RQYZQJKQ8WDQ

I recently was driving a round-about way to New Harmony, Indiana and passed through Poseyville.  Much to my surprise, right in the middle of town, what appears to be a bank by Louis Sullivan.

No mistaking the ornament, both in their individual designs and how they ’strap’ the building.  However, having studied Sullivan in school and later while living in Chicago, while I was familiar with many of his late career bank designs, I had never heard of this one.  It is extremely similar in its long facade to the bank in Sidney, Ohio.

However, as you can see, the Poseyville bank is more of a shoe-box than a jewel box, simply repeating the long facade ornamentation to the main entry.  The individual ornamentations however are unmistakable:

Poseyville bank

Sidney bank

Well, it turns out the Poseyville bank is not a Sullivan work at all.  Rather, it is a knock-off, by Edward Thole, built in 1924 (documented in the excellent essay “The Banks and the Image of Progressive Banking” by Wim de Wit in Louis Sullivan, The Function of Ornament. ( I highly recommend this essay as it gives cultural context to the intentions of the architect and clients of the bank projects.  Rarely are the needs and desires of the engaged clients presented or discussed in architecture books)

Maybe the Indianapolis Terra Cotta Company had the molds available for use?

Sidney bank image from the website maintained by Mary Ann Sullivan:  http://www.bluffton.edu/~sullivanm/sidney/sidney.html

In any case, it is an interesting building and though not a Sullivan original, a commanding presence in the small town and a fascinating attempt to convey strength and security for a bank without resorting to the usual Greek temple forms.

On the border between southern Illinois and Indiana, along the Wabash River, sits New Harmony, Indiana.  Founded in 1814 by a group of religious separatists similar to the Shakers, the town consisted of 180 buildings, but was bought in its entirety by Robert Owen, a wealthy industrialist from Wales.  His communitarian society was an utopia experiment in social reform but was short-lived.

What they left was a remarkable series of buildings and realized urban plan:

Throughout its history, New Harmony has attracted philosophers, theologians, scientists and most importantly reformists, interested in the ideas and promise of communal living.

That spirit is incorporated in the Working Men’s Institute building and in Philip Johnson’s 1960 interdenominational Roofless Church:

This is a beautiful space and surely his best work, – a tall brick rectangular wall with the ‘church’ structure sitting to one side.  The space of this outdoor room is very striking, made the more so by a single, modulated opening looking out on the floodplain of the Wabash River.

This building in a sense spans the cabins of the original founders and the Atheneum Visitors Center by Richard Meier (not built at the time of Johnson’s work).  The Atheneum is other-worldly, a graceful, pure white, vision.  I am sure it was not intentional, but it feels a bit like a nineteenth century steamboat pulled up to a dock, an apt allusion for a visitor’s center.

New Harmony was intentionally separated from the mass of society and it still remains a bit isolated in rural southern Indiana.  I know of no other place that within the space of a few blocks you can wander around almost 200 years of remarkable American architecture.  Well worth a visit.

These are some images from our recent submittal to the Highlands Farmers Market Competition sponsored by Sprocket Design/Building in Denver.

Our take on the project was to make the market secondary to a more general community-use building.  While adaptable for use as a market, the building is more of an open market-hall that can host art classes, shows, etc. beyond the seasonal and weekly market.  A long, narrow site along 32nd Avenue, just east of the Highlands retail district was the chosen site, spanning from the street to the alley.

Our project posited a curving, cantilevered, plywood-clad box that houses the community meeting room and office functions creating a covered ‘porch’ for the neighborhood.  The jury clearly picked schemes that put a more dominant emphasis on the farmer’s market with the winning scheme particularly elegant and minimalist.  There are many very interesting submissions, some more or less conventional, others pushing the boundaries of what a market might be and how urban space is formulated.

http://www.sprocketgallery.com/index.php?page=first-place

Thanks to Kate Iverson for her help in formulating the design and program and to Susan Everett for her logo and identity contributions.

This is a composite photo of the facades along a one block length of Market Street in Louisville, Kentucky.

I grew up in Louisville, and while it did not boast a thriving modern architecture scene, it did have a remarkable collection of late nineteenth and early twentieth century commercial architecture.  Market and Main Streets, both relatively close to the Ohio River’s transportation, were a thriving business district and the masonry and cast-iron storefronts erected there are a poignant reminder of Louisville’s once critical location along the Ohio River.  Unfortunately, like other river towns, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, etc. the middle and later twentieth century and the growth of the interstate trucking system, did not serve the economies of these places well.  And, of course, like many cities, Louisville’s ardor to tear down the buildings of the past was only halted by enough general economic decline that it wasn’t profitable enough to get rid of them all.

Now, in the days of renewed urban living and loft apartments, there is a renaissance for these buildings, especially in St. Louis, where the river-hugging brick warehouses and factories are being reinvented as condos and the excellent and amazing St. Louis Children’s Museum.   I hope the fate of this block in Louisville has an equally good outcome.  For while modernist buildings are still thrilling to look at and occasionally design, it is the continual reinvention of a building that surely holds the most interest, historic, cultural and aesthetic.

a parti diagram is an idea sketch, an initial response to a site, a client’s program or some other conditions that begin to determine the order for designing a project.  They don’t really represent what the project will look like in plan or elevation, but are a road map of the ideas of the project.  Ideas of ‘threshold’, ‘tension v. repose’, ‘horizon and center’, or ‘territory and enclosure’ all can be simply diagrammed in the parti as an initial response to the problem posed by a new project.

“… a freehand sketch diagram that was at the tangent between idea and imagination…if the parti – the first critical diagram – is not made well, it will be difficult for architecture to follow.  If there is no parti, there will be no architecture, only (at best) little more than the utility of construction.  Buried within their early sketches is the germ of a narrative or language.  The early diagrams are reflective conversations with the language of architecture.”

-  Alan Phillips, Brighton, UK

the diagrams above are some of the parti sketches from some recent projects of mine

Untitled (Andromeda Hotel), c. 1953-54 and Untitled (“Dovecote” American Gothic), c. 1954-56

I really like these two ‘hotel’ boxes of Cornell.  The Andromeda says it explicitly, a single, spare white space, a housing for a drama astrological and mythical.   The Dovecote is also like a little hotel, with some vacant, individual little stories playing out as each sphere makes it way around the room.

Untitled (Yellow Sand Fountain), 1955 and Untitled (Butterfly Habitat), c. 1940

Two boxes with complex and interesting thoughts on time.  The Sand Fountain actually pours sand out from the top, filling and then overflowing the broken glass.  Its resemblance to an hour glass is unmistakable, but it is the fragility of the glass, its destruction, that most occupies the viewer.

The Butterfly Habitat is one of many habitats Cornell made, usually with images of birds or butterflies.  This one especially makes explicit the reframing of the butterflies into artificial boxes, trapping them in time.  Their static nature almost conflicts with the sense of temporal decay and degradation of the fading glass front.

Untitled, c. 1956-58

This box is particularly beautiful and intriguing.  A map of the cosmos, a charting of the heavens.  It has a strange dual character, both scientific and precise, but still filled with the wonder of the stars racing across the night sky.  The sand in the drawer moves against the gridded enclosure as well, planets and stars whirling away.

Joseph Cornell’s work has long interested me and I think many architects.  The boxes are framed worlds, tightly defined creations.  But within them the whole world can exist.  They are also like little windows, and as the architect, we are continually looking in at other people’s lives, not so much looking out to the world.  These works are a bit sad, somewhat melancholic – fascinated with engaging and reframing the universe, but forever outside it.

These images are scanned from the excellent book on Cornell’s work: Joseph Cornell Shadowplay Eterniday published by Thames & Hudson with insightful and often amusing essays by Lynda Hartigan, Richard Vine, Robert Lehrman and Walter Hopps.

this is the last in a series of posts this week about the work of photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard

Romance (N.) from Ambrose Bierce #3, 1962

Lucybelle Crater and her 40-year old son, Lucybelle Crater, c. 1969-71

This last photo is from a series of ‘portrait’ photos of Meatyard’s friends and family, all with the Lucybelle Crater masks.  A prolific collector of odd and unusual names, Meatyard struck upon “Lucybelle Crater” and made her family.

All the photos this week are scanned from the excellent book on Meatyard, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, An American Visionary published by the Akron Art Museum in 1991, editor Barbara Tannenbaum.

Arugula Restaurant opened last weekend.  Designed by M. Gerwing Architects with the help of:

ABL Construction (Alan Lawrence, Herb Ruprecht, Randy Zahn)

McGinty (Graphics, Design)

Laak Woodworks (cabinetry)

Boulder Engineering (HVAC design)

and of course, owner and chef Alec Schuler

Arugula is a fine dining Italian restaurant located at 2785 Iris in the old Laudisio’s location.  Using locally-sourced ingredients, Alec creates contemporary interpretations of classic Italian dishes.  It is simple, natural dining in a warm, inviting surrounding fusing modern and traditional, timeless and seasonal.

http://www.arugularistorante.com/

even with the dire news daily filling the airwaves and dampening our enthusiasm,

it is hard not to be optimistic at the turn of a new year.  Or maybe it’s just a sunny 60 degrees in Boulder today.

One of a series of Chicago bridge paintings done over 4 or 5 years.

I have lived in a few different cities and each place has seemed to call for a different medium of work.

In Lexington, KY it was mostly photography.  Boston was sketching, with dozens of sketchbooks filled with daily lunch drawings, etc.

In Chicago, painting held sway.  Now in Boulder, CO, photography has again dominated my interests. It is certainly the light of each city that is different, but also the job I was working at the time that allowed for different types of works.

Not by way of comparison, but it is no surprise that the Venetian painter’s work was characterized by shifting relationships of colors, not clearly defined forms, as the city’s mists and land/water ambiguity never leaves one’s perception of the place.  The hard, sharp light of New Mexico lead to Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings, California’s sun and ocean to Richard Diebenkorn’s abstractions.

It’s the start of a new year, maybe I’ll load some more film in the camera.