris
I am curious to know whether people think of this feature as being
useful for research or teaching:
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/technology/2011/09/what-was-there/156/
[Ed: This article refers to the website WhatWasThere.com , which
overlays historical photos (uploaded by users) on Google Maps Street
View, to show how streets looked in the past.]
Richard Harris, Professor,
School of Geography and Earth Sciences,
McMaster University
http://www.science.mcmaster.ca/geo/faculty/harris/index.html
H-Urban E-mail address: h-urban@h-net.msu.edu (Click: mailto:h-urban@h-net.msu.edu )
Please use for ALL mail to H-Urban, including postings, inquiries, and comments.
H-Urban (http://www.h-net.org/~urban) is affiliated with the International Planning History Society
(IPHS, at http://www.planninghistory.org ), the Society for American City and Regional Planning History
(SACRPH, at http://www.sacrph.org ),and the Urban History Association (UHA, at http://uha.udayton.edu ).
Robert Bruegman — Sprawl: Learning to Love It, or at least why you should think twice about trying to stop it
Please join for this year’s first Department of Architectural History Lecture:
Thursday, October 20, 2011
5:30 pm
SCAD Student Center
120 Montgomery Street
Savannah, Georgia
Professor Robert Bruegmann will be speaking on:
Sprawl: learning to love it or at least why you should think twice about trying to stop it
For several decades now almost all “right minded” architects, planners and public officials have deplored sprawl, castigating it as economically inefficient, socially reprehensible, environmentally disastrous and aesthetically ugly. Across the world planners have devised greenbelts, growth boundaries and other schemes to reign it in. Architects have tried to replace it with schemes like the high density towers of Vancouver, the modern townhouses of Amsterdam and the mixed-use main Streets of the New Urbanists. But are these places where most people really want to live and do they really solve the problems of sprawl?
Robert Bruegmann is Distinguished Professor of Art History, Architecture, Urban Planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has published several books and numerous articles on a variety of subjects related to architecture, landscape and urbanism.
Department of Architectural History lectures are free and open to the public. For more information email: dgobel@scad.edu
THE BERKELEY PRIZE
THE INTERNATIONAL UNDERGRADUATE PRIZE FOR ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN EXCELLENCE
THE 2012, FOURTEENTH ANNUAL BERKELEY PRIZE IS LAUNCHED TODAY.
THIS YEAR’S TOPIC: ARCHITECTURE FOR THE PUBLIC GOOD
Stage One Essay Competition Entries Due November 1, 2011.
_________________
SEE THIS YEAR’S NEW WEBSITE FOR MORE INFORMATION. www.berkeleyprize.org/
__________________
Please forward this message to undergraduate email lists, student message boards, newsletters, and all those who might be interested.
DOCOMOMO COMES TO SAVANNAH OCTOBER 7-8
DOCOMOMO US is pleased to announce our 5th annual Tour Day featuring tours of architecture of the modern movement nationwide. Exclusive events and tours will be hosted by DOCOMOMO US chapters and affiliate partners on Columbus Day weekend, October 8, 9, and 10th, 2011. In addition to our continued partnerships with notable institutions such as Chicago Architecture Foundation and the L.A. Conservancy, we are thrilled to announce 2011 partnerships with the Society of Architectural Historians, the Philip Johnson Glass House and Archtober. DOCOMOMO US is also pleased to welcome the participation of our newest chapter in Greater Philadelphia and all of our members on Tour Day.
FOR SAVANNAH-CENTRIC INFORMATION, SEE http://www.myhsf.org/advocacy-education/docomomo-savannah-modern-tour/
NOTE THERE ARE OPPORTUNITIES FOR VOLUNTEERS IN A VARIETY OF CAPACITIES ON OCTOBER 7, AND 8. CALL OR EMAIL
Terri O’Neil, Development Director, Historic Savannah Foundation, 912.233.7787, 321 E. York Street, Savannah, GA 31401,
terri@myHSF.org THANKS!
DOCOMOMO is an acronym for the Documentation and Conservation of buildings, sites and neighborhoods of the Modern Movement. Docomomo promotes the study, interpretation and protection of the architecture, landscape and urban design of the Modern Movement. DOCOMOMO US is an all-volunteer group comprised of enthusiasts, historians, architects, designers, students, and preservationists. Regional Chapters promote the goals and mission of the organization through advocacy, education, and outreach. National Tour Day 2011 is the fifth annual nation-wide event encompassing all thirteen DOCOMOMO US chapters as well as affiliate organizations to promote the education and preservation of the Modern Movement. We aim to encourage a sense of regional and national pride for the rich legacy of the Modern Movement within the United States.
Tour Day 2011 is focused on providing exclusive access to modern interiors that would otherwise be closed to the public. The knowledge of local experts and the national community of preservationists, architects, and educators inform our tours. Each tour is uniquely designed to take full advantage of the modern resources that a particular region has to offer. Featured tours include a double-decker bus tour in Palm Springs, California; exclusive access to residential modern interiors in Delaware County, Pennsylvania and Minneapolis, Minnesota; a chance to meet noted architect Ira Rakatansky at his home in Providence, Rhode Island; an exclusive DOCOMOMO US member event at the Philip Johnson Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut; and much, much more. New tours and events will be added weekly. For more information about tours and reservations visit: www.docomomo-us.org/tour_day_2011.
For further information on Tour Day or regional chapters please contact tourday@docomomo-us.org.
HABS / HAER / HALS programs now have a Facebook page
The Heritage Documentation Programs (Historic American Buildings
Survey/Historic American Engineering Record/
Historic American Landscapes Survey) of the National Park Service is now
using Social Media to better communicate with
our friends, alumni, project sponsors, and others interested in our work of
recording America’s architectural, engineering and
landscape heritage through measured drawings, written historical reports
and large-format photography. Our Facebook page
can be found at: http://www.Facebook.com/HeritageDocumentationPrograms
For timely updates on summer jobs for students, current documentation
projects, transmittals statistics to the Library
of Congress, keeping up with HDP staff and alumni, and other news and
updates, you are invited to become a HDP Fan!
The people at HABS/HAER/HALS are looking forward to seeing you on Facebook soon.
For more information, contact:
R. Arzola, HABS Architect and Holland Prize Coordinator
Heritage Documentation Programs, National Park Service
tel: 202-354-2170 email: Robert_Arzola@nps.gov
