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10/12/10--08:25: Wes Anderson vs. Jacques Tati

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Check out Wes Anderson's new spot for Stella Artois. A little Mon Oncle, no?

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10/12/10--13:09: Volume to Space

Articles on this Page (showing articles 1 to 25 of 25)

10/12/10--08:25: _Wes Anderson vs. Ja... 10/12/10--13:09: _Volume to Space 10/25/10--19:12: _Figures of Involvement 11/04/10--13:37: _Seen and Not Seen 12/15/10--08:36: _A Sartorial Moment 12/23/10--08:57: _Happy Holidays 01/13/11--19:58: _Symposium Season 01/24/11--20:51: _Utopia For Sale 02/25/11--07:24: _Architecture on Trial 03/06/11--18:13: _The Harvard Candle 06/02/11--19:04: _Of Hyphens and Hurr... 09/08/11--16:02: _Rocket Talk 10/11/11--08:32: _Some Updates 11/14/11--09:44: _Capsule Review: The... 11/23/11--08:43: _Exit Strategy 11/23/11--08:56: _The Aerodynamic Lig... 02/20/12--19:35: _Attributing Modernism 03/26/15--19:32: _Thomas Pynchon's 11... 03/27/15--05:36: _Centerville/Interzo... 03/29/15--16:05: _Follow The Light 08/03/15--19:22: _The Law of Levity i... 09/30/15--08:21: _1979 (Book Zero) 10/12/15--08:09: _A Reader's Guide To... 10/14/15--08:43: _The Face of the Ear...

Olivier Messiaen in Bryce Canyon, Utah, 1971 (Source)

10/07/10--20:41: _Patina, Provenance,... (showing articles 1 to 25 of 25)

More remains to be said about the relationship of music criticism to architecture criticism. Or put another way, music criticism should be considered as a kind of architecture criticism. This is not to say that the two realms have been far apart. Far from it. In fact, books like Mark Treib's Space Calculated in Seconds(1996), Robin Evans' essay "Comic Lines" from his posthumous The Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometries (1995), or even more deeply historical works such as Emily Thompson's The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933(2002) all consider, to a certain extent, a spectrum of relationships between music and architecture. These relationships are both literal and figurative. As Treib's and Evans' work shows, the relationship between Le Corbusier, Iannis Xenakis, and Edgard Varèse went beyond physical artefacts such as the Phillips Pavilion (1958), but also extended to design methods as well. And as Thompson expertly demonstrated in her influential book, the history of architectural modernism could be understood through acoustical technologies. There is still more work to be done. Take, for instance, the role that the trip to the desert has played in the late 20th century. From Robert Venturi's, Denise Scott Brown's, and Steven Izenour's Learning From Las Vegas (1972), to Reyner Banham's Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971), to Luis Buñuel'sSimon of the Desert (Simón del desierto) (1965), and even, to a certain extent, David Lean'sLawrence of Arabia (1962), the desert has become a place of reinvention and a site of reinvigoration. Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has even given the desert an architectural significance of sorts. "What attracts the stranger to the city is what makes the city and desert alike," he writes. "In both, there is just the the present, united by the past, a present that may be lived as the beginning, and a secure beginning, a beginning that does not threaten to solidify into a consequence ... In the city as in the desert, the stranger, the wanderer, the nomad, the flâneur finds reprieve from time."[1] And yet this timelessness operates on a musical register as well. Thus in his preface to The Rest is Noise (2007), critic Alex Ross describes the effect of atonal music on 20th century audiences, noting how something noisy and disorienting can be "so singularly beautiful that people gast in wonder when they hear it. Olivier Messiaen'sQuartet for the End of Time, with its grandly singing lines and gently ringing chords, stops time with every performance."[2]

Cover to a CBS recording of Des canyons aux étoiles ... featuring an image of Bryce Canyon. The reference to Messiaen is very apposite, as the French composer created one of the most important desert-related works in recent memory. In 1971, philanthropist Alice Tully commissioned Messiaen to compose a piece for the upcoming U.S. bicentennial. To prepare, he took a research trip out west to Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah to study the various birds and landscape colors there. Messiaen, who had bidirectional sound-color synaesthesia, created a system for correlating the colors of the landscape, the local species of birds, and various sounds. Music historian Jonathan Bernard recognized the importance of Messiaen's ailment: His synaesthesia, like the true form of the phenomenon in any affected individual, is involuntary, the pairings of colors and sounds out of his control. What Messiaen has managed to do, however, is to find the particular sound combinations that will give rise to an extremely wide and variegated range of color responses, an accomplishment which affords him the ability to paint, as it were, in sound what is visible. It is difficult to know for sure whether this reverse aspect of Messiaen's synaesthesia—that is, visible transmuted into audible rather than the other way around—is also involuntary or simply a well-oiled habit, but the fact is that he can do it, with significant impact on his creative output.[3] The result of the desert trip was Messiaen's most important work, the massive, 100-minute Des canyons aux étoiles... (From the Canyons to the Stars...) (1971-4). Arranged into twelve movements, many named after a specific bird, Messiaen's piece is a combination of conventional and unusual instrumentation. Stringed and brass instruments are paired along whips, wind machines, sheets of metal, and even a geophone (an instrument of Messiaen's own invention), the end result being the evocation of a particular landscape unmoored in time. Oliver Knussen, who published a review in 1976 of the very first performance of Messiaen's magnum opus cannot but help bring in spatial and architectural observations: It comes as something of a surprise, therefore, to encounter a relatively intimate and genial work, employing an orchestra that is by Messiaen's standards modest … This restraint was no doubt conditioned to some extent by the dimensions of Alice Tully Hall in New York, where the work was premièred. This hall is one of the most beautiful and warmly resonant that the present writer has experiences: a fact worth bearing in mind while listening to Canyons in the dryish acoustic of the Festival Hall, where the imagination had to supply some of the inscapes of reverberation which Messiaen characteristically takes into account.[4] The review continues with its hints of architectural and spatial orientations. Movements are "polychrome edifices."[5] Each places "things next to another in horizontal juxtaposition."[6] It may not be fair to impart the author with an architectural understanding of Messiaen's work, yet the connection remains useful as it points to other realms in which architecture and music collide. More analogies could thus be made of the various instrumentalities shared by architecture and music criticism. In addition to analyses of forms and structures, of shapes and compositions, there is always volume. Volume is an important concept to architectural modernism. And yet the conflation and confusion of something tangible like mass with something intangible like volume yields productive observations. A key point of reference here is Frederick Etchell's famous mistranslation of "volume" into "mass" in his 1927 version of Le Corbusier's Vers une architecture (1923).[7] Another would be the fact that the term "volume" has another set of spatial connotations that have to do with just more than form. Erwin Panofsky famously described Renaissance perspectival techniques as the transformation of "psychophysiological space to mathematical space"—a transformation resulting in a view of space as a "quantum continuum."[8] And later, in "Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures," he described the combination of sound, movement, and image in film as both a "dynamization of space" and a "spatialization of time."[9] When combined, these two observations lead to an idea of space as something defined by the presence and movement of light and matter. In other words, it is a framework that could be understood as a way for sound to create and define space. Sound emantes from a source, and waves shape and define the space and objects in the same way that radar or sonar use wave phenomena to "paint" a picture. Volume, in its musical sense, can refer to either the quality of a sound or to its combined strength, power and mass. And yet volume is not only a way of describing three dimensions, but it is also a way of describing how sound travels in three dimensions. Consider, for a moment, the sonic call-to-arms "MAXIMUM VOLUME YIELDS MAXIMUM RESULTS." It is an equation of sorts, a seemingly pithy grouping of words featured on all of Sunn O)))'s albums. Comprised of Stephen O'Malley and Greg Anderson, this Los Angeles-based outfit specializes in a blend of low-frequency bass and guitar feedback drone combined with a sometimes-baroque sensibility—it almost goes without saying, but this is some very loud music.

1969 ad depicting Sunn Orion amplifiers (note logo at bottom left)

Schematics depicting location of Sunn O)))'s gear

Volume is a product of the band's massive array of Sunn and Ampeg amplifiers and cabinets. The band's logo, which references Sunn's own logo, shows an eye-like "O" emanating unidirectional waves. And yet a 2005 schematic published for the band's European tour hints at another dimension of architectural-ness. Note the placement of the various cabinets and amplifiers. Here is something of a sonic equivalent to Ludwig Hilberseimer'sHochhausstadt (1924), obsidian-like rectangular forms distributed across an empty, isotropic expanse. Or, squint your eyes a little bit, and there is a passing resemblance to Le Corbusier's drawing of Buenos Aires from the River Plate, an negative image where fields and black and white are confused for one another.

Ludwig Hilberseimer, Drawing of a Hochhausstadt, from Groszstadtarchitektur (1924)

Le Corbusier, drawing of the Voisin Plan of Paris in Buenos Aires, from Precisions (1930) ________________ Notes [1] Zygmunt Bauman, "Desert Solitaire" in Keith Tester, The Flâneur (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 140. [2] Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York: Picador, 2007), xvi. [3] Jonathan W. Bernard, "Messiaen's Synaesthesia: The Correspondence between Color and Sound Structure in His Music" Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Fall, 1986), p. 44. [4] Oliver Knussen, Review: Messiaen's 'Des Canyons aux Etoiles...' Tempo, New Series, No. 116 (Mar., 1976), p. 39. [5] Ibid., p. 40. [6] Ibid., p. 41. [7] For more on the mistranslation of Le Corbusier's Vers une architecture, see Jean-Louis Cohen's introduction to Toward an Architecture, John Goodman, trans. (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute Publications, 2007), pp. 1-82. [8] Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, Christopher Wood, trans. (New York: Zone Books, 1997), p. 31. [9] Panofsky, "Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures," in Irving Lavin ed. Three Essays on Style (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1997), p. 96.

10/25/10--19:12: Figures of Involvement

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Minutemen (L to R: d. boon, George Hurley, Mike Watt) at the 1984 Los Angeles Street Scene (photo by Eric Stringer) (Source).

While we are on the topic of statistics [1], I only need to remind you of a song verse. It goes something like this: Let's say I got a number. That number's fifty thousand. That's 10% of 500,000. Oh here we are in French Indochina. Executive order. Congressional decision. The working masses are manipulated. “Was this our policy?” Ten long years — not one dominoe shall fall. Some of you will recognize these as the lyrics to “Viet Nam,” from the Minutemen’s ground-breaking Double Nickels on the Dime (1984). Released by SST Records the very same year as Hüsker Dü’sZen Arcade, Double Nickels on the Dime was a blast of jazz-funk-inflected agitprop that continues to be recognized as one of the most important rock albums of the late 20th century, if not all time. Combining guitarist d. boon’s slinky, trebly guitar parts, Mike Watt’s muscular and melodic bass playing, and George Hurley’s acrobatic drumming, the Minutemen did much more than just create the definitive sound of America’s music underground during the early 1980s. They created a template for punk rock’s labors by setting a minimum threshold for band membership and songwriting. Guitar. Bass. Drums. That was all that was needed to write songs. With hardly a guitar solo, and with tight compositions that made the most of the band lineup and instrumentation, Minutemen albums were, sonically-speaking, lean affairs.

Top: What Makes a Man Start Fires? (1982) (Featuring cover art by Raymond Pettibon). Bottom: Double Nickels on the Dime (1984) But that’s only part of it. Not only could the Minutemen play songs better than most (they were all incredible musicians), but by the time your shitty band finished a song, boon, Watt, and Hurley already played four or five. This was the Minutemen equation: don’t just play better music, but play more music. The result was a head spinning catalog of music where almost all songs clocked in somewhere between 45 seconds to 2 minutes. Listen to a Minutemen album, and suddenly the idea of diminishing returns is turned on its head. Each musical volley leaves you wanting more and more. Here is some statistical evidence. Their first full-length, The Punch Line (1981), contained 18 songs. The longest track from the album, “Tension,” clocked in at 1:20. The shortest, “Fanatics,” at 0:31. The album’s total run time is only 15:00, which, by my math, is over 5 minutes shorter than Rush’s epic “2112” (which is somewhere around 20:33). The Minutemen’s second album, What Makes a Man Start Fires? (1982) also had 18 songs but ran at a slightly longer 26:39. The 8 songs fromBuzz Or Howl Under The Influence of Heat (1983) could technically qualify their third studio recording as an EP, but it was marketed by SST as a fulllength LP (its run time was 15:30). These songs tended to be longer affairs, a trend that would continue with Double Nickels on The Dime (43 tracks, with a 73:35 running length). Their last album, 3-Way Tie (For Last) (1985) featured their one of their longest songs, a cover of Blue Öyster Cult’s“The Red and The Black” (4:09). With 16 songs, its run time is 36:11. Here’s the final tally: 5 albums; 103 songs; and 4 hours, 16 minutes’ worth of recording time. But back to “Viet Nam.” The song is a furious, nervous exchange of ascending and descending figures between bass and guitar (a popped bass note marking the transition between each phrase). Underneath all this, Hurley begins with a crescendo/decrescendo of drum rolls, eventually sliding into a crisp, brillant, breakneck high-hat motif. The drumming only hints at something that is not-quite-disco, not-quite-funk. But whatever it is, it is thrilling and propels the song forward like a cannonball, its concussion rattling your tympanum, your brainstem, until something gives, and the very thing within you that resists the urge to get down suddenly, beautifully, gives way.

Detail to back of gatefold sleeve for Double Nickels on the Dime (1984), "Viet Nam" begins on the second line (Photograph by Francisco Ramirez) The excerpt that introduced this piece contains all of the lyrics to the song. It is the song “as heard.” However, if one were to peer at the back of Double Nickels’ gatefold sleeve and look at the lyrics to “Viet Nam,” one would see this: Let's say I got a number. That number's fifty thousand. That's 10% of 500,000. These are the figures of our involvement in French Indochina. Executive order. Congressional decision. The working masses are manipulated. “Was this our policy?” Ten long years — not one dominoe shall fall. The difference here, of course, is that the lyrics as written refer to the statistical number as “figures of involvement.” Never sung in the recording, yet part of the original song, this small clause points to the political nature of much of the Minutemen’s work. The name "Viet Nam" suggests that this was a song protesting American foreign policy, and if you were—like d. boon, Mike Watt, and George Hurley—in the business of politically-oriented punk music, you would probably be writing songs about the Vietnam war as well as American involvement in Nicaragua or El Salvador (for example, cue the first track, second side, second album of Double Nickels, “Untitled Song for Latin America”). As Michael Azerrad points out in his definitive Our Band Could Be Your Life (2001), "America was in a catatonic state through the Eighties, and the Minutemen's music—all angular starts and stops, challenging lyrics, and blink-and-you-missed-'em songs—was a metaphor for the kind of alertness needed to fight back against the encroaching mediocrity"[2].

Rear to gatefold sleeve for Double Nickels on the Dime (1984) (Photograph by Francisco Ramirez) In addition to their music, their look, and their ethos, the Minutemen used their catalog to communicate their message in unique ways. Along with “Viet Nam,” all of the lyrics to Double Nickels on The Dime—in fact, all Minutemen albums—fit in a compressed space, covering only up to 20% of an LP's 144 square inches of graphic design real estate. Although this layout reflects the band’s brand of short, urgent songs, it is nevertheless visually compelling. This is because when printed, the lyrics do not look like lyrics; that is, they are not presented as poem-like verse. Instead, all lyrics on a Minutemen album are displayed as a single block of unjustified type, with the titles of songs (usually in italics, bold, or both italic and bold typefaces) separating the songs. The lyrics to a single song are therefore printed to appear as a single sentence with hardly any punctuation. The effect is twofold. On the one hand, the seemingly unconnected song lyrics become part of a single stream-of-consciousness rant. On the other hand, they mimic the actual listening of the recording. You can’t just pick up at one point only to go to another. You read the lyrics in the way you listen to the recording: from beginning to end.

Top: rear sleeve to What Makes a Man Start Fires? (1982), also featuring artwork by Pettibon. Bottom: detail of sleeve (Photographs by Francisco Ramirez) Such presentation of lyrics rings quite familiar in this day of Facebook status messages and clipped 140character Twitter bursts. To be tapped into the constellation of social networking sites requires one to be clipped and to the point. It is as if one's online existence is reduced to short sentences and paragraphs. This kind of practice has a visual component: strange as it may seem, you only know if a person has updated their status or Twitter stream when a new sentence, phrase, or clause appear. Your existence in ætherized, online space is mediated by episodes of smallness: short messages, blips, utterances comprised of few characters that announce your presence to the world.

Top: book of poems by Charlotte, Emily, and Branwell Brontë measuring 2 3/4in x 1 1/2 in (Source). Bottom: excerpt from Charlotte and Branwell Brontë, The Secret (1833) (with accompanying ruler for scale) (Source)

Robert Walser, "A Will To Shake That Refined Individual," Microscript 215 (Source)

This kind of economy by virtue of size has some important precedents, to be sure. Emily and Charlotte Brontë (along with their brother, Branwell) wrote miniaturized “books” that were large enough to be held by dolls and often included their own maps and illustrations. Robert Walser composed thousands of cryptic “microscripts” on the backs of business cards, book covers, and other found paper objects using a special alphabet that was only millimeters high. For the Minutemen, however, their economy of size was inversely proportional to the influence of their output. Their shortened songs (with shortened lyrics) amounted to a music that was easily consumed and that delivered a maximum wallop. The visual presentation of their lyrics in condensed blocks of text was a vital part of this strategy.

______________________________

Notes

[1] An edited version of this piece appeared in Junk Jet 4, the "Statistics-of-Mystics" issue. A big "thank you" goes to Asli Serbest and Mona Mahall for letting me publish a version of this piece in their wonderful, offbeat "jetzine." [2] Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes From the American Indie Underground 1981-1991 (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2001), 71. (Note: this book's name is a reference to "History Lesson, Pt. 2," from Double Nickels on the Dime).

11/04/10--13:37: Seen and Not Seen

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Postcard depicting the Comte de Lambert's 1909 flight around the Eiffel Tower (Source: Wright State University Library Special Collections) The earliest, most well-known romance between architecture and aviation had everything to do with seeing ... and not seeing. We can look to the very opening moments of Le Corbusier's Aircraft (1935) to have this revealed before us, the portrait of the young architect as a young polemicist. The year is 1909, and the young Le Corbusier, then an apprentice in Auguste Perret's office, sequestered in a "student's garret on Quai St. Michel,"[1] hears a noise. It is the sound of the Comte de Lambert flying his Wright flyer around the Eiffel Tower. It may have not been the loudest noise in the world, and yet the aircraft's single 35-hp engine would have created enough of a distinguishable drone in the air to catch an unsuspecting ear. The flight was the latest event in what would be a watershed decade for the history French aviation—and a momentous occasion for Le Corbusier as well. This was, after all, the very moment when "men had captured the chimera and driven it above the city."[2] And yet the Comte's flight was literally obstructed by architecture. The noise was enough to cause our young architect to crane his head out the window, away from the building, so to speak, "to catch sight of this unknown messenger."[3] Such talk of messengers is wholly apposite, for as Le Corbusier tells us, it was some time later when Perret burst into his atelier brandishing a copy of L'intransigeant announcing Louis Blériot’s successful flight across the English Channel on July 25, 1909. These two events—the Comte de Lambert's fight around the Eiffel Tower and Blériot's channel crossing—have a special significance for narratives of architectural modernism in that they anticipate Le Corbusier's own romance with flight and flying machines. There are of course other, and in some cases, earlier and more fruitful instances where the cultures of architecture and aviation have merged. Yet what is important here is that this early entanglement with aviation would inform some of Le Corbusier's most important polemical statements about architecture.

Le Corbusier-Saugnier, "Des yeux qui ne voient pas ... Les Avions" L'Esprit nouveau No. 9 (1921) Within the pages of L'Esprit nouveau, the publication edited and published by Le Corbusier[4] and Amédée Ozenfant from 1920-1925, there appears a series of installments with the cryptic title "Des Yeux Qui Ne Voient Pas" ("Eyes That Do Not See"). The phrase, attributed to a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé called "Le phénomène futur,"[5] is an indictment of Le Corbusier's contemporaries, architects who are incapable of seeing without any sense of clarity, of not seeing what "is right before our eyes."[6] It is as much an appeal to contemporaneity as it is a demand for architects to really look at the various industrial objects around them to truly understand how to pose a design problem.[7] The first "Eyes That Do Not See" that appeared in L'Esprit nouveau No. 8 (1921) is about ships, and the second, from No. 9 (1921), concerned airplanes. Here, Le Corbusier looks to aircraft to demonstrate how architects should be looking at design problems. The logic goes something like this: if an airplane is a machine for flying, and a bomber a machine for bombing, then the reason why houses are not looked at as machines for living is that architects have not trained their eyes to really pose the question in this manner.[8] Thus the photographs of aircraft in the pages of L'Esprit nouveau No. 9, many of which would be reprinted in Le Corbusier's influential book, Vers une architecture (1923), serve a didactic purpose. They are evidence not only of design problems that are well-thought out, but also exhibited (if that's the appropriate term) to stand in stark contradiction to the work of contemporary architects. Hence the last spread in "Des Yeux Qui Ne Voient Pas ... Les Avions" (1921) pairs an ensemble of public and private buildings, all gaudy and overscaled, against the sleek lines of a Farman Goliath. Whereas Le Corbusier labels buildings by Marcel, LaJoie, Vorin, Lavirotte, Garriguenc, Gosselin, and Castel as "Le problème mal posé ... des yeux qui n'ont pas vu" ( "The badly posed problem .... by eyes that have not seen") [9], the Goliath, on the other hand, appears pristine against a cloudless sky. It is visible, obvious.

SPAD S.XIII from "Des yeux qui ne voient pas ... Les Avions" L'Esprit nouveau No. 9 (1921)

Farman F.40 from L'escadrille 44, France, 1916 (Source) (Note the horseshoes printed on the rear horizontal stabilizers: these also appear on the image in L'esprit nouveau) This is not to say, however, that the aircraft appearing in "Des Yeux Qui Ne Voient Pas ... Les Avions" or Vers une architecture were at the pinnacle of French aviation development. Much as the text rarely corroborates or references the images of aircraft, the vehicles themselves seem to have no relation to each other other than the fact that they are aircraft, and that many of their images are culled from publicity brochures and advertisements. Most are Maurice Farman designs. For example, the image on the title page of "Des Yeux Qui Ne Voient Pas" (reproduced in Vers une architecture) is a Farman F.40 from L'escadrille 44 flying a reconnaissance mission over Verdun sometime in 1916. By the time L'Esprit nouveau went to print, it was an airplane that had already been superseded by sleeker, faster, and bigger models, including the Goliath. How interesting, then, that one of the aircraft that Le Corbusier chooses to present is a SPAD XIII, one of the most celebrated aircraft of the First World War. In 1912, textile heir Armand Deperdussin founded the Société de Production des Aéroplanes Deperdussin. And with the help of aircraft designer and engineer Louis Béchereau, Deperdussin's company became famous for designing fast, single-engine monoplanes that became popular with foreign buyers. In 1913, Deperdussin became embroiled in a fraud scandal and was subsequently arrested and sentenced to trial. An external consortium of aviation experts appointed Béchereau as the head of Deperdussin's former company. The head of this consortium was none other than Louis Blériot, the very same pilot and aircraft designer who made the first crossing of the English Channel by plane in 1909. They renamed the company Société Pour L'Aviation et ses Dérivés, or SPAD. Under Béchereau's supervision, and just in time for the outbreak of the First World War, SPAD produced a series of agile, heavily armed biplanes, including the SPAD A-Series and the more successful S.VII. But it was the S.XIII, with its powerful 220-hp Hispano-Suiza engine, that became the one of the Allies' favored front-line fighters during the First World War. It was the very airplane that made French airmen Rene Fonck and Georges Guynemer, Italian pilot Franceso Baracca, and American aces Eddie Rickenbacker and Frank Luke famous. The caption underneath the picture of the S.XIII in L'Esprit nouveau identifies it as a "SPAD XIII Blériot." This is because in 1918, Blériot had purchased all the assets in Béchereau's company and taken over the production line. The new company, now named Blériot-SPAD, continued producing aircraft using the SPAD brand until 1921. This means that the aircraft depicted in L'Esprit nouveau was not technically produced by Blériot-SPAD (production of the S.XIII halted in 1919). In other words, it is an archival image probably used to depict the history of Blériot-SPAD's production line. This perhaps explains the appearance of Bécherau's name (he had left the company after the war to establish, along with Adolphe Bernard, a new company, the Société des Avions Bernard). The image is therefore a testament to the designer's legacy, perhaps a suggestion that it was Bécherau, and nor Blériot, that had posed the so-called design problem well.

Louis Blérior prepares for his cross-channel flight on 25 July 1909 (Source) The above materials, the ways in which they implicate Le Corbusier's interest in aircraft are well-known. So are the methods used to articulate this interest. Archival images and photographs, period newspaper and magazine clippings from the early 1920's are scoured by scholars. The idea here is that the proper contextualization of Le Corbusier's work requires finding direct correlations between the process of writing and laying out L'Esprit nouveau and Vers une architecture. It is a way of acknowledging the perniciousness of intentional fallacy. In other words, although the work of an author is of primary importance, there still added value in acknowledging the importance of other work that Le Corbusier may have consulted. But before we cast Blériot as the one who "had not seen," it is not only important to recall that this pioneering aviator was also an industrial designer, but also to recognize one of the central themes of this post. I am, of course, talking about seeing and not seeing—a distinction that invites another discussion as to the significance of the eye.[10] The idea of the disembodied eye is one that is indelibly woven into the fabric of modernity. Thus philosophy scholar Karsten Harries uses the term "Angelic Eye" to describe a "move to objectivity" to "defeat doubt."[11] This is, however, much more than a description of the commonly held view that objectivity and rationality are coextensive with modernity.[12] Historian Martin Jay points out, for example, that Harries is presenting a more complicated view, so to speak, one that considers how the disembodied eye "expressed the very human ability to see something from the point of view of the other."[13] This is a point of view that resonates well with one made earlier by Swiss literary critic Jean Starobinski in L'oeil vivant (The Living Eye) (1961). The subject of this book is the writer's eye, an eye with not only the capacity to see the world, its objects, and through its objects, but also with the ability to recognize its limits, to know when one cannot truly see.[14] Starobinski describes this tension between the desire to see everything and nothing in poetic terms: "One must refuse neither the vertigo of distance nor that of proximity; one must desire that double excess where the look is always near to losing all its powers."[15] If Starobinski's task is to warn of the dangers of "le regard surplombant" ("the look from above"), then it follows that a slightly different vantage point is needed, one that modulates between distance and proximity. My charge here is to describe this process of seeing as somewhere between a close reading and a general history. This entails recasting Starobisnki's idea of "le regard surplombant" as a medium-altitude scan. From this height, then, facts, events, texts, images become part of a larger fabric. And yet one of the benefits of observing from this height is that the fabric below appears as a much more fragmented surface. Subject to this medium-altitude scan—this bird’s-eye view of the bird’s-eye view, so to speak—the landscape below becomes a vexed object. No longer a smooth or continuous isotropic space, our subject is irregular, wrinkled, serrated. Actors, objects, histories shuttle in and out to complicate this vantage point. Consider how this complicates the connection between Le Corbusier and Louis Blériot that introduced this post. Until now, our brief survey of this period of Le Corbusier's works involved a close reading of his sources. These are moments of diligence: images are traced to specific publications, which are alluded to in letters between Le Corbusier and others, which, in turn create a tight, interconnected skein of sources and texts that give way to a historical picture. But now, moving a little higher to our medium-altitude vantage point, we note an additional series of texts and authors that, although not directly related to L'Esprit nouveau, are nevertheless instrumental to our understanding of it. And at this height, we can capitalize on the value of coincidence.

Top: Blériot ("PHI"-type?) dynamo; Bottom: Blériot dynamo placed on an engine flywheel (Source: Codd, Dynamo Lighting for Motor Cars [London: Spon, 1914]) Although he is more closely associated with developments in aviation, Blériot was also an important figure for automobile culture. And like many aircraft designers, he plied his trade in the design and manufacture of car parts before achieving fame as an aviator.[16] An issue of The Automobile from 1909—the very year that Blériot crossed the English Channel—announces his publishing of an airplane catalog "in which aeroplanes are listed in a commercial basis."[17] The announcement also mentions that Blériot's factory, on 16 Rue Duret in Paris, also specializes in the manufacture of custom woodwork for aircraft framework. And as early as 1902, a small listing in an issue of L'Aérophile (a publication started in the 1890's by the Aéro-Club de France) tells its readers that Blériot, "known throughout the automotive world for his powerful acetylene headlights" has just built a flying machine in that very same factory.[18] Blériot also became famous for designing the dynamos needed to power automobile headlights. Attached to an engine flywheel, the dynamo was a device that would generate the electricity needed to power a headlight thought constant, rapid revolutions. And in 1914, Mortimer Arthur Codd, a leading authority on the design of power components for automobiles, published a whole book devoted to the operation of headlights called Dynamo Lighting for Motor Cars. Codd surveys the entire European landscape of dynamo designers, and even devotes an entire section to Blériot's current dynamo, "modelled on the lines of a central station machine, its parts being of quite ordinary design and of considerable strength and robustness."[19] It is quite likely that the very dynamo presented in this pages a Blériot "PHI"-type design.

In 1910, Blériot published an ad in the pages of L'aérophile promoting this line of dynamos. The image is remarkable, even illuminating. It reads: "Une automobile sans dynamo 'PHI' c'est une visage sans yeux" ("A car without PHI dynamos is a face without eyes"). Underneath is a Modigliani-esque image, a stark, lean face carved out of the interplay between the blackness of the hair and brows and the whiteness of the skin. Earrings shaped like the Greek lowercase "phi" appear in lieu of ears. And the eyes, as the title declares, are missing. The implication Advertisement for Blériot PHI-type dynamo, L'Aérophile, 15 October 1910 here, of course, is that your car's headlights will not work without a set of Blériot dynamos. But it is the use of the face that really calls attention to the suggestive nature of this image. This is not just supposed to remind us of the front view of a car; it calls attention to the fact that the eyes are missing. Around the time that Ozenfant and Le Corbusier began to publish L'Esprit nouveau, they would have been familiar with an automobile's standard front-end light-and-radiator arrangements. When viewed as a front-end elevation, the front of the car would indeed have appeared as a face. Part of the reason for this particular style is that for dynamos to work properly and efficiently, they would have to be placed somewhere near the engine. This would require mounting headlight fairings as close as possible to the engine block: this proximity is what gives the front of the car its literal and figurative visage.

Drawings of radiator and front-end assemblies for automobiles (Source: The Autocar, 7 February 1912) This idea was not unfamiliar to automobile culture, however. Automotive industry trade publications in the early twentieth century published schematics showing the latest designs by car and parts manufacturers. And when showcasing the various kinds of radiators, such publications would often have to depict the front end of a car without its headlights. They were, in essence, publishing faces without eyes. A 1912 issue of the British automobile trade publication The Autocar devoted a whole section to radiators. Displayed in alphabetical order, the images are familiar in the sense that they are perspective drawings of the front ends of cars. But the lack of headlights makes them, if not unfamiliar, disconcerting, as if something was wrong with these cars. In the "D" section, there even appears the front end assembly for a Delage automobile.

Top: front end of Delage automobile without headlights; Bottom: front view of Delage Grand-Sport from L'Esprit nouveau No. 10. To get a sense of what a Delage would have looked like with its headlights mounted, one would only have to look through the pages of L'Esprit nouveau No. 10. And there, at the very end of an article named "Des Yeux Qui Ne Voient Pas ... Les Autos" is a photograph of the front end of a Delage Grand-Sport automobile. Like the images of aircraft in No. 9, this image also appears in Vers une architecture. And there, too, the image of the Delage Grand-Sport is juxtaposed against a photograph of the Parthenon. Jean-Louis Cohen has observed how these two images demonstrate how "the eyes of an era were invited to accept a literally iconoclastic rapprochement between Greek temples and automobiles."[20] The reference to eyes and vision are, of course, wholly intentional. And here, the issue of proper vision is couched in terms of standardization. In other words, Le Corbusier uses cars as examples of properly-posed questions in the sense that they represent the pinnacle of a design process (i.e., a standard).[21] To go one step further, however, this sense of vision correction would also apply to the various components that make up a car. And though many of the photographs have a distinct emphasis on form, Le Corbusier alludes to the importance of standardized components when he writes in Toward an Architecture that "All automobiles are essentially organized the same way."[22] Such talk of organization invites a larger discussion about the role of the historian and critic in sifting through these materials. Consider this moment from Henry Adams' "The Dynamo and the Virgin," his mediation on the significance of the dynamo exhibit at the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris: Historians undertake to arrange sequences,—called stories, or histories—assuming in silence a relation of cause and effect. These assumptions, hidden in the depths of dusty libraries, have been astounding, but commonly unconscious and childlike; so much so, that if any captious critic were to drag them to light, historians would probably reply, with one voice, that they had never supposed themselves required to know what they were talking about.[23] Briefly acknowledging that Adams is here writing under the spell of dynamos, it is nevertheless important to recognize that the very process that he is describing here is not unlike what Le Corbusier was doing while assembling the materials for L'Esprit nouveau and Vers une architecture. It is a description of organization, of a process that also recalls the kind of archival and interpretative heavy-lifting normally associated to historians. Yet the very sense of doubt that Adams alludes to here—doubt in historical and critical methods— should not be overlooked. It seems that the only recourse would be to remember the significance of the eye. And here, I am not talking so much about the eye that reads things closely. Nor am I referring to Starobinski's "view from above"—the eye that reads objectively. The eye I am talking to is neither subjective nor objective, but synthetic. It hovers somewhere above, not too high nor too low, and allows us to piece things together that do not necessarily correlate. Because from this vantage point, we are afforded the luxury to question those things that we look at, to invert and re-invert the relationships they have with other objects, institutions, and histories. To cast something not only as a car without headlights, but as a face without eyes. #lgnlgn --------------------------Notes

[1] Le Corbusier, Aircraft (London: The Studio, Ltd., 1935), 6. [2] Ibid. [3] Ibid. [4] For his various articles in L'Esprit nouveau, Le Corbusier signed his name as "Le Corbusier-Saugnier." [5] Jean-Louis Cohen, introduction to Toward an Architecture, by Le Corbusier, John Goodman, trans. (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute Publications, 2007), 13. For more on Le Corbusier's attitudes to poetry, see Francesco Passanti, "The Vernacular, Modernism, and Le Corbusier" Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 56, No. 4 (Dec., 1997), 447. [6] Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, p. 156. [7] For more about Le Corbusier's inventory of industrial objects within the pages of L'Esprit nouveau, see Beatriz Colomina, "Le Corbusier and Duchamp: The Uneasy Status of the Object" in Taisto H. Mäkelä and Wallis Miller, eds. Wars of Classification: Architecture and Modernity (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1991), 3762. A version of this essay, with more illustrations, appears in Colomina, "L'Esprit Nouveau: Architecture and Publicité,"in Colomina, et al. ed. Architectureproduction, Revisions 2 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988), 56-99. An analysis of Le Corbusier's interest in automobiles in relation to futurism can be found in Tim Benton, "Dreams of Machines: Futurism and l'Esprit Nouveau," Journal of Design History, Vol. 3, No. 1(1990), 19-34. [8] I am, of course, summarizing here. To better understand the intellectual milieu surrounding the idea of "Des Yeux Qui Ne Voient Pas," see Cohen's introduction to Vers une architecture, especially pp. 13-17. [9] Le Corbusier-Saugnier, "Des Yeux Qui Ne Voient Pas ... Les Avions" L'esprit nouveau No. 9 (1921), 986. [10] I began this discussion with my post on atemporality in the work of Reyner Banham, Albrecht Dürer, L.B. Alberti, and Herbert Bayer in Story of an Eye (and Another Eye, and Yet Another Eye) (posted to this is a456 on 19 March 2010). [11] Karsten Harries, "Descartes, Perspective, and the Angelic Eye, " Yale French Studies, No. 49, Science, Language, and the Perspective Mind: Studies in Literature and Thought from Campanella to Bayles (1973), 32. [12] For one of the most articulate and most recent rejections of this view, see Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, Catherine Porter, trans. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993); Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). For an expert dissection of Galison's idea of the "mesoscopic view," check out "Traditions of Practice: Mesoscopy, Materiality, and Intercalation", from the excellent history and historiography of science blog, Ether Wave Propaganda. [13] Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 81, n. 187. [14] Here I am paraphrasing Wallace Fowlie's review of the English translation of Starobinski's The Living Eye. See Fowlie, "Sight and Insight," The Sewanee Review, Vol. 97, No. 4 (Fall, 1989), cxx-cxxii. [15] Jean Starobinski, L'oeil vivant: Essais (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), quoted in Ibid., p. 20. [16] For more on this trend, see Herrick Chapman, State Capitalism and Working-Class Radicalism in the French Aircraft Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). [17] Anon. "Recent Trade Publications" The Automobile, Vol. 21, No. 22 (25 November 1909), 941. [18] Anon. L'Aérophile: revue pratique le la locomotion aérienne, No. 11 (Nov., 1902), 292: "Nous apprenons que M. Louis Blériot, l'ingénieur bien connu du monde de 1'automobile par ses puissants phares à l'acétylène, construit dans ses ateliers de la rue Duret une machine volante qu'il compte expérimenter sous peu." [19] Mortimer Arthur Codd, Dynamo Lighting for Motor Cars (London: E. & F.N. Spon, 1914), 61. [20] Cohen, introduction to Toward an Architecture, 17. [21] I am also being reductive here. For more information on standards and standardization, see Cohen's discussion of how Le Corbusier used the German word standart to describe this process in Ibid. [22] Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, 182. [23] Henry Adams, "The Dynamo and the Virgin" in The Education of Henry Adams (Boston: Houghton and Mifflin, 1918), 382.

12/15/10--08:36: A Sartorial Moment

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"The unveiling of the Palace of Soviets' model, Paris, 1931" (Source: Jean-Louis Cohen, Le Corbusier and the Mystique of the U.S.S.R.: Theories and Project for Moscow, 1928-1936, Kenneth Hylton, trans. [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992], 165)

We are confronted by a strange image.[1] Taken in 1931, this photograph reveals a surprising episode from one of Le Corbusier's most trying (and defining) moments—the competition for the Palace of Soviets. It captures the very moment when the architect reveals the architectural model for the first time. To the left, we see Pierre Jeanneret and another employee from Le Corbusier's studio in the rue de Sèvres, holding a white sheet they have just pulled away. The Palace of Soviets model sits freshly uncovered, or, to use T.S. Eliot's term, "etherized upon a table"[2], that is, not asleep, but made ethereal. The project's telltale arch and roofsupporting spars are immediately recognizable against the ghostly cloth. And on the right, standing just to the side of the model is Le Corbusier himself, wearing a trim, fitted suit, hands wrapped around a double bass. His left hand cranes the instrument's neck. The right hand strokes the strings above the fingerboard, a position that could be a little too high for proper pizzicato technique, but a show nonetheless. He may be pretending to play the instrument. We are, after all, watching a performance.

Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, Palace of Soviets, interior perspective (1931) (Source: Le Corbusier Le Grand [New York: Phaidon Press, 2008]).

Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, Palace of Soviets, axonometric drawing (1931). Perhaps it is the stark, uncompromising lighting, or even the stage-like composition that drapes the subjects in dark, void-like shadows and brilliant fields of white: there is something about this image that just seems so appropriate. Le Corbusier's competition entry, with its innovative programming, attention to acoustics, emphasis on closed air ventilation (or respiration exacte), and distinctive roof-supporting arch, was many things—skeletal frame of pure functionalism; death-knell for Constructivism; moment of clarity severing relationships between the European and Soviet avant-garde; explanation foreshadowing his support of Marshal Pétain. Yet the proposal remains enigmatic not because of its architectural gestures, but because of its fate. Le Corbusier's proposal, which could have been "perhaps the greatest building ever built"[3], never made it past the second round of the competition. On 28 February1932, a letter announced Ivan Zholtovsky, Boris Iofan, and Hector Hamilton as the winners. It was not Le Corbusier's first loss (he had been disqualified earlier from the Palace for the League of Nations competition). It was, however, his most stinging and significant defeat to date. The importance that Le Corbusier assigned to his proposal surely explains the ritual-like nature of its unveiling. But what was being veiled? Or, to use use the language of detectives and investigative magistrates, what was being uncovered? The amount of time and labor invested in this project is legendary, but why all the drama? Le Corbusier's status as a figure in the history of architecture is undisputed. But an opportunity should be taken to examine all possible aspects leading to this claim, and hence the issue of "unveiling" takes an additional significance. The use of sheets as well as the clothes that Le Corbusier wears in the photograph from 1928 to 1931—a period coinciding with his Moscow projects— take on an special significance. A familiar architectural metaphor is in order. Architecture not only constructs, but is constructed. The same applies to the designer: an architect not only creates, but is created. And sometimes an architect's sartorial bent is presented as evidence of his stature. The clothes not only make the man, but they also make the architecture. It seems as if no meditation or survey of Le Corbusier's life and work, whether intended for popular or scholarly audiences, overlooks the significance of his clothes. Thus in the introductory essay to the most recent omnibus volume of the architect's work, Jean-Louis Cohen writes how "The nearly geometric rigidity of [Le Corbusier's] figure in his corporeal and sartorial frame was evidently an artificial construct, a deliberately prepared camouflage."[4] The description is a nod to the idea of the modern architect as a person with a certain "look" that is not only cultivated in building and writing, but also in external appearances. This emphasis on appearances follows two separate, but complimentary tracks. One the one hand, the architect's sartorial nature is seen as a legitimizing move, a conscious effort to place himself within a certain historical narrative.[5] On the other, the various material artifacts in an architect's attire (coat, tie, glasses, pipe) contribute to an iconographic portrait that hides as much as it reveals. The architect therefore appears as "a global brand name and embodied logo veiling the reality of a large-scale collaborative practice."[6] Together, these two statements help explain the construction of the modern architect ... and the architect as a modern construct. Some amount of reexamination is in order. Both observations (rightly) privilege the image of the architect. Yet Cohen's implicit separation of Le Corbusier's figure into "corporeal" and "sartorial" selves merits further exploration. The image of the architect is still of importance, but the significance of clothing can be instrumentalized in such a way to unveil and reveal more about architecture and its role in the writing the history.

Le Corbusier at the Centrosoyuz site (Source: Jean-Louis Cohen, Le Corbusier et la mystique de l'URSS: Théories et projets pour Moscou, 1928-1936 [Bruxelles: Madraga, 1987], 9)

"A March morning, 1930. Snow still covers the izbas and brick buildings of Moscow. Dressed in a voluminous woolen overcoat and a wide-brimmed, peaked cap (both bought at the GUM[7]), Le Corbusier smiles, notebook in hand."[8] This sentence, the very first from Cohen's landmark study of Le Corbusier's exchanges with Moscow during 1930s, is almost unassuming of its descriptive power. The architect here is revealed both as a consumer and as a writer. Yet the accompanying image reveals very little about his architecture. We are made to understand that this picture was taken on the construction site of the Centrosoyuz, Le Corbusier's first major public building. And though Cohen mentions the scaffolding in the background that would eventually become the building, we see very little of it. In fact, like the expansive adjectives used to describe Le Corbusier's attire (the "voluminous" coat and "wide-brimmed" cap) this photograph calls more attention to clothing than to building. The figure of the architect—exhausted, contemplative, freezing—is caught in a candid and vulnerable moment that seems very far removed from the critical and exalted images of architects we are accustomed to.

Le Corbusier outside the Centrosoyuz site (Source: Le Corbusier Le Grand [2008]) It is only when we see the entire image that a different figure emerges. Here, staging and framing replace candor and vulnerability. The edge of the house that we see behind the architect now becomes a demarcator, separating the photograph into two areas that seem to be in dialogue with each other. On the right, a white apartment building frames the already familiar figure of Le Corbusier. This side of the image speaks to construction: a completed building foregrounds the constructed architect. To the left we can see the Centrosoyuz scaffolding more clearly. Its skeletal scaffolding foregrounds a singular, stripped wooden utility pole that occupies the same space as the architect in the right hand of the photograph. But whereas this pole is coexistent with the white building behind the architect, Le Corbusier's figure contrasts that of the Centrosoyuz. Whereas the building is the process of being built, the architect is swaddled in layers. The Centrosoyuz is exposed. The architect, protected. In other words, the building is naked, unclothed. The clothing metaphor here is, of course, wholly intentional. Design historian Adrian Forty observed how architecture thought since antiquity had, in some very notable cases, looked to textiles and clothing as a model for utility. If imitation is indeed more than a sincere form of flattery, then any discussions about architectural form, surface, or even structure benefited from imitating the applied arts: "Just as a person should dress according to their station in life, so architecture should be appropriate to the use and importance of the building."[9] Forty continues his analysis on through to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, looking to Gottfried Semper's analysis of walls as symbolic clothing, John Ruskin's writings on dress to argue for more naturalism in architecture, and Viollet-le-Duc's writings for evidence of the idea that good, well-constructed clothing should serve as a model for architecture.

American girl in tennis costume, from Sigfried Giedion, Befreites Wohnen (1929) (Source: Forty, "Of Cars, Clothes and Carpets: Design Metaphors in Architectural Thought: The First Banham Memorial Lecture," Journal of Design History, Vol. 2, No. 1 [1989], 13). Turning to the modern movement in architecture, he concludes his analysis with an image of a young girl in an "American tennis costume." Taken from Sigfried Giedion's Befreites Wohnen (Liberated Living) (1929), the image makes an immediate (and perhaps too easy) comparison between the telltale white surfaces of signature modern housing projects like those from the Weissenhofsiedlung in 1927 and the athlete's formfitting white garments.[10] For Forty, the white tennis outfit "allows good ventilation and freedom of movement for the body, in contrast to its imprisonment by the conventional airless and restrictive dwelling."[11] This image invites a more nuanced discussion about the idea of clothing as architecture. This equation is not as strange as it seems. After all, clothing and architecture are two kinds of interventions that protect humans from the natural environment. But this direct equation has a historical pedigree that is worth investigating. Consider, for example, Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus(1833). In that work, the English essayist and historian offers a sardonic and cutting jibe at German idealism in the guise of a novel about fashion. The main protagonist, a tailor named Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, offers a "philosophy of fashion" that compares changes in culture with changes in fashion. Yet Carlyle's invocation of an architectural metaphor is worth block-quoting: In all his Modes, and habilitory endeavors, an Architectural Idea will be found lurking; his Body and Cloth are the site and materials whereon and whereby his beautiful edifice, of a Person, is to be built. Whether he flow gracefully out in folded mantles, based on light sandals; tower up in high headgear, from amid peaks, spangles and bell-girdles; swell out in starched ruffs, buckram stuffings, and monstrous tuberosities; or girth himself into separate sections, and front the world an Agglomeration of four limbs,—will depend on the nature of such Architectural Idea: whether Grecian, Gothic, Later-Gothic, or altogether modern …[12] Note how this passage marks a transformation of sorts that mirrors the above analyses and foreshadows what is yet to come: clothing is at first something that constructs the architect, that capitalizes on the metaphoric relationship between dress and building, and that finally reaches its sartorial apotheosis—that clothing has become architecture. With Carlyle's invocation of various modes of dress now firmly in mind, Le Corbusier's sartorialisms now take on added significance. Here, I want to focus momentarily on a brief observation from Reyner Banham'sAge of the Masters: A Personal View of Modern Architecture (1962), namely, that Le Corbusier openly flaunted architectural modernism's uniform-like "white walls": For twenty years—thirty in the case of some critics—the defence of modern architecture was the defence of the uniform quite as much as the defence of Functionalism, and there are still people today who cannot accept a building as functional unless it wears the uniform gear. But already in the early thirties, Le Corbusier was adjusting his dress, and incorporating sporty or tweedy elements not accepted by the rest of the gang.[13] This is a provocative quote, an almost too-facile invocation of Le Corbusier's nerdy dress as a critique of functionalism and anti-fashion statement.[14] And indeed, a look at Le Corbusier in the Soviet Union, preparing for the building of the Centrosoyuz (and the competition for the Palace of Soviets), reveals how some of these fashion gaffes did operate as a critique of sorts.

Le Corbusier poses next to a Russian peasant woman. Photograph taken by Sergei Kozhin in 1928 (Source: Starr, "Le Corbusier and the U.S.S.R.: New Documentation" Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique, Vol. 21, No. 2 [Apr.-Jun., 1980], 218). Two photographs from 1928, taken by the young architect Sergei Kozhin in the Moscow countryside, show Le Corbusier in a literally different guise. The first is a tight medium composition framing Le Corbusier and an older peasant woman. It is, to say the least, a study in contrasts. The woman, head covered with a baboushka, her body clad in a large, dark overcoat and blanket, appears weatherbeaten. Her pose is natural, unassuming, and yet provides the viewer with a glimpse of hard living only years before forced collectivization would take hold. Le Corbusier, on the other hand, appears as a sartorial emissary wearing a felt bowler instead of a peaked cap, his "overstuffed" coat open revealing the tweedy garments that bemused Banham so much as to call attention to them.

Le Corbusier stands by a peasant hut on the Moscow countryside. Photograph taken by Sergei Kozhin in 1928 (Source: Starr, "Le Corbusier and the U.S.S.R.: New Documentation", 218). The second photograph shows the architect standing in front of a log house with pitched roof. Following Banham's suggestion, this is a very portrait of anti-fashion. Again, it is Le Corbusier's tweedy, rumpled garments that should call our attention here. But before we follow this tack and claim that his Tati-esque outfit complements or corresponds to the shabby house, it is important to note just how frail and small Le Corbusier appears in the photograph. It is an image where vernacular architecture overpowers the high modernist. There is more, however, for here are the beginnings of Carlyle's "Architectural idea." Kozhin's photograph of the log house shows Le Corbusier in a manner not unlike that of the elderly peasant woman's: he too is buried under layers of bulky clothing. But, to recall the very "Architectural idea" that introduced this post— unveiling and concealment—what exactly is hiding under all these layers? Is it, as Cohen noted, the architect's geometric figure? When comparing this image with that of the architect sitting in front of the Centrosoyuz scaffolding or during the unveiling of the Palace of Soviets, the lack of definition is notable. The only things that are recognizable are the shape of Le Corbusier's head and his signature black glasses. In other words, is it possible that the process of constructing the self involves a fair degree of concealment? In her study of C.G. de Clérambault's maligned course on drapery given at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1923, Joan Copjec provides us with a plausible answer to this question. It is an answer that involves, of all things, Le Corbusier's Vers une architecture (also from 1923). Copjec begins with telling quote from a 1928 lecture by Clérambault called "Classification of Draped Costumes": "a draped costume must be defined by the scheme of its construction."[15] She equates this "demand" with utility, and therefore sees a parallel development in the rise of functionalism in modern architecture theory. Citing the importance of Vers une architecture to this equation, Copjec notes that "It is at this point that style and ornament began to be considered precisely as clothing; their connection to the building, in other words, was taken as arbitrary rather than necessary, and they were thus viewed, for the first time, as the wrapping or covering of an otherwise nude building ... Functionalism, in the form of architectural purism, peaked, then, in a rending of clothing."[16] Literal unveiling now becomes a figurative shredding of clothes, a sartorial term describing the advent of a new architecture. Unveiling, whether through the removal of drapery or rending of clothing, becomes functional and reveals a building underneath.

A Functional Unveiling This description may seem tacit, but let us get back to the very image that started this discussion—the unveiling (or uncovering) of the Palace of Soviets from 1931—in order to understand its further implications. What this picture makes clear is that the very thing that is being uncovered is a building. And in fact, it was not only a new kind of building for Le Corbusier (it would have been his largest building to date), but also incorporated elements from other building types (separated circulation à laCharles Garnier, a concrete arch perhaps inspired by Eugène Freyssinet's dirigible hangar at Orly, classicist- and Beaux Arts-inspired biaxial symmetry) into an organic whole. Furthermore, the competition program required a spatial response to a new kind of building use—Le Corbusier's monument to the first Five-Year Plan incorporated two auditoria that could house and move 22,000 spectators along a system of sloped floors. The building was, in the architect's estimation, not just big, but bol'shoi (big), a project that envisaged the whole of the Soviet Union.[17] Unveiling also suggests another kind of architectural valence, one that this post has attempted to utilize. If unveiling amounts to a kind of functionalism, then it follows that in terms of the writing of history, the uncovering of facts and details demonstrates another utility, that of constructing something general from something specific. It is an indirect kind of knowledge, one that not only emphasizes the (sometimes) conjectural value of an inference ("I will build an argument from the following clues"), but that also recognizes the importance of telepresence ("I will have to build an argument from the available information here because I cannot be there to assemble all possible clues"). But then again, we may have come full circle and understand the value of weaving a tapestry in lieu of uncovering it to detect something. The cloth therefore becomes a metaphor for the writing of history.[18]

Inverted Commas But let us look at the image of the unveiling of the Palace of Soviets even closer. Follow the hands. Specifically, the hands framing this scene. On the left, one of the draughtsmen holds his right hand up in the air, his wrist bent at a downward angle. To the right, Le Corbusier's left hand straddles claw-like to the middle range of the double bass's fingerboard. These are hands that appear as quotes. This calls to mind a brief moment from Colin Rowe's "Mathematics of the Ideal Villa" (1947), his influential study of the value of historical references to Le Corbusier's work. Rowe has this to say about the designer of the Palace of Soviets: "with Le Corbusier there is always an element of wit suggesting that the historical (or contemporary) reference has remained a quotation between inverted commas, possessing always the double value of the quotation, the associations of both old and new context."[19] This is more than an apt description of Le Corbusier's afflictions for history. It is also more than a reference to the Palace of the Soviets sitting there in the middle between these two inverted commas. It could very well describe the writing of this post. __________________ Notes

[1] This image appears only in the English translation of Jean-Louis Cohen's Le Corbusier and the Mystique of the U.S.S.R.: Theories and Projects for Moscow 19281936, Kenneth Hylton, trans. (New York: Princeton University Press, 1992). The image is attributed to the personal collection of Orestis Maltos. [2] The quote comes from the third line of Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1917). [3] Robert Furneaux Jordan, Le Corbusier (London, 1972), 57-58, quoted in Frederick Starr, "Le Corbusier and the U.S.S.R.: New Documentation," Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Apr.-Jun., 1980), 213. [4] Jean-Louis Cohen, "The Man With a Hundred Faces," in Le Corbusier Le Grand (New York: Phaidon, 2008), x. [5] Mark Jarzombek, "The Saturations of Self: Stern's (and Scully's) Role in (Stern's) History," Assemblage, No. 33 (Aug., 1997), 13: "[Stern's] monochromatic dark suit, the conservative tie, the silk handkerchief in the vest pocket, the Mona Lisan smile, the coat draped capelike over the shoulders speak of him not only as a successful member of the working bourgeoisie, but also as the holder of important spiritual and aesthetic values. The soft tones of the face and the direct glance imply a tenderness that seems to be pulled out of the reluctant architect by the studied focus of the camera. The hands are interlocked in a calm, meditative pose, while the scrolls project forward out of his coat like Samurai swords at the ready. The endearing qualities of the architect are posited here in reference to the enduring qualities of history." [6] Jeffrey T. Schnapp, "The Face of the Modern Architect," Grey Room, No. 33 (Fall 2008), 9-10. [7] ГУМ, or Glavnyi Universalnyi Magazin, the main department store in Moscow, designed in 1890-1893 by Alexsander Pomerantsev and Vladimir Shukhov. [8] Cohen, Le Corbusier and the Mystique of the U.S.S.R.: Theories and Projects for Moscow 1928-1936, xi. [9] Adrian Forty, "Of Cars, Clothes and Carpets: Design Metaphors in Architectural Thought: The First Banham Memorial Lecture," Journal of Design History, Vol. 2, No. 1(1989), 10. [10] The relation between fashion and modern architecture has generated a very substantial body of literature. Though a review of this literature could well require many long posts, it is worth acknowledging the many instances in which modern architects not only wrote about, but also designed clothes. These include figures such as Otto Wagner, Josef Hoffman, Henry Van de Velde and Frank Lloyd Wright. Le Corbusier, of course, also fits this bill perfectly, as he featured fashion accessories in his articles for L'Esprit Nouveau as well as in L'Art decoratif d'aujourd'hui (1931) (appearing later as The Decorative Art of Today, James I. Dumont, trans. [Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: MIT Press, 1987]). Any discussion about the role of white clothing and white modernist buildings is indebted to Mark Wigley's White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2001). It is also important to note most of the historical literature that associated architectural modernism with fashion appeared in the early 1990's. Some notable examples include Deborah Fausch, Paulette Singley, Rodolphe El-Khoury, and Zvi Elfrat, eds. Architecture: In Fashion (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1991); Wigley, "White-Out: Fashioning the Modern," in Fausch, et al., Architecture: In Fashion, 148-268; and Wigley, "White-Out: Fashioning the Modern [Part 2]," Assemblage, No. 22 (Dec., 1993), 6-49 (these last two texts appear later in White Walls, Designer Dresses). The best historiographic and analytical treatment appears in Leila W. Kinney, "Fashion and Fabrication in Modern Architecture," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 48, No. 3, Architectural History 1999/2000 (Sep., 1999), 472-481. This essay is important as it situates the production from the early 1990s within larger art historical, theoretical, and architectural contexts. [11] Forty, "Of Cars, Clothes and Carpets," 12. [12] Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinons of Herr Teufelsdrocke (London: 1833), quoted in George Van Ness Dearborn, "The Psychology of Clothing," in James Rowland Angell, ed. The Psychological Monographs, Vol. 26 (1918-1919), vii. [13] Reyner Banham, Age of the Masters: A Personal View of Modern Architecture (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 39, quoted in Wigley, "White-Out: Fashioning the Modern [Part 2],"7. [14] It is worth noting that Wigley's "White-Out" is a thorough investigation of this idea of anti-fashion and how it informed the construction of modern architecture, "a close examination of the way in which the white surface emerged out of architectural discourse's prolonged, but largely suppressed engagement with the antifashion movement in fashion design." Ibid., p. 8. [15] G.G. de Clèrambault, "Classification des costumes drapés," quoted in Joan Copjec, "The Sartorial Superego" October, Vol. 50 (Autumn, 1989), 66. [16] Copjec, "The Sartorial Superego," 67. I am not doing justice to Copjec's argument: in this piece, she looks at the relationship between drapery and utility in the construction of a postcolonial subject. Her invocation of Le Corbusier and architecture criticism locates Clèrambault's work within a larger cultural context. [17] Le Corbusier declared that until convinced of the meaning of "big" vis-à-vis the Palace of Soviets, he had understood "Bolshevik" to be "a man with a red beard and a knife between his teeth." Frederick Starr, "Le Corbusier and the U.S.S.R.: New Documentation," Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Apr.Jun., 1980), 211. [18] Carlo Ginzburg and Anna Davin, "Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method," History Workshop, No. 9 (Spring, 1980), 23. [19] Colin Rowe, "Mathematics of the Ideal Villa," in Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1982), 15 (italics added).

12/23/10--08:57: Happy Holidays

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Christmas card by Bob Wirth depicting LCM Chair as Santa Claus. Sent to Charles and Ray Eames in 1948 (Source) A quick note to thank everyone for helping make 2010 a great year for this is a456. I could not have done this without your support and enthusiasm. See you in 2011!

01/13/11--19:58: Symposium Season

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A quick note to remind readers of a symposium I am helping organize at Princeton. Called "Teaching Architecture, Practicing Pedagogy," this event is dedicated to new research on the history of architectural education in the twentieth century. It will take place at the Princeton University School of Architecture on February 11-12, 2011.

For more information about the event, please visit the symposium website. Hope to see you there!

01/24/11--20:51: Utopia For Sale

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Stanley Resor (1879-1962) (Source: Karen E. Mishra, "J. Walter Thompson: Building Trust in Troubled Times," Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, Vol. 1, No. 2 (2009), 246-269) The idea that good design matters seems so pervasive as to be a near-truism. One would be hard pressed to find materials — books, magazines, podcasts, et cetera — that do not bemoan a lack of good design. But what is meant by the term “good design”? Is it an objective term describing an object’s particular qualities, or is it a function of a user’s subjectivities? Enter the leagues of design experts, writers, and consultants willing to provide guidance and polemics. Consider, for example, a 2001 roundtable discussion from Wired called “A Conversation About the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” Featuring a diverse body of designers and thinkers, the piece appears as a series of infinitely quotable morsels that dissect previously held misconceptions about the value of design while at the same time offering a bit of prognostication tinged with some historical reflection. At one point, Paola Antonelli, a senior curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), claims that “People think that design is styling. Design is not style. It’s not about giving shape to the shell and not giving a damn about the guts.”[1] When compared along with everything else said during the discussion, this statement appears as a moment of untrammeled clarity, a provocation aimed to steer everyone away from a potentially meandering conversation about design. But it is also important to consider the rest of Antonelli’s quote, especially when she claims that “Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need, and beauty to produce something that the world didn’t know it was missing.” [2] These quotes appeared almost ten years ago, yet they echo those of a similar debate occurring among American design and corporate circles in the 1920’s and 1930’s. In 1928, Art Deco designer Paul T. Frankl remarked that “Simple lines … tend to cover up the complexities of the machine age. If they do not do this, they at least divert our attention and allow us to feel ourselves master of the machine.”[3] Frankl here was writing about the rising demand for beauty in products, a demand that appeared sometime around the 1920’s when consumers became more interested covering the above-mentioned guts with a pretty shell and demanded more “attractive” products as opposed to “haphazard, disorderly” goods that evoked a “engineered as you go” look.[4] This emphasis on attractiveness would reach its clearest and most effortless expression only four years later in the pages of Norman Bel Geddes’ industrial design manifesto Horizons (1932). With sumptuous images of cars, airplanes, trains, houses and furniture — all designed by Bel Geddes — the former stage designer now turned design expert applied the visual vocabulary of aerodynamic and hydrodynamic design to a host of industrial and consumer objects. Along with the work of other early twentieth century industrial designers like Raymond Loewy, Walter Dorwin Teague or Henry Dreyfuss, Bel Geddes’ projects are often heralded as examples par excellence of streamlined design.

Diagram explaining principle of streamlined design, from Norman Bel Geddes, Horizons (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1932) With graceful curves and ovoid shapes evoking speed and efficiency, streamlining was more “an aesthetic device rather than an aerodynamic one.”[5] Yet the difference was often not so clear. Streamlined designs only mimicked fundamental ideas about countering air resistance, instead capitalizing on the visual appeal of smooth, clean forms and surfaces to sell more units. This was not lost on critics. In 1933, Douglas Haskell, one of the first American critics of modern architecture, wrote a scathing review of Horizons, noting that Bel Geddes’ wrote not much more than a “lucid story … in which the technical details have been either flattened out or spirited away to form no obstacle to the technical reader.”[6] Yet as other have indicated before, he was an advocate of a scientific approach to streamlining. Thus for “Streamlining,” an article penned for the November 1934 issue of Atlantic Monthly, Bel Geddes namechecked theoretical aerodynamicists like Ludwig Prandtl with apparent ease for the purpose of educating the general public about the scientific principles that supposedly informed streamlined design of radios and toasters. This insistence on articulating a scientific basis appeared even earlier in Horizons when he mentioned efforts of aircraft designers like Glenn Curtiss in applying principles of aerodynamic design to automobiles. Yet such arguments were marshaled in service of an argument about aesthetics. And in some instances, critics were nevertheless quick to point out that in those moments where science was being invoked, Bel Geddes’ research on aerodynamics was still fraught with error. Despite all of these faults, his efforts in promoting aerodynamic principles nevertheless calls to mind the observation that good design involves issues of “technology, cognitive science, human need, and beauty.” Furthermore, describing streamlining as a direct application of scientific thought to the creation of beautiful industrial objects underlines how advertising and aerodynamics were far from strange bedfellows. In fact, it was Bel Geddes’ interest in streamlining as a discipline that unified these two realms. Aeronautical engineering developed out of naval engineering as its own separate discipline around the First World War. It was born not only of developments in practical and theoretical aerodynamics, but also from rapid changes in aircraft technology. It finds a contemporary equivalent in psychology, a discipline that was trying to unshackle itself from field of philosophy. In both instances, issues of application were at stake. Both would find their respective homes in laboratories. The challenge for aeronautical engineers rested in applying their knowledge to the evaluation and testing of military and commercial aircraft designs using scale models in wind tunnels. Psychologists faced an analogous situation: they had to create conditions and experiments in which to apply their studies and conclusions about human subjects to real world situations.The latter, of course, is one way to describe the rise of what would be called behaviorist psychology. The term came to be used in professional circles in 1913, when John B. Watson defined behaviorism as an “experimental branch of natural science” whose “theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior.”[7] This regimen of prediction and control relied on an experimental regime that sought to induce certain actions and reactions in subjects in laboratory conditions through behavioral modification. Watson’s insistence that behaviorism was “a study of what people do”[8] would become the foundation for a “science of advertising” in the 1930s. This came out of his belief that behaviorism alone could transform psychology from a discipline muddled in introspection to one bearing the imprimatur of a science. Watson therefore claimed that “If psychology would follow the plan I suggest, the educator, the physician, the jurist and the businessman could utilize our data in a practical way.”[9] This was because the behaviorist principles of prediction and control not only were the foundations for psychology: they applied to all sciences. [10] This line of thinking would find a home outside academia and inside the corporate office. Advertising agencies became increasingly interested in the idea of modifying consumer behavior. And indeed, the term often associated with this impulse — ”consumer engineering” — demonstrated that the engineering metaphor was one that advertising agencies could use to adopt the “vestiges of science.”[11]

Dedication to Stanley Resor, from John B. Watson, Behaviorism (1924) In 1920, Watson left academia to join the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in New York. With offices in Boston, Chicago, and London, J. Walter Thompson was at the time the largest and most successful agency of its type. This was due partly to the role played by Stanley B. Resor [12], J. Walter Thompson's visionary president who imbued his agency’s culture with a corporate ethos that accommodated Watson’s behaviorist thinking easily. Resor was also an early advocate of advertising as a scientific discipline — something that no doubt appealed to Watson, himself seeking a forum in which to apply his ideas. Starting as an ethnographer and salesman, Watson eventually became a Vice President at J. Walter Thompson by 1924. In 1925, he also dedicated an edition of Behaviorism, the book in which he would outline all his theories, to Resor, whose “unfailing interest in both industry and science” inspired Watson.[13] He would wield a powerful influence over Resor, who would continue to use his studies to not only rationalize advertising, but to understand consumer behavior (a development that led to the pioneering use of medical data as part of consumer research). And as head of research, he oversaw several important accounts such as Ponds, whose advertisements pioneered the use of customer testimonials in print and radio formats.

Architectural projects by Norman Bel Geddes: (Top) Factory for Toledo Scale Company (1929) (Source: Bel Geddes, Horizons [1932]); (Bottom) Auditorium for J. Walter Thompson Agency (1929) (Source: Jeffrey L. Meikle, Twentieth Century Limited:Industrial Design in America, 1925-1929 [Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001], 52) In 1936, around the time that Watson left J. Walter Thompson for another agency, Resor contacted Bel Geddes to gauge his interest in being a design consultant for an upcoming ad campaign. The two men were already familiar: in 1929 Resor had given Bel Geddes his first architectural projects. One was for Thompson client Toledo Scale Company: a factory whose curvilinear façades mimicked Erich Mendelsohn’s department stores (Mendelsohn met Bel Geddes during his 1924 trip to the United States), and whose banded glazing contains an echo of Walter Gropius’ and Adolf Meyer’s factory and office for the 1914 Werkbund Exhibition. Another was perhaps the signature J. Walter Thompson project: the redesign of the conference room and auditorium for the agency’s New York office. Tall floor-to-ceiling windows with alternating curtains gave this space a dramatic verticality, one which no doubt recalled the tall central court of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Administration Building. Though the conference room was much more of a renovation and opportunity to install newly-designed pieces of furniture, and though the Toledo factory was part of a study that never came to fruition, Resor would require Bel Geddes for a kind of architectural expertise that would merge with the J. Walter Thompson philosophy.

Bel Geddes, aerial photograph of "The City of Tomorrow" model for Shell Oil/J. Walter Thompson (Source: Adnan Morshed, "The Aesthetics of Ascension in Norman Bel Geddes's Futurama," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 63, No. 1 [Mar., 2004], 88) It was under such a climate that Resor finally contracted with Bel Geddes to partake in a study of traffic and automobile use for Shell Oil. The contract originally stipulated for Bel Geddes to provide sketches of projects designed to portray and alleviate “the-Traffic-Conditions-of-the-Future.” And as detailed by historian Jeffrey L. Meikle in his study of this project, Bel Geddes far superseded the expectations and created a entire city and interstate highway system in miniature, complete with multi-level, complex, automated interchanges accommodating both car and pedestrian traffic, Beaux-Arts-inspired open spaces, as well as a distribution of large skyscrapers suggesting Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin of 1925 (a project which, as it should be pointed out, was sponsored by an automobile manufacturer).[14] He assembled a research and development team that included Worthen Paxton, a Yale-trained architect who was a fixture in Bel Geddes’ office, an artist who went by the name of “Berdanier” (possibly the American illustrator Paul Frederick Berdanier), Brooks Stevens, an industrial designer who later became famous for his car designs as well as the phrase “planned obsolescence,” and Thompson executive William Day.[15] The resulting model, triangular in plan and built to a scale of 1 inch equalling 100 feet, featured 11,000 teardrop-shaped vehicles and 90,000 metal pins representing pedestrians.[16] Bel Geddes and his design team organized the model into “280 standard city blocks, drawn to scale to measure 250 by 500 feet.”[17] Eighty-five of these blocks were covered by lowslung, horizontally-oriented buildings. The rest contained tall, 1,500-scale foot tall wooden “skyscrapers,” many with curving façades and bristling aerials.[18] It terms of its overall scope and direction, Bel Geddes’ project evoked and perhaps rivaled other visionary projects, such as Eugène Hénard’s studies of Paris made in 1904 and 1905, Tony Garnier’s Une Cité Industrielle (1917-18), Le Corbusier’s urban plans from Urbanisme (1925) and Precisions (1930), and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City (which had already been discussed in a 1935 issue of Architectural Record). It bears mentioning that though Bel Geddes was by no means an urban or regional planning expert, he had previously articulated his thoughts about urban design in Horizons. Specifically, he considered the skyscraper as a basic unit of urban design, noting how “If the Empire State Building, instead of covering merely a quarter of a block, covered the whole block, and went as much higher as necessary, it would accommodate all the people now working within the surrounding half dozen blocks and accommodate them more comfortably than they are accommodated at the present moment … Such a building would the population of a fair-sized city and contain every element that a city would need to function, — its own fire department, hospital and police department.”[19] Like Le Corbusier, he believed that this approach would create more open green space. It was also a design principle that could apply to small and rural municipalities as well. And yet for all his passion for the subject, Bel Geddes only discussed matters of mobility as they applied to pedestrian circulation inside and outside these large buildings. The project for Shell Oil and J. Walter Thompson was something altogether different. Far more than a template for urbanism in the future, Bel Geddes’ model, which he labeled “The City of Tomorrow,” would be an object used to instruct audiences in the importance of transportation planning as it related to the design of cities. It promoted the building of better highways while advocating for the increased use of personal automobiles in the years to come. The idea that the model was to serve a didactic purpose while convincing consumers to buy more Shell gasoline was a tried and true J. Walter Thompson tactic. Yet the project would also suit Resor’s interest in making advertising more scientific through the use of experts. “The City of Tomorrow” thus fit the J. Walter Thompson agency ethos by capitalizing on the public’s perception of Bel Geddes as an expert and “scientific” designer. Yet another dimension of expertise would be applied to the project. Before the actual model for “The City of Tomorrow” began to be built, Bel Geddes had already began to include traffic expert Miller McClintock in its design.

The experts: (Top) Miller McClintock and Bel Geddes working on "The City of Tomorrow" (Source: Thought Equity/HBO Archives); (Bottom) Bel Geddes as traffic authority (Source: "This Is The City of Tomorrow," Life [5 July 1937]) As the “No.1 Man in U.S. Traffic Control,”[20] McClintock was ideal for the Shell Oil project. In 1925, McClintock wrote Street Traffic Control, a book which gained him a position in the newly-formed Albert Russel Erskine Bureau for Street Traffic Research at Harvard (started by a gift of the Studebaker Motor Company). Street Traffic Control was a comprehensive and comparative study of traffic regulations in the United States. It also surveyed and evaluated existing design recommendations such as curb-cuts, traffic islands, and signal towers in order to promote what he saw as the primary goals of traffic control. As McClintock would put it, “Free and rapid of persons and commodities over the city streets is essential for the prosperity of the community, but this necessity must always be counterbalanced by the even greater necessity to protect the lives of those who use the streets.”[21] And like Bel Geddes, McClintock also took opportunities to spread his views via articles in popular magazines. In 1936 and 1937, an article for Fortune as well as interviews in Scribner’s and Time had made him somewhat of a household name. These pieces introduced another line of McClintock’s theories, one that would invoke Bel Geddes and Resor in an unexpected way. McClintock depicted issues of traffic congestion using the language of hydrodynamics and aerodynamics. As stated in Time magazine: “The remedy is Dr. McClintock's ‘limited way,’ a road following hydraulic principles by ‘delivering traffic as in a sealed conduit past all conflicting eddies.’ It has four elements: 1) A dividing strip down the road's centre ; 2) over and underpasses with cloverleaf detours at every intersection; 3) denial to abutting property of direct access to the highway; 4) acceleration and deceleration lanes for fast and slow traffic. All four forms of friction are largely cured by these four elements. But few roads exemplify them all.”[22] This reliance on a scientific metaphor has not been lost on historians, some of who do not shy away from using the language of streamlining. Thus when referring to “The City of Tomorrow” model, business and advertising historian Roland Marchand observes that “A system of widely spaced, immense skyscrapers would allow for more health-promoting open space within the cities and the speed and efficiency of the highways into the city would allow more people to live in peripheral towns and suburbs, affording workers a more wholesome suburban life.”[23] Meikle observes how McClintock “wanted to streamline the flow of traffic, just as industrial designers hoped that their modernistic products would streamline the flow of goods from producers to consumers by overcoming sales resistance.”[24] This last statement is provocative as it alludes to how “The City of Tomorrow” dovetails with Bel Geddes’ and Resor’s interests. Meikle’s observation frames the behaviorist desire to modify and control behavior in aerodynamic terms: behavioral efficiency now becomes “overcoming sales resistance.” With these in mind, it is now possible to understand how “The City of Tomorrow” would leverage architecture as part of a distinct and compelling vision of urban living. This is because like airplanes, trains, cars, or refrigerators, architecture could be branded as an example of good, beautiful design. And this meant that a beautiful building (or city) was the very thing that could inspire a consumer not only to buy more products, but to also buy into a vision of the future. All would come to fruition in a series of full-page advertisements for Shell taken out in Life and Saturday Evening Post in 1937. Photographed by Bel Geddes’ associate Richard Garrison, “The City of Tomorrow” appears as a pristine metropolis only slightly occluded by wisps of fog and yet draped in dramatic shadows. Some photographs utilize shallow focus to give a sense of the extraordinary scale and space being depicted. In others, the model appears as if photographed on a sound stage. Yet all of the advertisements follow a similar structure. They begin with a quote from Bel Geddes, touted in the ads as an “expert in future trends.” From that point on, explanatory texts describe Garrison’s photographs, many which focus on the relation between the city and the highway (or architecture and automobile). Everything about these images indeed suggest that the relationship between these two is unequal. More importantly, they envision the year 1960 as much more than an era of mobile urbanism, but one where highway planning becomes the primary engine for urban design.

"In 25 Years You'll Swing Into Main Street At 50" Life (26 June 1937)

"This Is The City Of Tomorrow" Life (5 July 1937)

"Tomorrow's Children Won't Play In The Streets" Life (9 August 1937)

"In Average City, U.S.A., You'll Breeze Right Over Cross-Town Traffic By 1960" Life (30 August 1937)

"Motorists of 1960 Will Loaf Along At 50 — Right Through Town" Life (11 October 1937)

"Sidewalks of Tomorrow To Be Elevated" Life (1 November 1937) “Today 4 miles in 5 are stop and go — the most annoying, the most costly type of driving there is.” With these concluding words, each of the Shell ads created a dissonance of sorts and leveraged the very thing identified as causing problems — traffic jams — into a justification for buying more gasoline. Copy and image combined to depict an urbanism that was dysfunctional not because of the way architects and planners designed and laid cities, but rather because of impediments to traffic. Furthermore, these impediments were portrayed as costly. If consumers could not live in “The City of Tomorrow,” they could at least approximate the experience by buying “Super Shell,” the “motor-digestible” gasoline whose “daily use will save on your daily stop and go.” Here, then, was the perfect amalgamation of Resor’s interest in consumer engineering, McClintock’s insistence in traffic reduction as design consideration, and Bel Geddes’ fascination with commercialized versions of European and American modernism. Utopia was not far off in the future. In fact, it was very much in the present: beautiful, pristine, desirable, and most of all, fueled by gas. It all somehow rings familiar. During the early 20th century, art and architecture never existed wholly isolated from popular culture, consumerism, or corporate interests. This was the case in Europe as it was in the United States. As Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin or the various Revere Copper and Brass ads that would appear in the United States in the 1940s demonstrate[25], corporate interests sometimes found an unlikely alliance with the avant-garde. But with Bel Geddes and “The City of Tomorrow,” something slightly different was in order. The author of Horizons did see himself primarily as an artist, but never in the same vein as would Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, or Erich Mendelsohn. As a person who always wore his commercial aspirations on his sleeve, Bel Geddes became a figure willing to leverage his artistic inclinations not only as a kind of expertise, but as a vehicle for transmitting ideas about contemporary urbanism to mass audiences. He was, in many ways, a person who popularized utopia by giving it its most tangible and visibly-appealing manifestation. This would be the case when, following on the footsteps of his successful Shell campaign, Bel Geddes was called to work for General Motors to design another “City of Tomorrow” for the "Futurama" exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

City of Tomorrow: Model 1939: (Top) Visitors gazing at Bel Geddes' "Futurama" model at the 1939 World's Fair in New York (Source: Morshed, "The Aesthetics of Ascension in Norman Bel Geddes's Futurama," 75); (Bottom) Cover to Magic Motorways (1940), Bel Geddes' book about the "Futurama" exhibit. “The City of Tomorrow” was also an instance of how corporations could play the role of patron and curator. Like other professions and institutions, corporations sought “social and moral legitimacy”[26] and would turn to the arts and architecture to achieve that goal.[27] Bel Geddes’ "Futurama" would certainly prove the point, yet it is also important to note the role that advertising agencies played in such schemes. Historian Andrew Shanken, for example, has observed how the most utopian of mantras — “Better Living” — originated as part of a 1935 campaign to reverse Du Pont’s negative public image.[28] The agency of record for that account, Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn (BBDO), would like J. Walter Thompson, shape the American advertising company landscape in the years to come. Shanken continues, noting how the term “Better Living” experienced a blowback of sorts: The phrase changed from an appeal for business legitimacy to a home-front anticipation of postwar plenty, when manufacturers of building materials vied for control of the postwar building boom. Yet it also appeared in less commercial architectural and building literature, in “how-to” and do-it-yourself literature, and in the publicity of the building trades. More surprisingly, the phrase continued to resonate after the war, as urban planning organizations conscripted the phrase for their own publicity in a moment when the planning profession was reaching out for public relations techniques to communicate to the lay public.[29] Perhaps, then, something of the same order happened with the idea of “good design.” The case of Bel Geddes’ “The City of Tomorrow” shows how good design became less of a functionalist idea and more of an ad copy technique. It was a strategy that relied on architectural modernism as a kind of visual commodity even before the heady, postwar output of firms like Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. And designers would eventually use similar techniques as part of their professional practice to "condition" clients much like Resor or Bel Geddes — and they continue to do so to this day. __________ Notes

[1] Chee Pearlman, “A Conversation About the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” Wired 9.01 (Jan., 2001), available at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.01/forum.html. [2] Ibid. An unattributed version of this quote also appears in Virginia Postrel, The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness (New York: Harper Collins, 2004), 178. [3] Paul T. Frankl, New Dimensions: the Decorative Arts of Today in Words and Pictures (New York: Brewer and Warren, 1928), 17. [4] Raymond Loewy, Never Leave Well Enough Alone (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1951), 11, quoted in Carma R. Gorman, “Educating the Eye: Body, Mechanics and Streamlining in the United States, 1925-1950” American Quarterly, Vol. 58, No. 3 (2006), 839. [5] Gorman, “Educating the Eye”, 840. [6] Douglas Haskell, “A ‘Stylist’s’ Prospectus,” Creative Art 12 (Feb., 1933), 126, 132-33, quoted in Jeffrey L. Meikle, Twentieth Century Limited: Industrial Design in America, 1925-1939 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979), 148. [7] John B. Watson, “Psychology As the Behaviorist Views It,” Psychological Review, Vol 20, No. 2 (Mar., 1913), 158. [8] Quoted in Peggy J. Kreshel, “John B. Watson at J. Walter Thompson: The Legitimization of ‘Science’ in Advertising” Journal of Advertising, Vol. 19, No. 2 (1990), 50. [9] Watson, “Psychology As the Behaviorist Views It,” 168. [10] Kreshel, “John B. Watson at J. Walter Thompson: The Legitimization of ‘Science’ in Advertising,” 53. [11] Ibid., p. 50. [12] Resor is familiar to architecture audiences as one of Mies van der Rohe's first American contacts. Known better though a collage suggesting how its floor-toceiling windows looked out into the landscape, Mies' Resor House at Snake River Ranch in Jackson Hole, Wyoming remains one of his most enigmatic projects. For more about the location of Resor's house and Mies' involvement, see Michael Cassity "National Register of Historic Places Registration Form: Snake River Ranch" (27 October 2003) National Park Service (available at http://pdfhost.focus.nps.gov/docs/NRHP/Text/04001089.pdf). One account of Resor's first contacts with Mies can be found in Cammie McAtee, "Alien 5044325: Mies’s First Trip to America," in Phyllis Lambert, ed., Mies in America (Montreal, Canada: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2001), 132-91, and "Alien 5044325: Mies’s First Trip to America" Harvard Design Magazine 14 (Summer, 2001), 69-75. [13] Watson, Behaviorism (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1925), n.p. [14] Meikle, “The City of Tomorrow: Model 1937,” Pentagram Papers 11 (London: Pentagram Design, 1984), 7-8. Many of the details concerning Bel Geddes’ “City of Tomorrow” for Shell Oil will come from this source, which remains the best interpretative account of this project. [15] Ibid., p. 9. For more on Brooks Stevens, see Glenn Adamson, Industrial Strength Design: How Brooks Stevens Shaped Your World (Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Milwaukee Art Museum, 2003). More about Stevens can be found at his company history website at http://www.brooksstevenshistory.com/. [16] Ibid., p. 22. [17] Ibid., p. 19. [18] Ibid., p. 22. [19] Norman Bel Geddes, Horizons (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1932), 287-288. [20] Meikle, “The City of Tomorrow: Model 1937,” 16. [21] Miller McClintock, Street Traffic Control (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1925), 9. [22] “Transport: Four Frictions,” Time (3 August 1936). [23] Roland Marchand, “The Designers Go To The Fair II: Norman Bel Geddes, The General Motors ‘Futurama,’ and the Visit to the Factory Transformed,” Design Issues, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Spring, 1992), 27. [24] Meikle, “The City of Tomorrow: Model 1937,” 16-17. [25] For more on this campaign, see Andrew M. Shanken, 194X: Architecture, Planning, and Consumer Culture on the American Home Front (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). [26] Roland Marchand, “Where Lie the Boundaries of the Corporation? Explorations in ‘Corporate Responsibility’ in the 1930s,” Business and Economic History 26 (Fall 1997): 81, quoted in Shanken, “Better Living: Toward a Cultural History of a Business Slogan,” Enterprise and Society, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Sep., 2006), 486. For more on the social history of American advertising and public relations companies during the early twentieth century, see Marchand’s Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986) and Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). [27] For an example of how this operated in postwar America, see Joan Ockman, “Art, Soul of the Corporation Patronage, Public Relations, and the Interrelations of Architecture and Art after World War II,” SOM Journal 5 (2008), available at http://www.som.com/content.cfm/art_soul_of_the_corporation. [28]Shanken, “Better Living: Toward a Cultural History of a Business Slogan,” Enterprise and Society, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Sep., 2006), 485-519. [29] Ibid., 487.

02/25/11--07:24: Architecture on Trial

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A colleague of mine is raising funds for a film about Jim Stirling'sLeicester Engineering Building (1963). Called MORE THAN a Building? Architecture on Trial, the film promises to be a detailed look at Stirling's iconic building. Director Joseph Bedford has already amassed over 40 interviews for this film from critics, scholars, and architects. Bedford's film is related to an upcoming exhibition on Stirling set to open April 1 at the Architecture Foundation— funds will go towards the completion of this project. For more information, check out the embedded trailer. (This, of course, does not excuse you from checking out the Canadian Center for Architecture's site dedicated to the James Stirling/Michael Wilford archive.)

03/06/11--18:13: The Harvard Candle

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Detonation of Napalm M47 Device, Harvard University, 4 July 1942 (Source: Louis F. Fieser, The Scientfic Method: A Personal Account of Unusual Projects in War and in Peace [New York: Reinhold, 1964]) These signs are real. They are also symptoms of a process. The process follows the same form, the same structure. To apprehend it you will follow the signs. All talk of cause and effect is secular history, and secular history is a diversionary tactic. Useful to you, gentlemen, but no longer so to us here. If you want the truth — I know I presume — you must look into the technology of these matters. Even into the hearts of certain molecules — it is they after all which dictate temperatures, pressures, rates of flow, costs, profits, the shapes of towers …[1]

I wasn’t eager to hear Zapparoni’s opinion of the army. Very likely he thought of it as a department of his factory, where teams of scientists and engineers worked in overalls – a company of non-horsemen and vegetarians with sets of false teeth who loved to press buttons – and where a half-witted mathematician could cause more damage in a second than Frederick the Great …[2]

The above quotes suggest how the most cataclysmic aspects of war often had small beginnings. Small, in the sense that they sometimes depended on the whims of a few individuals. Small, as they involved that most fundamental of phenomena — the chemical molecule. The sites of such developments were more than just laboratories and universities. Their origins were more than likely institutional, the result of various government-sponsored joint ventures and committees entrusted with creating advanced weapon technologies. The most powerful and influential of these was the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), which came into official existence on July 2, 1940, more than a year before the United States entered World War II. That year, President Roosevelt appointed Carnegie Institute president Vannevar Bush as the NDRC’s first chairman. Original committee members, in addition to representatives of the armed forces and the government, included Roger Adams, head of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Illinois, Karl T. Compton, President of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, James B. Conant, President of Harvard University, F.B. Jewett, President of the National Academy of Sciences, and R. C. Tolman, the Dean of the Graduate School at California Institute of Technology. Shortly after his appointment, Bush organized the NDRC into five separate divisions, each entrusted with a general type of weapons research. With Bush’s endorsement, Dr. Conant’s was the first NDRC division to receive funding. This division’s sole charge was the research and development of different types of bombs, fuels, poison gases, and “chemical problems.”[3] Bush immediately contacted a group of professors from universities throughout the country to begin work in this area. On October 23, 1940, the committee members met at Roger Adams’ home and finalized the very mechanisms that would “draft” prominent scientists into the war effort. Participation in the NDRC structure was highly secretive: each member was to receive the highest security clearances and very wide-ranging powers regarding the nature of their research.

Louis Fieser's NRDC identification card (1944) One of these professors was Harvard University chemist Louis F. Fieser. A widely-published expert on organic and synthetic chemistry and student of James Conant's, Fieser’s job was to evaluate the explosive potential of new types of nitrogen-based compounds. He enlisted a group of other well-known scientists for his cause: Richard C. Clapp, a Harvard-trained chemist working for the Quartermaster Research and Development Center; William H. Daudt, a research scientist at Dow Chemical; William von Doering, a chemistry professor at Yale University; and Marshall Gates, the editor of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.[4] Together, all worked in secrecy in basement laboratories on the Harvard campus. They were a productive group. In a matter of time, the team developed two nitrogen compounds that were over 100 times more powerful than TNT, Tetryl, PETN, and Cyclonite, the preferred conventional explosives at the time. Fieser’s group presented the results at an NDRC conference on explosives on May 28, 1941. James Conant was present at this conference, and informed Fieser about an unusual series of events at a DuPont plant in Delaware. A group of DuPont scientists, also under NDRC supervision, reported a series of explosions occurring during the production and testing of divinylacetylene, a synthetic drying oil for paints. These scientists found that exposing the oil to oxygen caused a violent, explosive chemical reaction. Conant asked the conference attendees if any of them would be willing to explore the potential military applications of divinylacetylene. Fieser was the first to volunteer. Fieser enlisted one of his fellow NDRC scientists to work on this specific problem. Dr. E.B. Hershberg, a chemist for the Schering Corporation, had been on the Harvard faculty with Fieser since 1938. Hershberg was also a reserve officer with the Chemical Warfare Service, the branch of the United States Army responsible for the development and testing of chemical and biological weapons. Hershberg was the man for the job, being “experienced in the handling of military explosives, fuzes, poison gases, smoke pots, and grenades.”[5] At Harvard, Fieser and Hershberg made small bombs containing divinylacetylene, ignited by a black powder charge. Reminiscing about these bombs, Fieser notes, “We noticed also that when a viscous gel burns it does not become fluid but retains its viscous, sticky consistency. The experience suggested the idea of a bomb that would scatter large burning globs of sticky gel.”[6] By the time Fieser and Hershberg reported the results of this test to the NDRC in June 1941, around the time that the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) assumed all responsibilities over American weapons research, the Royal Air Force and the German Luftwaffe already had months of experience using incendiary bombs against each other’s cities. The R.A.F. began bombing Berlin on August 25, 1940, and Germany responded in kind with attacks on London and other major English centers. It thus may not be surprising the War Ministry, who already had valuable contacts within the NDRC, was interested in Fieser’s bombs. In July 1941, Major Gerrard M. Rambaut of the British Air Ministry paid a visit to Fieser’s and Hershberg’s lab. Major Rambaut was responsible for the testing and development of incendiary bombs in England, and was interested in finding a way to increase the effectiveness of R.A.F. ordnance. The R.A.F.’s incendiary bombs relied on a mixture of magnesium and phosphorous, a mixture that ignited upon contact with oxygen, but that did not have the ballistic properties of divinylacytelene. A month later, the NDRC was reorganized, and Fieser’s group was assigned the task of developing chemical spray agents. A result of this reorganization was the NDRC’s decision to abandon development of petroleum-based incendiaries in favor of the British-style magnesium incendiary bomb, as well as a type of bomb that relied on a mixture of iron oxide and aluminum to create puddles of molten iron. Fieser, the consummate self-promoter, called Roger Adams at the NDRC and successfully lobbied for additional funds and manpower for the development of gasoline-based incendiaries. The resulting contract between the NDRC and Harvard called for the payment of $359,125 to a project called “Anonymous Research No. 4, OEMsr-179” — thus inaugurating the development and testing of incendiary weapons in the United States.[7] Global events influenced the results of “Anonymous Research No.4, OEMsr-179.” Fieser originally wanted to develop a type of gasoline incendiary that relied on rubber for its jelling properties. In theory, once ignited by a small explosive charge, Fieser’s bomb would discharge the flaming, melting rubber in all directions. Although the tests were less than satisfactory, Fieser conceded to the Chemical Warfare Service’s desire to use a gasoline/rubber bomb, and suggested that the mix be placed in an M47 general purpose iron casing, the U.S. Army’s standard bomb at the time. On November 27, 1941, Fieser telegraphed the Chemical Warfare Service with a set of directions on how to “arm” a shipment of 10,000 M47 gasoline incendiaries en route to Manila: Cut X lbs. Of smoked sheet rubber or Y. lbs of pale crepe rubber into strips and insert these through the opening in the nose of a bomb. Place the bomb upright and run in gasoline until the level is 3 inches from the top (in order to provide a 5% void). Screw in the burster tube securely and rest the bomb on its side. To ensure even mixing, rotate each bomb 180 degrees at three 1-2 hr. intervals.[8] A Japanese submarine torpedoed the ship containing the bomb shipment only a couple of days after the attack on Pearl Harbor. And by early 1942, Japanese forces controlled all the vital sources of rubber in the South Pacific, a circumstance that affected both Allied and Axis weapons research.

Mixing Napalm (Source: Fieser) Fieser’s team now faced the task of developing an incendiary bomb that did not rely on rubber for its gelling properties. By this time, the Chemical Warfare Service set up offices on the MIT campus, and began working with Fieser at his Harvard lab. The results of more testing revealed that aluminum naphthene, a metal soap, successfully formed lauric acid gels when mixed with gasoline. And finally, when mixed with another soap, aluminum palmitate (coconut or palm oil), the incendiary bomb finally had the gelling properties that Fieser and his team desired. The new gel could not only withstand temperatures above 90 degrees Fahrenheit, but would still stay in a gelled state in temperatures lower than –30 degrees Fahrenheit — the operational parameters required by the United States Army Air Force for aerial operations. Fieser eventually called the resulting compound napalm, a contraction of the names of the two soaps (napthene palmitate). On July 4, 1942, Fieser and Hershberg performed a static test of the world’s first napalm incendiary (see image at top of this post). An M-47 bomb with a phosphorous fuze designed to ignite the napalm was placed in the middle of a small puddle in a soccer field outside Harvard’s football stadium. Fieser ignited the bomb with a radio-controlled squib. He described the result as follows: The performance, from the start, was most impressive. The high explosive cuts the inner well into the ribbons and opens the casing down the entire length. Pieces of phosphorous are driven into the gel, and large, burning globs are distributed evenly over a circular area about 50 yards in diameter.[9] The Chemical Warfare Service tested successive versions of Fieser’s napalm bomb at Harvard and at Edgewood Technical Arsenal in Maryland. The official history of the Chemical Warfare Service notes the significance of this test, boasting “A landmark was reached in the history of petroleum warfare.”[10] Even more significant is that Fieser’s work led to the manufacturing of the M69 incendiary bomb. As stated in The Chemical Warfare Service in World War II: A Report of Accomplishments (1948): The 6-pound M69, napalm-filled bomb, was the model that made headlines with its spectacular performance in the strategic bombing of Japan. More than 30 million of them were manufactured. Exactly 755,319 clusters of these bombs were dropped on the cities of Japan, each cluster consisting of 14, 38, or 60 of the 6-pound bombs … [T]he attacks on Japanese cities were on so large a scale and such concentrated form that Japanese fire fighting defenses were completely overwhelmed. To have added intimidation would have been gratuitous … Our incendiary attacks destroyed 158 square miles of Japanese industrial areas and left homeless an estimated 8,480,000 persons. Approximately 40 per cent of every city subjected to incendiary bombing was destroyed and because so much of Japanese war industry was in homes, under the typical light housing of the Pacific Islands, the war potential of the nation was seriously crippled.[11] In the decades following World War II, historians have assessed the significance of this campaign of total destruction. The literature has even analyzed the historical exigencies that led United States Army Air Force planners to consider the use of napalm against Japanese cities, conditions that facilitated the switch from “strategic” to “area” bombing. Whatever historical, critical, or analytical lens is chosen to examine the events, it is important to note that incendiary attacks against Japanese cities in 1945 did not distinguish between industry and housing. Japanese civilians and uniformed-personnel were equal in the eyes of the United States Army Air Force.

Cutaway drawing of M69 incendiary bombs (Source: Fieser) The development of napalm, specifically, the M69 incendiary bomb, obviated the need to consider collateral damage — all damage was now collateral damage. But before the decision to use napalm against enemy cities was ever made, the M69 bomb had to be tested. The only way to test the flammability of a Japanese house was to build a Japanese house. And in order to understand how incendiaries would burn Japanese (and even German) houses, the Chemical Warfare Service relied on the expertise of a handful of well-known architects. As the NDRC mobilized the scientific elite, the Chemical Warfare Service enlisted the design establishment for the war effort.[12] __________________________ Notes

[1] Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (New York: Penguin, 1972), 167. [2] Ernst Jünger, The Glass Bees, Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Mayer, trans. (New York: NYRB Classics, 2000), 113-114. [3] Louis F. Fieser, The Scientfic Method: A Personal Account of Unusual Projects in War and in Peace (New York: Reinhold, 1964), 9 [4] Ibid., p. 10 [5] Ibid., p. 11. [6] Ibid., p. 12 [7] Ibid., p. 16. [8] Ibid., p. 24. [9] Ibid., p. 36. [10] Chemical Corps Association, The Chemical Warfare Service in World War II: A Report of Accomplishments (New York: Reinhold, 1948), 69. [11] Ibid. [12] To see how this story unfurls, see my two earlier posts on this topic: A Sphinx in Utah's Desert (posted 6 December 2009) and An Ithaca of Sorts (posted 29 June 2010). See also my two published pieces on napalm testing at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah: Enrique Ramirez, "Erich Mendelsohn at War" Perspecta, No. 41, Grand Tour (Cambridge, MIT Press, 2008) and “Fata Morgana” Thresholds No. 33Form(alisms) (July 2008). Additional material can be found at Charles Sterling Popple, Standard Oil Company (New Jersey) in World War II (New Jersey: Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, 1952). Materials regarding the results of the M69 trials at Dugway Proving Ground are located at the National Archives: ETF 550 E-2844: Military Intelligence Division, Great Britain – “Dropping Trials of Incendiary Bombs against Representative Structures at Dugway, USA, October 12, 1943”, Edgewood Arsenal Technical Files Relating to Foreign Chemical Radiological, and Biological Warfare Retired to the Defense Intelligence Agency for Reference Purposes (Entry 1-B), Records of the Defense Intelligence Agency (Record Group 373), and ETF 550 E-2844: Military Intelligence Division, Great Britain, IBTP/Report/128, “Comparison of the Japanese Targets and Test Results at the Building Research Station, Edgewood Arsenal and Dugway Proving Ground, H.M. Llewellyn, M.A. London”, Report No. R3583-45, June 29, 1945, Edgewood Arsenal Technical Files Relating to Foreign Chemical Radiological, and Biological Warfare Retired to the Defense Intelligence Agency for Reference Purposes (Entry 1-B), Records of the Defense Intelligence Agency (Record Group 373).

06/02/11--19:04: Of Hyphens and Hurricanes

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S.S. Phemius (Built in 1921, Sunk by U-515 on 20 December 1943) (Source) Hurricane season is upon us, so consider these excerpts from Richard Hughes’ largely forgotten novel In Hazard (1938). Both are descriptions of the engine-room of the Archimedes, a cargo ship caught in the whorls of a catastrophic hurricane during the entirety of the novel: An engine-room is unlike anything in land architecture. It is an immensely tall space—reaching from the top of the ship, more or less, to the bottom. Huge. But, unlike most large architectural spaces (except perhaps Hell), you enter it through a small door at the top. And then: The stokehold (or fire-room), which you enter at the bottom ordinarily, through a low door from the bottom of the engine-room, is a very different place. The air here is hotter still; but quite dry. Here, moreover, is a symmetry more like that of land-architecture: a row of similar furnaces, small at the bottom and growing larger above, so that overhead they come together, like gothic arches in a metal crypt (or the walls of a room in a dream).[1] These passages call our attention to a subtle difference between “land architecture” and “land-architecture.” These two terms identify something we are all familiar with (buildings), and yet it is the use of a hyphen that really merits our attention. In the first excerpt, the words “land” and “architecture” are unconnected: they are separated both physically and conceptually. If architecture is different than land, then the engine-room is different from any kind of building we may be familiar with. With the second passage, however, the hyphen joins “land” and “architecture.” This is more than just a typographic connection. Here, it is as if buildings were literally connected to the earth. This gesture evokes such terms as site, location, and even context—all expressing different ways in which buildings become part of something else. History may even be the very thing that connects “land” and “architecture.” Notice how Hughes describes the engine-room’s stokehold as “symmetrical,” an attribute that immediately brings to mind the symmetric plans of classical or Beaux-Arts architecture. If the stokehold is “more like” a building, then equating its furnaces with “gothic arches” is another deliberate architectural description. Yet what connects these two descriptions are the parenthetical asides. In the first, the engine-room is “Hell”; in the second, “walls of a room in a dream.” These are architectural ideas, and thinking of a ship as architecture is enough to make it so. Admittedly, this all amounts to a fair bit of hair-splitting. We may even excuse the narrator for any errors of judgment or observation he may have made. This is, after all, neither an architect nor a historian, but a novelist that is making these equations. Yet this interest in equating the design and making of ships with the design and making of buildings is not foreign to the history of architecture. Nor is it foreign to the history of the history of architecture.

Antoine-Denis Chaudet, Julien-David Le Roy, 1803-4 (Source: Christopher Drew Armstrong, "The Architect as Revolutionary Hero: A Monument to Julien-David Leroy," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 66, No. 3 (Sep., 2007), 317.) Enter Julien-David Le Roy. As an architect, archaeologist and historian, Le Roy (1723-1804) is credited with creating a dualist approach to history that lingers to this day. Think of this approach as one that views the same building under two separate lenses—one historical, the other architectural— and that can yield different results. This was no doubt a reflection of Le Roy’s own curious upbringing. As a student at the prestigious École des arts under Jacques-François Blondel, Le Roy inherited a very rigorous background in architecture history. Upon finishing, he received the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1751. While there, he undertook an exhaustive and systematic study of Greek ruins, and went to Athens, Corinth and Sparta in 1754 to study more examples. In 1758, he published Les Ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce (Ruins of the Most Beautiful Monuments of Greece), his account of his travels to Italy and Greece. Part travel monograph, and part history of the region, Le Roy’s book featured picturesque compositions along with measured drawings of details and examples of Greek architecture. Others have remarked already that these two kinds of drawings represent the dualist approach I alluded to earlier: whereas the more picturesque drawings sought to situate a particular ruin within a historical context, the measured drawings represented an understanding of architecture through abstract and formal differences.[2] This latter approach has been touted as an example of a “scientific” approach to the history of architecture. (Le Roy is often credited as being the first to apply Enlightenment ideas about science to the writing of architecture history). That is, Le Roy’s formal studies of Greek architecture were an attempt to deduce examples from general, original forms he called ideés. It perhaps should not surprise the reader that Le Roy also came from a distinguished family of watchmakers. Clocks, after all, were more than just metaphors describing the order of the universe; they were mechanical technologies that implemented order and structure to those phenomena that eluded description. In other words, clocks were regulators of chaos. They were highly rational machines that provided form.[3]

(Left) Plan and Elevation of Temple of Istria at Pola, from Julien David Le Roy, Les Ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce (1758); (Right) Details of Temple of Istria at Pola, from Le Roy, Les Ruines. Both engravings by Le Bas (Source: Jeanne Kisacky, "History and Science: Julien-David Leroy's "Dualistic Method of Architecture History," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 60, No. 3 (Sep. 2001), 264. Le Roy was a young architect who busied himself by expanding his world view. Worldly travels were becoming essential to architectural training, and this meant booking passage on vessels throughout Europe and the Mediterranean to visit those sites which were of historical importance. Le Roy was following in the footsteps of Antoine Babuty Desgodetz (1653-1728), who also traveled to Rome to make measured drawings of ruins and buildings from antiquity. Desgodetz’s experiences as an architectural traveller are remarkable: during his 1674 trip to Rome, Ottoman pirates captured and overran his ship. He and his companions, Jacob Spon and Augustin-Charles d’Aviler, were kept as slaves in Algiers and Tunis for a year. Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the Minister of Finance under Louis XIV and a tireless advocate of building up the French merchant fleet and armada, later arranged for a prisoner exchange. Once Desgodetz returned to Rome, he began the series of drawings that would become part of the influential Les edifices antiques de Rome dessinés et mesurés très exactement (The Ancient Buildings of Rome, Accurately Measured and Delineated) (1682). Like engraved books, ships were important mechanisms for conveying information about the ancient world to larger audiences. They were mediums of exchange between the modern and ancient worlds. This would take on an additional significance for Le Roy. After the successes of Les Ruines, as well as subsequent books on the history of ecclesiastical architecture, and following his appointment to the Académie Royale d’Architecture and the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, Le Roy began to turn his attention to ships. In 1786, he became an advisor to Académie de marine in Brest and even proposed designs for a national school of maritime studies in 1794. These were all formative moments in an already illustrious career. Yet Le Roy’s project of articulating simultaneous historical and scientific approaches to history had reached their fullest expressions by 1770 and 1777 in three works that were not about buildings, but about ships.

Le Roy, “Premier mémoire sur la marine des anciens,” Histoire de l’Académie royale des inscriptions et belles-lettres, avec les mémoires de Littérature tirés de Registres de cette Académie, depuis l’année M.DCCLXX, jusques & compris l’année M.DCCLXXII, Tome 38 (Paris: L’Imprimerie Royale, 1778) The first of these was “Mémoires sur la marine des anciens” (“Memoirs on the navies of the ancients”), Le Roy’s first lecture on naval architecture. Presented at the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres in February 1770, this lecture presented analyses and detailed explanations of the evolution of ships and sails to demonstrate that the historical and scientific approaches had to work in tandem. In Le Roy’s words, history and nature were similar: “History, as much as nature, frequently offers us a mass of sterile facts; she also sometimes presents us with some more precious, but more rare facts, from which can be drawn, as from a prolific spring, a great number of truths.”[4] History and nature both yielded the ever-important principles needed for scientific understanding. Without a historical underpinning, a technical understanding of ship building would be faulty. The same applied to history of naval architecture: it made little sense without understanding the kinds of technological changes that gave rise to the present problem. And like Les ruines, Le Roy’s first work on ships identified the development of an idée over time. The only difference here, of course, was that he looked to examples from Phoenician, Greek, and Roman shipbuilding to prove his point.

Catherine Haussard, engraving showing historical development of vessels. Figure 3 represents Odysseus' raft. Figure 4 is a Phoenician vessel. Figures 5 and 6 are the side and front elevations of an Egyptian ship. From Le Roy, "Premier mémoire sur la marine des anciens,” 596. Le Roy’s use of images, begin to demonstrate how these two methods were at first separated. The most famous of these are the set of engravings (drawn by Catherine Haussard) showing the development of vessels based on the idée of a single-person raft. At the top, an elevation shows a flat piece of wood supported by wooden logs. Underneath, the complexity of the vessel increases progressively according to the number of oarsmen and passengers, showing Odysseus’ raft, a Phoenician long ship, and culminating with an Egyptian vessel. Another engraving shows the further development of rowing vessels, focusing on the idée of a ship comprised of a single line of rowers. Yet the emphasis is geographically-specific. Here, Le Roy focused on how Greek designers modified ships in order to accommodate larger numbers of rowers. Whereas the first engraving depicted changes in development according to technological innovations, the second focused on a specific historical context.

Le Roy, engraving comparing and describing history of sail development. At bottom row, center is a section of the Naupotame, the ship that Le Roy designed. From Le Roy, Les navires des anciens, considérés par rapport a leurs voiles (Paris: Nyon, 1783) (Source: Kisacky, "History and Science," 281.) In his third text on ship design, Les navires des anciens (The Ships of the Ancients) (1783), Le Roy begins to conflate the two approaches. Again, it is an engraving that gives a visual expression to this method. Here, the focus is on the development of sails, showing the development of Carthaginian, Greek, and Roman ships as part of a singular historical procession. The unifying principle here is the shape and arrangement of the sail as it leaps periods and geographies by dint of the engraved image. It is an image that underscores faith in reason, for only through the application of scientific reasoning could such an image be created. But in order to get a sense of how all of this came to be, of why ships should even be subjected to the same kind of analysis as buildings, it is important to look at Le Roy’s second text on ships, La marine des anciens peuples (The Navies of Ancient Peoples) (1777).

Engraving by Jean Goujon of the Vitruvian origins of fire as shown in the first French translation of de Architectura. From Jean Martin, Architecture, ou Art de bien bastir de Marc Vitruve Pollion Autheur (Paris, 1547). Here, it is not an image, but a historical reference that reveals something new. In the very first section of La marine, Le Roy details the history of seafaring peoples. He relies on ancient geographic texts by Ptolemy and Eusebius to identify the ancient Phoenicians as one of the first fish-eating people, or Ichthyophagi. But the very idée of a ship began with something more tumultuous. Eusebius was one of the first people to provide an account of the first ship—a story which was a retelling of a fragment by the Phoenician chronicler Sanchuniathon: And when furious rains and winds occurred, the trees in Tyre were rubbed against each other and caught fire, and burnt down the wood that was there. And Ousous took a tree, and, having stripped off the branches, was the first who ventured to embark on the sea.[5] Le Roy acknowledges this fragment as an account of the origins of seafaring. Yet he re-imagines the passage, here giving form to the meteorological event that gave birth to seafaring: Hurricanes (said Sanchuniathon) having burst all at once upon the trees of the forest of Tyre, which caught on fire, and the flames devoured the forest. In this confusion, Ousoüs took the trunk of a tree, and having de-limbed it, he first ventured out to sea.[6] Le Roy did not have to scour ancient texts to find this fragment. A version of it also appeared in the first volume Antoine-Yves Goguet’s De l’origine des loix, des arts, et des sciences (On the Origins of Laws, Arts, and the Sciences) (1758). In a section devoted to the history of commerce and navigation, Goguet also gives credit to Sanchuniathon’s account, noting that Ousous, having made a raft from a “half-burned tree,” was the first to expose himself to the water.[7] Yet in Le Roy’s telling, this tale gains architectural significance. He explains how the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius borrowed Sanchuniathon’s story of seafaring and applied it to his study of architecture. To prove the point, Le Roy notes the similarity between Sanchuniathon’s account of the origins of seafaring with this description from Book II of Vitruvius’de Architectura (also known as The Ten Books of Architecture): A tempest, on a certain occasion, having exceedingly agitated the trees in a particular spot, the friction between some of the branches caused them to take fire; this so alarmed those in the neighbourhood of the accident, that they betook themselves to flight.[8] The “flight” here leads to the first gathering of people around a fire, which leads to the creation of the first shelters — the origin of architecture. Yet Le Roy’s reading of Sanchuniathon gives a more important significance to storm at Tyre. The very hurricane that gives birth to seafaring becomes the storm that gives birth to architecture. This was by no means a strange way to look at the historical relationship between ships and buildings. In La marine, Le Roy also mentions in a footnote Goguet’s description of large seaborne rafts known as "pyrogues" as “that other kind of building.”[9] By the time that Le Roy published his treatises on naval architecture, "bâtiment" was commonly understood to refer to both "ship" and "building."[10] But as Le Roy noted, thanks to Vitruvius replacing Ousous’ wooden raft with a shelter, we can now locate the origins of architecture in seafaring.[11] The ship was the very first architectural object.

The Calypso, shown alongside other vessels with ancient riggings. From Le Roy, Nouvelles recherches sur le vaisseau long des anciens, sur les voiles latines, et sur les moyens de diminuer les dangers que courent les navigateurs (Paris, 1786) (Source: Sylviane Llinares, “Marine et anticomanie au xviiie siècle: les avatars de l’archéologie expérimentale en vraie grandeur,” Annales de Bretagne et des pays de l’Ouest, Vol. 2, No. 115-2 (2008), 25. Le Roy believed in the study of ancient sources as a way to approach contemporary architectural design. The same could be said about his interest in ships. More than a historian of naval architecture, Le Roy also designed various ships and used his knowledge of seafaring from classical antiquity to design sails and riggings. This aspect of his career has meteorological origins as well. In 1763, the Minister of the Navy, the Duke de Choiseul, appointed Le Roy to test a new kind of sail based on ancient designs aboard the war frigate Calypso. These riggings, which used triangular instead of square sails, proved deficient when a strong storm overtook the Calypso and forced the crew to almost scuttle the ship near the English coast.[12] Though crewmen were able to repair the ship, Le Roy would continue this aspect of his career. Besides testing additional sails and riggings on other naval vessels, he would design his own ship, the Naupotame, and engage in an prolonged letter exchange with Benjamin Franklin about the development of merchant fleets.[13] This would reach its apex in a final series of texts, including one written in 1786, that concerned sail designs and the avoidance of marine hazards, and another, a small tract advocating for a system of deep canals that would connect Paris and the Seine to the sea.[14] ***

Aftermath of 1932 hurricane, Santa Cruz del Sur, Cuba The 1932 Atlantic hurricane season was particularly devastating to ports and merchant fleets along the Caribbean. October alone saw three storms. One, which formed on October 30 near Guadeloupe, traveled southwards and then curved towards the north, becoming one of the most powerful storms ever recorded before it hit Cuba.[15] It weakened and gained even more strength before reaching Jamaica. At that time, it crossed paths with the S.S. Phemius, a merchant steamer traveling between Savannah and Colon. With initial gusts of over 200 miles per hour, the hurricane overpowered and ensnared the Phemius for almost four days. The ship’s meteorological log describes the storm’s effect on the ship’s various structures and buildings: At 2 p.m. [November 5, 1932] the wind shifted to N.E. blowing with hurricane force accompanied by blinding squalls and a very high sea. The barometer was then falling rapidly reaching the low point of 914.6 mb. [27.01 inches] by 8 p.m. A fierce hurricane was blowing and a very high sea running. The ship was enveloped in spindrift, reducing the visibility to Nil, the No. 1 hatch not being visible from the bridge. The vessel was rolling heavily, the helm being of little use. So great was the force of the wind that shortly before 8 p.m. the funnel was blown overboard. The ship was rendered helpless and from then on was carried with the hurricane in an unmanageable state. It would not be overestimating to put the wind force at 200 miles per hour. Hatches were blown overboard like matchwood, derricks and lifeboats wrecked, upper and lower bridges blown in.[16] The passage, with its account of chaos and destruction, seems to be undoing very description that introduced this post. If the Archimedes from Richard Hughes’ In Hazard is an example of a ship that can be equated with “land-architecture,” then this storm becomes the very force that “erases” the hyphen. Architecture becomes unmoored, cast adrift in a maelstrom. Later in 1932, after the Phemius was towed to salvage, its captain, D.L.C. Evans, asked Richard Hughes to write an account of the hurricane. He would eventually fictionalize the account, the result being one of the inspirations for In Hazard. And though the book’s descriptions of the storm are sometimes fantastic, their brute poetry give the 1932 hurricane an additional allegorical dimension. Hughes wrote the novel in in 1938, its chaotic whorls foreshadowing the ways in which the Second World War would ravage Europe and the rest of the world. Yet the hurricane from In Hazard is more than just an allegorical storm. As a meteorological event, it is the device that propels and structures Hughes’ narrative. It is, in other words, a form-giver, an elusive, chaotic event that nevertheless orders the world it consumes. To fully understand this, it is important to consider one final storm.

Vice-Admiral Georges Cloué (Source: Préfecture Maritime de la Manche et de la Mer du Nord) On May 24, 1885, a tropical monsoon cyclone formed near the Laccadive Islands, about 555 km southwest of the Indian peninsula. It traveled westwards and entered the Arabian Sea, making a direct line toward the Gulf of Aden. Yet neither the cyclone’s trajectory, nor its strength and magnitude were known until unverified and poorly-kept accounts from ships caught in the storm’s path began to appear in various newspapers. The storm would eventually make landfall on the Horn of Africa, and its immediate aftermath became well known. On June 3, the cyclone claimed five vessels—the German corvette Augusta, the French dispatch vessel Renard, the Turkish steamer Fetul-Bahari, and the British cargo ships S.S. Speke Hall and S.S. Seraglio— with no sign of cargo and at least 427 crew and passengers lost.[17] It was not until 1886 when the first detailed accounts of the storm began to appear in official publications. For example, a report of the storm appeared in an issue of Annalen der Hydrographie und martimen Meteorologie, the German Hydrographic Office’s official journal. The article featured one of the first maps of the cyclone’s trajectory, based on information provided by the Indian Meteorological Office. That year also saw one of the most comprehensive and authoritative accounts of the cyclone. Written in March 1886 by Vice-Admiral Georges Cloué, the newly-appointed French Minister of the Navy and the Colonies, the article was the first of several reports for the French Navy compiling meteorological and navigational data from 27 vessels that were caught in the storm.[18] Cloué’s studies featured numerous diagrams and maps that explained the strength of the storm in terms of the speed and orientation of winds. Of these, the most visually compelling are the diagrams that show the location of a ship in relation to the storm. Each is presented from a particular vessel’s “point of view.” The most basic diagram is that representing the storm as it passed over the French frigate Rouen, carrying a cavalry regiment from Tonkin in Indochina. Here, Cloué calculated the cyclone’s direction and orientation by compiling wind speed, direction, and atmospheric pressure: these were drawn as a familiar cyclonic form, with a line in the middle representing the storm’s direction. This was a fairly straightforward, yet incomplete graphic. Though the center of the cyclone passed over the Rouen, the diagram did not show the ship’s position in relation to the storm’s. Cloué would achieve this subsequently with other diagrams depicting the storm’s trajectory as it would intersect with a ship’s, and in other instances, showing the cyclone in relation to two vessels. All of this information would be compared with data provided by manometers and anemographs posted on the Gulf of Aden by the British Royal Navy.

Diagrams showing vessels in relation to the Aden Cyclone. From Vice-Amiral Cloué, “L’Ouragan de juin 1885, dans le Golfe d’Aden,” in Service Hydrographique de la Marine, Annales hydrographiques: Recueil d’avis, instructions, documents et mémoires relatifs à l’hydrographie et la navigation, Vol. 2, No. 8 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1886). Cloué’s studies, though carefully-researched and expertly-wrought, only foregrounded what was really at stake: the form and “design” of tropical cyclones. He called the very last section of his April 1886 article “Étude du cyclone” (“Study of the Cyclone”), and it purported to be just that: an investigation of the storm’s shape and form as it gained and lost strength. This was necessary. Cloué claimed that his report would improve on previous work on storms, which often relied on eyewitness accounts without corroborative data. Even more important was the fact cyclones rarely occurred on or near the Gulf of Aden. The Aden cyclone was not only unprecedented in terms of strength and destructiveness, it was rare. By comparing the previous drawings with sailors’ accounts, Cloué introduced a series of diagrams that give us a more familiar understanding of the shape and movement in a hurricane. He presents one describing the cyclone’s trajectory as a function of data provided by S.S. Duke of Devonshire and a weather station on Aden. The data was not only easy to obtain but also easy to interpret and showed that the storm traveled in a curlicue pattern along a line equidistant from both sources. Yet this was no mere trending line. Cloué compared the Aden cyclone’s movements with those from other parts of the world, in short deducing the trajectory as a function of wind speed and pressure. These were just ways of expressing the importance of latitudinal motion to the Coriolis effect: the counterclockwise movement of fluids around a vortex in the Northern Hemisphere.[19]

(Top) Diagram comparing the movement of the cyclone between the Indian Meteorological Office's station at Aden and the S.S. Duke of Devonshire; (Bottom) "Curlicue" pattern described by the storm (Source: Clouè, "L’Ouragan de juin 1885, dans le Golfe d’Aden.") Yet there was something about the storm that troubled Cloué. “Everything is excessive in a hurricane: the electric state, the sea completely upset, the wind, the wind above, irresistible, terrible! I can speak because I am a witness to one of these large and dangerous atmospheric disturbances, and the few details that I'm going to give to an event already thirty-nine years old are not irrelevant.”[20] Here, the Vice-Admiral is speaking from experience. In 1846, Cloué was an officer aboard the war frigate Belle-Poule when it encountered a powerful cyclone in the Indian Ocean. Recounting the confusion and destruction brought about by the storm, he reminds readers that hurricanes are fundamentally unpredictable. Any attempt at understanding their composition or power is doomed to failure. Only a year after the Belle-Poule was nearly scuttled, another event would give Cloué’s observation some weight. In 1847, the French mathematician Joseph L. F. Bertrand “popularized” the Coriolis effect in an article concerning “relative movement”— the perception of one object’s motion compared to an other’s. When applied to natural phenomena such as hurricanes, Bertand’s interpretation of the Coriolis effect resulted in two observations: first, that a storm would conserve its velocity as it traveled; and second, that the Coriolis effect alone was responsible for the movement of hurricanes.[21] Cloué’s remark about knowledge that had been around since 1846 is poignant because by 1885, everything that there was to know about the Coriolis effect was known. His observations about the Aden cyclone contradict Bertrand’s descriptions of the Coriolis effect. Energy was not at all conserved. Rather, Cloué noted that the Aden cyclone shrank in size as it gathered in strength until it slowed down and withered into nothing: “the mass of storm clouds was consumed by itself, and without further nourishment the cyclone ended like a simple waterspout.”[22] More importantly, he stated that what caused the cyclone was not the Coriolis effect, but rather the collision between southeasterly winds and the easterly monsoon winds. He illustrates this with a drawing showing how the collision between these two winds could generate the counter-clockwise motion normally associated with the Coriolis effect in northern latitudes.

Diagram showing the Aden cyclone being formed by the collision of southeasterly winds and the easterly monsoon winds (Source: Cloué, "L’Ouragan de juin 1885, dans le Golfe d’Aden.") *** The hurricane has become a central metaphor for this tale. Cyclones, tropical storms, and other meteorological aberrations are more than just phenomena that order and structure narratives; they are the very forces compelling one to write a literary or historical account. And yet a hurricane, whether described by Richard Hughes, Vitruvius, Eusebius, Le Roy, or Cloué, is that most illogical of objects, a kind of destructive disorder that can only be understood through various normative means of representation. As a series of lines that suggest a whirlpool, or a circle with watery arms that “spin” in a counter-clockwise direction, hurricanes are examples of what English physicist Michael Faraday called “lines of force.” These tell-tale lines, which proved the existence of magnetism, could not be observed. Yet when metal shavings were placed near a magnet, they “formed” lines that seemed to oscillate outwards.[23] Like Faraday’s “lines of force,” Cloué’s whorls and curlicues confront and describe something that is known yet invisible. Yet what really separates the two is that, unlike Faraday’s accounts of magnetism, Cloué’s diagrams and descriptions of the Aden cyclone rely on conventional drawing techniques. Sometimes rough, other times meticulous, these drawings treat data in a sketch-like manner. They only aim to give a sense of a hurricane’s ideal, and not precise form. Returning to Le Roy’s treatises on naval architecture momentarily, we are reminded of how his combination of historical and architectural approaches could be combined in a single diagram. Like the example of sail and rigging development from Les navires des anciens, drawings could be use to convey both scientific and historical development. The same could be said of Cloué's analytical drawings of the Aden cyclone. Following the initial diagram showing the Aden cyclone’s curlicue path, a second image shows a progressive series of similar paths. Each of these changes shape with changes in wind speed and barometric pressure. Yet we are not looking at one storm, but several from different parts of the world. Some show the trajectory of winds in the Northern Hemisphere, others in the Southern. It is a diagram that is conceptually similar to the engraving from Le Roy’s Les navires showing the development of sails. As these showed the development of sails throughout history using examples from different eras, Cloué’s diagram abandons geographical specificity to demonstrate how a hurricane’s path develops over time.

Diagram showing comparative shapes of storm trajectories from different parts of the world, arranged according to progressive wind speed and direction (Source: Cloué, "L’Ouragan de juin 1885, dans le Golfe d’Aden.") Yet the general principle that underlies Le Roy’s thinking—the tracing of the development of an idée over time—resonates with another aspect of Cloué’s work. In an 1887 article, Cloué introduced two maps, each showing the path of the cyclone as it moved from the Laccadives to the Gulf of Aden at a specific time of the day. The first is a reinterpretation of the German map that appeared in German hydrographic journals in 1886. It shows the storm’s trajectory, as told from the point of view of different vessels. The paths of four of these are depicted as dashed arrows, each showing the general path of a ship as it moved with or against the oncoming storm. Labeled dots indicate the threshold at which barometric pressure reaches the 750 mm isobar at a certain time and location. The thickest, blackest line belongs to the Aden cyclone itself, here shown as moving in a shallow sine wave-like pattern as it entered the gulf. Small dots show that the storm was increasing in size as it approached land.

Maps showing trajectory, position, speed, and pressure of the Aden cyclone: (Top) Version based on one published in Annalen der Hydrographie; (Bottom) Cloué's account (Source: Cloué, “L’Ouragan de juin 1885 dans le Golfe d’Aden (second mémoire)” Revue maritime et coloniale, Vol. 93 (Paris: Librarie Militaire de L. Badouin et cie, 1887) This depiction of the storm is different from that in the second map, a summary of Cloué’s own research about the event. Here, the cyclone’s progression appears as series of circles that diminish in size—this, of course, verifying his observation that the storm behaved “irregularly.” As in the German map, the resulting diagram here represents information gathered from various vessels. Yet the most important difference is that in the French map, the cyclone appears to be taking a rectilinear path. This is because, according to Cloué, cyclones tend to follow the “line of least resistance” once they enter a confined space like the Gulf of Aden. [24] And after using additional accounts, Cloué concludes that the German report is erroneous. It is in this sense that much of the intellectual work behind Cloué’s 1887 article consisted of proving that, of all things, the cyclone behaved in a rational manner. The two maps then exemplify different kinds of knowledge. The German map, which relied extensively on wind change data to show differences in isobars as well as the position of the storm, exemplified a quantitative approach to meteorology that was being recuperated slowly.[25] Cloué’s map, on the other hand, resonates with the kind of scientific thinking shown in the engravings from Le Roy’s Les navires. This map suggests that experience, in the form of the accounts from various vessels moored or traveling along the Gulf of Aden from May 31 to June 3, 1885, confirm the idea that cyclones travel in straight paths. The fact that the maps show the cyclone differently is also important. Whereas the German hydrographic map depicts the cyclone as a nebulous form that saunters along the Gulf of Aden, Cloué’s shows it as a circle—a convention that reflects the actual “position and extent” of the storm.[26]

Synoptic chart showing position of Aden cyclone relative to regional pressures. From W.L. Dallas, Storms of the Arabian Sea (Calcutta: Indian Meteorological Department, 1891) (Source: David Membery, “Monsoon Tropical Cyclones: Part 2,” Weather, Vol. 57, No. 7 (Jul., 2002), 247). Readers will no doubt find Cloué’s conclusions troubling, especially since the German map “looks” more exact than the French map. Yet more attention must be paid to not only the location of the cyclone in each map, but also to the lines which connect it as it travels up the Gulf of Aden. Because the German map considers the storm in terms of wind direction, it calls attention to four instances of sudden changes in orientation. The result is a map that shows the trajectory as a sweeping curve. It is, in some ways, reminiscent of the Indian Meteorological Office’s synoptic chart from 1891. One of several authoritative maps published in various almanacs until about 1900, this chart shows the Aden cyclone in relation to the changes in isobars in the region on 3 June 1885. With Cloué’s map, however, the “line of least resistance” is just that: an unwavering line with a preordained trajectory. They are overly conclusive, but more importantly, they connect seemingly unrelated phenomena in the most efficient way possible. There is another way to read these lines. These are not lines of causality portraying how one event followed another in a logical sequence. Nor are these “lines of force” that suggest something that is understood yet invisible. The lines describing the Aden cyclone’s path are reminiscent of hyphens. As stated at the beginning of this post, a hyphen is a line that joins separate words to form a single, coherent idea. The hyphen also presupposes that the ideas are unrelated. But for a hyphen, we would understand “landarchitecture” as different from “land architecture.” Yet hyphens and similar marks perform a more complicated operation than just connecting and separating. The hyphen, as understood in classical and medieval texts, was first used as a pronunciation aid and then as a device for correcting spacing errors.[27] This must be distinguished from the trait d’union, a hyphen-like mark appearing around the tenth and eleventh centuries. The trait d’union ensured continuity in text through the separation of words. And through the separation of words, texts became easier to read.[28] The trait d’union was therefore a representation of continuity. And like Le Roy’s ships or the Aden cyclone, the trait d’union was a kind of representation that reflected changes in geography and technology. It not only changed as printing technologies changed, but it was used in different ways according to the kind of text and location. Above all, both the trait d’union and hyphen are important because they are examples of devices or conventions that articulate the spaces in between words with lines. Space became a connector. Like a picture plane, the flat, two-dimensional surface of a printed page, synoptic chart, or hydrographic map became, as art historian Erwin Panofsky described it, a “spatial continuum ... which is understood to contain all the various individual objects."[29] Cloué’s line of least resistance can be considered as such. It is not only evidence of a spatial and temporal continuum, but more importantly, it shows how the space in between the Aden cyclone’s various positions are imbued with meaning. Portentous, unpredictable, and destructive, hurricanes, cyclones, and other forms of treacherous weather were carriers of meaning as the world spun into modernity. For example, in Voltaire’sCandide, or Optimism (1759), the logical Pangloss tells the hapless Candide that the storm that has just destroyed their vessel within sight of Lisbon and killed numerous sailors was “formed expressly” for this disaster.[30] And though Voltaire’s account of weather seems rather accepting, inclement weather was an important metaphor for change. In the first of two lectures that became Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century (1884), John Ruskin ruminated on the significance of “ragged white clouds” carried aloft by a wind that shook trees and windowpanes. This “plague-wind” darkening the skies of over Europe from the “North of England to Sicily” takes on a more sinister aspect: [The wind] looks partly as if it were made of poisonous smoke; very possibly it may be: there are at least two hundred furnace chimneys in a square of two miles on every side of me. But mere smoke would not blow to and fro in that wild way. It looks more to me as if it were made of dead men’s souls—such of them as are not gone yet where they have to go, and may be flitting higher and thither, doubting, themselves, of the fittest place for them.[31] Part-description of the effects of industrialization on city and country air, and part-meditation on the end of the Franco-Prussian War, Ruskin’s storm-cloud set the bar high for using weather as the go-to metaphor for dire prognostication. And as this historical tour of storms approaches the twentieth century, consider the opening moments from Robert Musil’sThe Man Without Qualities (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften) (1930-1942): A barometric low hung over the Atlantic. It moved eastward toward a high-pressure area over Russia without as yet showing any inclination to bypass this high in a northerly direction. The isotherms and isotheres were functioning as they should. The air temperature was appropriate relative to the annual mean temperature and to the aperiodic monthly fluctuations of the temperature. The rising and the setting of the sun, the moon, the phases of the moon, of Venus, of the rings of Saturn, and many other significant phenomena were all in accordance with the forecasts in the astronomical yearbooks. The water vapour in the air was at its maximal state of tension, while the humidity was minimal. In a word that characterizes the facts fairly accurately, even if it is a bit old-fashioned: It was a fine day in August 1913.[32] These last words—”It was a fine day in August 1913”—not only operates as a satire on positivism, but also underscores one of the novel’s preoccupations: analytical passivity in the face of an oncoming global catastrophe. Indeed, all meteorological information may lead to the conclusion that it is a fine day in August 13, and yet the opening paragraph is one of the few emphatic statements of certainty in the novel. Everything unravels after this point, as it is made clear by the fact that the novel’s titular character, an Austrian mathematician named Ulrich, claims that he lacks unity and coherence. Like the Archimedes, or even Ousous’ raft, we seem to have drifted very far from the opening premise of this post: that ships were architecture. To avoid what may seem like a tacit fact, the narrative moved forwards and onwards, taking whorl-like detours and breezy tangents that tried to escape the centering premise, and yet managed to circle around it. To say that hurricanes are architectural is different than saying that hurricanes have a significance for the history of architecture. But is there really any other metaphor that encapsulates the historian’s task like a hurricane? Unlike Le Roy, our take on the histories of architecture and urbanism leads us to the inevitable conclusion that ours is a demanding and herculean task. Historical and technological accounts are only part of the information we much compile and assess. And much like Vice-Admiral Cloué, we compare this data with ephemeral or less-than-ironclad information to try to come up with an understanding that builds upon, elaborates, or even corrects previous accounts. To confront this situation, to give order to conflicting and confusing information, Cloué gave us the ideal form of a hurricane. And he did it in a most architectural fashion: as a rendering composed almost entirely of lines and space.

Ideal storm (Source: Cloué, "L’Ouragan de juin 1885, dans le Golfe d’Aden.")

__________________________ Notes

[1] Richard Hughes, In Hazard (New York: NYRB Classics, 2008 [1938]), 5,6. [2] One of the most succinct articles espousing this point is Jeanne Kisacky, “History and Science: Julien-David Leroy’s ‘Dualistic Method of Architectural History,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 60, No. 3 (Sep., 2001), 260-289. For more information about Le Roy’s writings, see Robin Middleton’s exhaustive introduction to Julien-David Le Roy, The Ruins of the Most Beautiful of Greece, Historically and Architecturally Considered, David Britt, trans. (Los Angeles: Getty Center Research Publications, 2004) as well as Christoper Drew Armstrong, “Progress in the Age of Navigation, The Voyage-Philosophique of Julien-David Leroy,” Unpublished Ph.D Diss, Columbia University, 2003. Later this summer, a version of this last work will be published as Christopher Drew Armstrong, Julien-David Leroy and the Making of Architectural History (London: Routledge, 2011). [3] For excellent descriptions of how clocks became essential to the Western tradition, see Carlo M. Cipolla, Clocks and Culture, 1300-1700 (New York: Norton, 1977) and J. David Bolter, Turing’s Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). [4] Julien-David Le Roy, “Premier mémoire sur la marine des anciens,” Histoire de l’Académie royale des inscriptions et belles-lettres, avec les mémoires de Littérature tirés de Registres de cette Académie, depuis l’année M.DCCLXX, jusques & compris l’année M.DCCLXXII, Tome 38 (Paris: L’Imprimerie Royale, 1778), 545: “L’Histoire, ainsi que la Nature, nous offre souvent une un amas de faits isolés & stériles: elle nous en présente aussi quelquefois de plus précieux , mais en petit nombre, d’où sort, comme une source féconde, un grand nombre de vérités.” This quote also appears in Kisacky, “History and Science,” 278. Much of my understanding of Le Roy’s views comes from this article. [5] Eusebius of Caesarea, Praeparatio Evangelica (Preparation for the Gospel). E.H. Gifford, trans. (1903) -- Book 1, http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/eusebius_pe_01_book1.htm, Accessed 21 May 2011. [6] Julien-David Le Roy, La marine des anciens peuples, expliquée et considerée par rapport aux lumieres qu’on en peut tirer pour perfectionner la Marine moderne (Paris, 1777), 12: “Des ouragans (dit Sanchoniaton) ayant fondu tout-à-coup sur des arbres de la forêt de Tyr, ils prirent feu, & la flammé dévora la forêt. Dans ce trouble, Ousoüs prit un tronc d'arbre, & l'ayant ébranchée, il osa la premier aller en mer.” (Italics mine). An excellent account of how other historians incorporated Sanchuniaton into their own accounts, see Edward Eigen, "The Plagiarism of Heathens Detected: John Wood, the Elder (1704-1754) on the Translation of Architecture and Empire, " Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol 70, No. 3 (Jul., 2009), 375-397. In this text, Eigen focuses on an English account of Sanchuniathon, Richard Cumberland, Sanchoniatho’s Phoenician History, translated from the first book of Eusebius De Praeparatione Evangelica (London: W.B. for R. Wilkin, 1720). Special thanks also go to Eigen for also pointing me to Cloué's articles about the Aden cyclone that are discussed later in this post. [7] Antoine-Yves Goguet, De l'origine des loix, des arts, et des sciences, Volume 1 (Paris: Desaint & Saillant, 1758), 274: “Sanchoniaton dit qu'Ousoüs, un des plus anciens héros de la Phéncie, s'étant saisi d'un arbre à demi-brûlé, en coupla les branches, & eut le premier la hardiesse de s'exposer sur les eau.” [8] Marcus Vitruvius Pollo, On Architecture, Book II, Bill Thayer, trans., http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Vitruvius/2*.html, Accessed 21 May 2011. The entire passage reads: “Mankind originally brought forth like the beasts of the field, in woods, dens, and groves, passed their lives in a savage manner, eating the simple food which nature afforded. A tempest, on a certain occasion, having exceedingly agitated the trees in a particular spot, the friction between some of the branches caused them to take fire; this so alarmed those in the neighbourhood of the accident, that they betook themselves to flight. Returning to the spot after the tempest had subsided, and finding the warmth which had thus been created extremely comfortable, they added fuel to the fire excited, in order to preserve the heat, and then went forth to invite others, by signs and gestures, to come and witness the discovery. In the concourse that thus took place, they testified their different opinions and expressions by different inflexions of the voice. From daily association words succeeded to these indefinite modes of speech; and these becoming by degrees the signs of certain objects, they began to join them together, and conversation became general.” (“Homines veteri more ut ferae in silvis et speluncis et nemoribus nascebantur ciboque agresti vescendo vitam exigebant. interea quodam in loco ab tempestatibus et ventis densae crebritatibus arbores agitatae et inter se terentes ramos ignem excitaverunt, et eo flamma vehementi perterriti qui circa eum locum fuerunt sunt fugati. post ea re quieta propius accedentes cum animadvertissent commoditatem esse magnam corporibus ad ignis teporem, ligna adicientes et ita conservantes alios adducebant et nutu monstrantes ostendebant quas haberent ex eo utilitates. in eo hominum congressu cum profundebantur aliter spiritu voces, cotidiana consuetudine vocabula ut obtigerant constituerunt, deinde significando res saepius in usu ex eventu fari fortuito coeperunt et ita sermones inter se procreaverunt.”) [9] Goguet, De l’origine des loix, 274: “Aux radeaux auront succédé probablement les pyrogues, c’est-à-dire, des troncs des arbres creusés par le moyen de feu, comme le pratiquent encore les sauvages. Cette seconde sorte de bâtimens étoit & plus commode & plus sûre que les radeaux.” [10] Bâtiment could refer to either a large or small vessel. Dictionnaire de l'Académie française, 4th Edition (1762), http://artflx.uchicago.edu/cgibin/dicos/pubdico1look.pl?strippedhw=b%C3%A2timent, Accessed 22 May 2011. However, in Diderot’s and D’Alembert’s Encyclopedie, the authors take great pains to distinguish between buildings and ships, creating a separate category for bâtimens (“buildings”), bâtimens de marine (naval buildings such as arsenals), and bâtiment marine (“ships”). L’Encyclopedie, Volume II (1752), http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/L%E2%80%99Encyclop%C3%A9die/Volume_2#BATIMENT, Accessed 22 May 2011. [11] Le Roy, La marine des anciens peuples, 189, b: “Vitruve, parlant, comme Sanchoniaton, de l’origine des Arts, dit: Homines veteri more, ut ferae, in silvis & speluncis & nemoribus nascebantur, ciboque agresti vescendo, vitam exigebant. Interea quodam in loco ab tempestatibus & ventis densae crebritatibus arbores agitatae, & inter se terentes ramos, ignem excitaverunt. Vitr. lib. II, cap. I.” [12] For more on Le Roy’s work for the French Navy, see: Kisacky, “History and Science,” 278-280; Robin Middleton, “Introduction,” in Julien-David Le Roy, The Ruins of the Most Beautiful of Greece, Historically and Architecturally Considered, 130; and Sylviane Llinares, “Marine et anticomanie au xviiie siècle: les avatars de l’archéologie expérimentale en vraie grandeur,” Annales de Bretagne et des pays de l’Ouest, Vol. 2, No. 115-2 (2008), 67-84. [13] Le Roy, Lettres à M. Franklin: sur la marine, et particuliérement sur la possibilité de rendre Paris port; précédés de recherches sur les moyens d'y prévenir la disette des grains (Paris, 1790). [14] Le Roy, Nouvelles recherches sur le vaisseau long des anciens, sur les voiles latines, et sur les moyens de diminuer les dangers que courent les navigateurs (Paris, 1786). This text also details some of his correspondence with Franklin; Le Roy, Canaux de la Manche, indiqués pour ouvrir a Paris deux débouchés a la mer (Paris: Stoupe, 1801). [15] This account is taken from Ivan Ray Tannehill, Hurricanes: Their Nature and History: Particularly Those of the West Indies and the Southern Coasts of the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945). [16] Ibid., p. 205. [17]Vice-Admiral Georges Charles Cloué, “L’Ouragan de juin 1885, dans le Golfe d’Aden,” in Service Hydrographique de la Marine, Annales hydrographiques: Recueil d’avis, instructions, documents et mémoires relatifs à l’hydrographie et la navigation, Vol. 2, No. 8 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1886), 44. [18] The first version appeared in the April 1886 issue of Revue maritime et coloniale; the second as Cloué, “L’Ouragan de juin 1885 dans le Golfe d’Aden (second mémoire)” Revue maritime et coloniale, Vol. 93 (Paris: Librarie Militaire de L. Badouin et cie, 1887), 177-214. [19] The Coriolis effect is named after the French mathematician Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis (1792-1843), who outlined the contours of this theory in Coriolis, “Mémoire sur les équations du mouvement relatif des systèmes de corps,” Journal de l'Ecole royale polytechnique, Vol. 15, No. 24 (1835), 142-154. [20] Ibid., p. 106: “Tout est excessif dans un ouragan: l'état électrique, la mer entièrement bouleversée; le vent, le vent surtout, irrésistible, épouvantable! J'en puis parler, car je suis un témoin d'un de ces grands et dangereux météores, et les quelques détails que je vais donner sur un événement déjà vieux de trente-neuf ans ne sont pas hors de propos.” [21] For more on Bertand’s erroneous calcuations, see Anders O. Persson, “The Coriolis Effect: Four Centuries of Conflict Between Common Sense and Mathematics: Part 1: A History to 1885,” History of Meteorology, Vol. 2 (2005), 1-24. [22] Cloué, “L’Ouragan de juin 1885, dans le Golfe d’Aden,” 103: “La masse de nuages orageux se consommant sans se renouveler, l'ouragan a peut-être pris fin comme une simple trombe?” This quote also appears in David Membery, “Monsoon Tropical Cyclones: Part 2,” Weather, Vol. 57, No. 7 (Jul., 2002), 248. [23] For more on "lines of force," see Michael Faraday, Experimental Researches in Electricity (London: Taylor, 1839). [24] Cloué, “L’Ouragan de juin 1885 dans le Golfe d’Aden (second mémoire),” 199: “A priori, nous pensons que lorsqu'un cyclone s'engage dans un bras de mer relativement étroit, il tend à suivre la ligne de moindre résistance, aussi, il ne nous parait pas possible d'admettre que ce grand tourbillon ait pu changer quatre fois de direction, dans un espace relativement peu étendu, et ce soit promené ainsi d'un côté à l'autre du golfe.” [25] For more about the relation between precision and meteorology in 19th century Germany, see Theodore S. Feldman, “Late Enlightenment Meteorology,” in Tore Frängsmayr, J.L. Heilbron, and Robin E. Rider, eds. The Quantifying Spirit in the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 143-177. Here, Feldman argues how political events of the late 18th century interrupted the project of quantifying weather. This would set the stage for the more systemic, “globalist” approaches to meteorology perfected by Alexander von Humboldt. Focusing on the work of German physicist and meteorologist H.W. Dove, M. Norton Wise situates the desire to quantify weather within a larger series of contexts, including not only relations between scientists and an emerging maufacturing sector, but also the advent of locomotive and wireless technologies. Wise, “Precision: Agent of Unity and Product of Agreement Part II—The Age of Steam and Telegraphy,” in Wise, ed., The Values of Precision (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 222-238. [26] Cloué, “L’Ouragan de juin 1885 dans le Golfe d’Aden (second mémoire),” n.p.: “Les cercles indiquent la position et l’etendue du Cyclone, à midi et à minuit de chaque jour.” [27] Paul Saenger, Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 69. [28] Ibid., p. 66. [29] Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, Christopher S. Wood, trans. (New York, New York: Zone Books, 1997), 27 (translation of "Die Perspektive als 'symbolische Form'," in Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg, 1924-1925 [1927]). [30] Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), Candide, or Optimism (New York: Bantam, 2003 [1759]), 26. [31] John Ruskin, The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century: Two Lectures Delivered at the London Institution, February 4th and 11th 1884 (Sunnyside, Orfington, Kent: George Allen, 1884), 43-44, 47-48. [32] Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, Part I: A Sort of Introduction and Pseudoreality Prevails into the Millenium, Sophie Wilkins, trans. (New York: Knopf, 1995), 3.

09/08/11--16:02: Rocket Talk

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Space Capsule, from Walter Hohmann, The Attainability of Heavenly Bodies, Technical Translation F-44, U.S. Joint Publications Service, trans. (Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1960), 65. (Official translation of Hohmann, Die Erreichbarkeit der Himmelskörper [Berlin and Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1925].) No matter the scale of an object, whether it is a small, hand-held device or a tall building, we ask of it to more or less “act” human. This is the familiar conceit underlying MoMA’s Talk To Me, an exhibition showcasing technologies “that enhance communicative possibilities and embody a new balance between technology and people, bringing technological breakthroughs up or down to a comfortable, understandable human scale.”[1] This act of asking, of needing technological objects to be more like people takes different aspects, is based around notions of reflexivity; That is, of acting, reacting, responding to our own impulses in a like manner. Things do not “talk.” They may communicate, send us messages, data, or other kinds of information, but only at our own behest, on our own terms. We identify and design the contours and parameters that allows technology to communicate with us. We imbue the objects we design with a kind of communicative ability that has nothing to do with physiology or language, but that has everything to do with prescribed routines and tasks. If things indeed do “talk,” this is only because we “tell” them to.[2] One wonders, then, if a technological object’s own verisimilitude to humans—whether it can “talk,” “see,” and otherwise sense the world like us— becomes the sine qua non of good contemporary design. One also wonders if this desire is actually a burden. If so, who or what shoulders the weight of this seemingly impossible task? Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote of an unburdened modernity that would “kill the Spirit of Heaviness.”[3] This unburdening is more than philosophical; It describes the actual, physical unshackling of bonds of gravity. No endeavor has captured the sense of philosophical and physical unburdening like human flight. From Icarian waxwings to Otto Lilienthal’s hang gliders (and, to a certain extent, even Yves Rossy’s jetsuits), a quick inventory of the history of manned flight amounts to no less than a study of how tinkerers and scientists persisted in modeling human flight on bird flight even into the early 20th century. And with the advent of modern rocketry, of conceiving and executing the machines that finally allowed humans to escape gravity’s burdensome maw and spring into the weightlessness of space, the Icarian folly was abandoned in favor of technologies that looked more “human” than ever before.

Boitard's engravings showing flightsuits for Gawry (top) (Source) and Glumm (bottom) (Source: Paltock, The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, Vol. 1 [London: Reeves and Turner, 1884]) The literal “human” in “human flight” is the subject of a post at Ptak Science Books that calls attention to the visual similarities between two images of flying humans. The first is an engraving by Louis Peter Boitard from Robert Paltock'sThe Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, a Cornish Man, Relating Particularly, His Shipwreck near the South Pole; his Wonderful Passage thro a Subterraneous Cavern into a kind of New World, his there Meeting with a Gawry or Flying Woman (1750). It features a scantily-clad female figure, anything but demure, with a kite-like device harnessed to her back. Boitard’s engraving only alludes to flight, as our posed, Icarian Gawry stands with one hand pointing up, the other down, alluding to her role as a person mediating between earth and sky, yet all-too-rooted to terra firma. The technology depicted here is more accessory than airworthy. It appears a bit too small to support the Gawry’s frame. However, a closer look at Paltock’s text reveals something much more interesting. The kite-like device is literally clothing. A Gawry or Glumm (her male counterpart) wears a suit which, as depicted in Boitard’s other engravings, appear as a form-fitting leotard-like garment that extends to its kite form when arms and legs are outspread. Paltock even describes how, in a moment of curious gender-bending, the Glumm’s garment is comprised of stiff membranes and whalebone ribs—in other words, a corset. As objects of wonder, Gawries and Glumms levitate effortlessly in the pages of The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, carrying cannons and even a seated figure into the skies. Yet this is an effortlessness made possible by technology that is unlike the ungainly or clunky artificial wings drawn by Leonardo da Vinci and others. This is, after all, clothing whose ability to follow closely the contours of the human body provides the appropriate shapes and cambers to form the kite-like extension.

(Top) Hohmann, Die Erreichbarkeit der Himmelskörper (Berlin and Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1925); (Bottom) Hohmann, The Attainability of Heavenly Bodies, Technical Translation F-44, U.S. Joint Publications Service, trans. (Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1960) The second image, the frontispiece to German scientist Walter Hohmann’s treatise on spaceflight, Die Erreichbarkeit der Himmelskörper (The Attainability of Heavenly Bodies) (1925), shows flight in its most reductive (and anthropomorphic) manifestation. It is a depiction of an unclothed, idealized human figure, balancing precariously on the curved surface of a planet (presumably Earth), arms outspread like wings as if about to leap into the Milky Way’s starry belt. The image at once suggests liberation, and indeed Hohmann devotes much of his text to the physics of escaping Earth’s gravity. He bases his theoretical calculations on previous work on rocketry, most notably Robert H. Goddard’s influential A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes (1919) and Max Valier’sDer Vostoß in dem Weltraum (The Advance into Space) (1924)—texts that relied on “exhaust-gas velocity” as a means for propulsion. Hohmann’s preferred mode of space travel is a small, teardrop-shaped projectile that sits atop a giant, explosive-filled rocket. And though the question of propulsion remained for Hohmann “a question for the technology of explosives,”[4] his evocation of this model of spaceflight has some important antecedents. The most important of these is HermanOberth’sDie Rakete zu den Planetenräumen (The Rocket into Interspace) (1923), a work that was not only influenced by Jules Verne’s Autour de la Lune (Voyage Around the Moon) (1872), but that also qualified Oberth for his first “assignment” as scientific consultant for Fritz Lang’sDie Frau im Mond (The Woman in the Moon) (1929). All of these feature bullet-shaped projectiles that jettisoned additional stages in order to accelerate through space.

(Top) Walter Hohmann, Drawing of Spacecraft, Elevation (Source: Hohmann, The Attainability of Heavenly Bodies, 11); (Bottom) Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) (Source: Andrei Nakov, "Quelques éléments d’une convergence significative entre Malewicz et Ciolkovski," in La conquête de l’air : Une aventure dans l’art du XXème siècle [Toulouse: Les Abattoirs, 2002]). Hohmann’s spacecraft is smaller, more compact, with only enough room for two passengers. It references projectile designs by Russian rocketry pioneer KonstantinTsiolkovsky, whose spacecraft and rocket engine designs featured ovoid, aerodynamic shapes to lessen friction during ascent and descent. Work by students at Moscow’s Higher Art and Technical Studios, or VkhUTEIN would demonstrate a passing familairity with Tsiolkovsky’s work. Examples include Georgy Krutikov’s “Habitation Cell” (1928) and Iosevitch’s study for a Congressional Palace (1929), both deploying teardrop-like aerodynamic shapes at the vehicular and architectural scale to represent speed and progress. Yet Hohmann’s vehicle, with its hyperboloid rocket stage, references Tsiolkovsky in another, more curious way. The hyperboloid shape resembles an ear trumpet, and indeed, one of the most famous images of Tsiolkovsky shows him holding such a device to his ear.

(Top) Tsiolkovsky's studies for jet- and rocket-propelled vehicles; (Middle) Georgy Kruitikov (VkhHUTEIN — Ladovskii), Flying City, Graduation Project, Drawing for "Habitation Cell" (1928) (Source: S.O. KhanMagomedov, VHUTEMAS [Paris: Editions de Regard, 1990]); (Bottom) I. Iosevitch, Study for Congressional Palace (1929) (Source: Khan-Magomedov) This image of Tsiolkovsky reinforces one of the central points of this post: A technology designed for escaping Earth’s atmosphere now becomes a device to help a person communicate. To borrow an argument made by the late Denis Cosgrove and William L. Fox, the hyperboloid rocket is prosthetic and aesthetic: it extends the capacity of the ear while reinforcing the spacecraft’s familiar form across different media.[5] Yet more needs to be said about the process of spaceflight and how it translates into a kind of communication. The idea of a rocket as a prosthetic, aesthetic, and finally, communicative device reaches a strange apotheosis in the last moments of Thomas Pynchon’sGravity’s Rainbow (1973)—a description of a V2 rocket variant called Schwarzgerät, or Rocket 0000, taking off to an unnamed target. Aboard Rocket 00000 sits Gottfried, trained and conditioned to act as the rocket’s internal guidance system. “Guidance” is a misleading term, however, as our pilot/astronaut wears a form-fitting shroud made out of a mysterious plastic called Imipolex-G. Its purpose is to translate a human’s sensory inputs into polar coordinates. Gottfried has no means to actually talk to those on earth, much less the Schwarzgerät itself. There is no calculation, no communication, only pure reaction. ____________________________

Notes

[1] Museum of Modern Art, Talk to Me, http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2011/talktome/ (accessed 8 September 2011). [2] Here, the legal maxim res ipsa loquitur (“The thing speaks for itself”) will likely be invoked. Without going into a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction account of its use, let me state that notable exceptions notwithstanding, the doctrine applies only in cases of negligence. Res ipsa loquitur can be used in the absence of direct evidence of negligent behavior, the major qualification being that the thing that “speaks for itself” only does so because it was under a person’s control. This is but one instance of how our desire for objects to be “human” may be quixotic. To say that technology should be “understandable” and “comfortable” is a way of restating something which is fairly clear: We want our technologies to be more and more like us. [3] Friedrich Nietzsche, “Of Reading and Writing,” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, R.J, Hollingdale, trans. (New York: Penguin, 2003 [1961]), 68. [4] Walter Hohmann, The Attainability of Heavenly Bodies, Technical Translation F-44, U.S. Joint Publications Service, trans. (Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1960), 11. This is the official translation of Hohmann, Die Erreichbarkeit der Himmelskörper (Berlin and Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1925). [5] Cosgrove and Fox use this argument to describe the tools and processes of aerial photography. In their words, “Photography’s purpose is at once prosthetic and aesthetic (in the broadest sense of the word): to extend the capacity of the human eye to perceive the world, and to capture and freeze a moment in space and time, documenting and archiving it, and rendering it mobile through the printed and transmitted image.” Denis Cosgrove and William F. Fox, Photography and Flight (London: Reaktion Books, 2010), 8.

10/11/11--08:32: Some Updates

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Directions for camera usage (Source: Richard Linklater, Slacker [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992]) A very quick note to let you know about some things I have written of late that have appeared outside the space of this humble little blog (which, by the way, turned 5 this past summer). 1. In August, Materia, an Italian professional architecture journal published by Paolo Portoghesi, ran a piece by me called "L'aerodinamica leggerezza dell'essere" ("The Aerodynamic Lightness of Being.") It's a brief essay that truly exposes audiences to one of my own pathologies: namely, of writing about airplanes as a kind of architecture. Though the article was translated into Italian by Daria Ricchi, the English version of the piece also appears in the magazine. I may publish an extended version of it here, with more images. 2. Late last month, Quaderns d'arquitecture i urbanisme (better known as Quaderns) published "Air Control," my own brief, ruminative account of how the physical and metaphorical control of air defined the course of architecture through modernity into the present day. This article appears in English, Catalan, and Spanish. 3. Lastly, my own take on Richard Linklater's Slacker, from Places. It is the first of a small series of articles concerning the depiction of Texas cities on film. Bonus points to those who read the footnotes. Those of you who read all the way to the end will understand the above image. Special thanks go out to the editors I've been working with over the summer: Kazys Varnelis, Nina Rappaport, Mario Ballesteros, Guillermo López, Caroline Fuchs, Daria Ricchi, Nancy Levinson, Josh Wallaert, and Iben Falconer. Stay tuned ....

11/14/11--09:44: Capsule Review: The Heights

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From Kate Ascher, The Heights: Anatomy of a Skyscraper (2011) Deep into the index of Kate Ascher’s likable and engaging The Heights: Anatomy of a Skyscraper (The Penguin Press, 2011), we learn that “skyscraper” was not only the name of a racing horse, but that it also referred to the “triangular sky-sail” of a ship. The fact that such data appears in such a manner is poignant— here, in a book teeming with information, in the very part dedicated to the categorization and organization of names, nouns, verbs, et cetera, we find what is perhaps one of the most important concepts of the book. The word “skyscraper” is both performative and descriptive: not only does the Oxford English Dictionary tell us that “Skyscraper” was sired by “Highflyer” (these must have been very tall horses), but that along with “moonrakers,” “skyscrapers” were cast out during light wind conditions, presumably to catch an errant breeze that may guide a foundering vessel back to port. Similarly, The Heights uses its sumptuous graphics to present a performative and descriptive (i.e. anatomical) look at skyscrapers. To do so, Ascher abandons the impulse to conflate “skyscraper” with “architecture” and presents tall buildings more as urban objects. Repeating and elaborating the formula that made her earlier graphic study on infrastructure, The Works: Anatomy of a City (2005), so successful, Ascher offers the reader hundreds of drawings, as crisp as legible as anything offered by Ernst Neufert or Otto Neurath, all showing how skyscrapers are, in essence, compact, vertical cities. This emphasis on verticality goes well beyond the book’s title: The Heights is organized in a roughly vertical fashion, with some parts dedicated to the laying of foundations, and others showing how concrete is pumped towards upper floor plates via a complex series of compressors and tubes. (The table of contents even appears as an elevator control panel, which seems counter-intuitive unless one starts thinking of The Heights as vertical.)

A book about verticality, organized vertically Ascher’s book is by no means flawless. Those with afflictions for history (such as me), will find the introductory material either very familiar or somewhat lacking. For example, the tried and true method of showing the history of skyscraper construction on a timeline only serves to show a progression in form with only a very cursory investigation of the social, political, and cultural contexts that gave rise to these building types. Yet this is not a serious fault, for the book’s preference for graphic design and visual analysis gives the reader a detailed and comprehensive glance into the design, composition, and maintenance of skyscrapers. In all, the book’s greatest strength is its ability to communicate complex information for all kinds of audiences. This means that while perusing The Heights, I was able to suspend my own predilections for historical analysis if only for a moment to confront the complexities of architecture and urbanism in a different and exciting way.

11/23/11--08:43: Exit Strategy

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Timofey Pnin's Isometric Head (Source: ccassidy) February, 1957. A wintry day at fictional Waindell College, somewhere in the fictional Northeastern United States. The world is at its greyest. Bare-armed campus elms, no longer adorned by leafy crenellations, offer no resistance to the freezing air. The sun carves a shallow transit against the cirrus formations: silvery, aeriform scars illuminated by a hovering pale orb in the withering light. The previous year is only recently dead, and the new year, fraught with growing pains, is just coming to terms with its own anxieties. The future, unclear, is inevitable, looming. Atoms have just been spilt, their energy uncontrolled and dangerous. Boundaries, thought and drawn, calcify East and West. Sputnik is yet to become a wandering star. Yet even within the secluded groves of this Waindelled world, the faintest flickering of distant events prime the murmuring heart. All is not well in the world that is the University. An imaginary professor of Russian literature has just found out, to crushing disappointment, that he has been assigned to teach a theater course in the French department. His name is Timofey Pnin. Son of an ophthamologist, survivor of "The Hitler War," sifting through the flotsam and jetsam of a failed marriage, Pnin mulls over his latest failure. Tenure was not guaranteed, but in the fantastic, cobweb-ridden corners of Pnin's mind, it was a possibility as distant, tangible, and impossible as a nebula. Witness the exit strategy, the transition, the turning-over. Lists are made, appointments canceled or confirmed. Our elderly professor, defeated, collects his meager belongings in a small valise: tortoise-shell glasses too narrow for his crown, an omnibus volume of Sherlock Holmes stories, a fob of linen, a brilliant set of false teeth. Everything else seems like a film played backwards. Dishes are emptied of food and leap into the covert in neat, ceramic ziggurats. The sink fills and empties repeatedly, trash disappearing into the whorls and eddies of an infinite drain. Table and bed linens crumple into orthogonal forms and fly into closet drawers in spectral choreographies. These are the last days. Pnin writes to his landlord: "Dear Mr.___ : Behold the instructions for closing a bank account." Our esteemed professor enters a small, four-door blue sedan, and takes the driveway out from his rented house through the tall trees onto a busy street. A sure, if not steady driver, he leans into the gas pedal to avoid a swerving truck. Waindellians remembered a bluish blur leaving acrid smoke and petrol in its wake. "Did I just see Pnin?" they ask, commenting on an image-like composition of bald pate, glasses, and brilliant teeth accompanied by guttural threnodies of vrooms and even more vrooms. Pnin sightings increase in frequency as the car speeds away to some unknown terminus. And he is gone. In the wake of this noisy, smoky departure, there’s nothing. But wait: Is that a rustle of leaves? A cool breeze stirs the budding boughs. An icicle falls from a tree and shatters on the soft earth with a plink. Spring is not as far off as it seems. (Note: A version of this article appeared in Fulcrum, the Architectural Association's student broadsheet, in May 2011)

11/23/11--08:56: The Aerodynamic Lightness of Being

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Louis-Pierre Mouillard (1834-1897), Nile Vulture (Otogyps auricularis), from L’Empire de l’air (1881) The year is 1881. Convalescing in Alexandria, sketching images of Nile Vultures gliding in the sweltering Mediterranean skies, the French ornithologist and engineer Louis-Pierre Mouillard writes of an air teeming with life. Appearing early on in his influential treatise on bird flight, L’Empire de l’Air, Mouillard’s powerful, sublime description of the air casts a prophetic eye to the future: “O! Blind Humanity! open thine eyes and thou shalt see millions of birds and myriads of insects cleaving the atmosphere. All these creatures are whirling through the air without the slightest float; many of them are gliding therein, without losing height, hour after hour, on pulseless wings without fatigue; and after beholding this demonstration given by the source of all knowledge, thou wilt acknowledge that Aviation is the path to be followed.” [1] Here, then, is a plea to view the world differently. It is a new sensibility that does more than call attention to the changing air; it asks us to look at the numerous denizens of the air as something altogether different. This is because for Mouillard, these are not birds or insects. They are airplanes. In Mouillard’s world, these creatures maneuver easily through the air thanks to their nearly weightless bodies. This was the predominant view for centuries. Even that most dedicated chronicler and student of animal flight, Étienne-Jules Marey acknowledged how those before him thought that insects and birds were able to “float” in the sky because of air-filled sacs that made them no different than balloons. Marey and his contemporaries looked to the flight mechanisms of birds and insects as models for human-powered, heavierthan-air flight. And during its initial moments, heavier-than-air flight was only slightly heavier than air. This was the case with the earliest airplanes: delicate, cumbersome assemblages of cloth, wood, and wire that strained to escape the surface of the earth only to fly slowly, elegantly, and effortlessly on currents of air. This was not a common sentiment, however. Franz Kafka referred to the various machines lined up like flying mantises at the 1909 Brescia Air Show as “suspicious little wooden contraptions.” [2] For the budding modernist, aircraft were no different than Gregor Samsa, the scarab-like tragic figure from The Metamorphosis: insects with uncontrollable appendages that were “continually fluttering about.” [3] Samsa’s fantastical predicament moored him to some very real concerns. And despite Kafka’s plodding verse, we can think of another modernity that follows Nietzsche’s clarion call to “kill the Spirit of Heaviness.” [4] Here, instances like F.T. Marinetti’s descriptions of pilots, who upon returning to earth, leave their machines “with an elastic ultralight leap,” [5] or Le Corbusier’s observation that airplanes are a “sign of the new times” advancing forward “in a winged flurry,” [6] tell of a modernism imbued with a lightness. It is a physical and metaphysical lightness. An aerodynamic lightness. As stated by James A.H. Murray in the New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (1858), “Aerodynamics [is the] branch of pneumatics which treats of air and other gases in motion, and of their mechanical efforts.” [7] Murray’s definition is based on an earlier entry from the Popular Encyclopedia of 1837: “Aerodynamics; a branch of aerology, or the higher mechanics, which treats the powers and motion of elastic fluids.” [8] Though these definitions speak more of laboratories and experimental chambers, consider how Siegfried Giedion, that most stalwart promoter of architectural modernism, puts forward the laboratory as a metaphor for the creation of new architecture. Using ferroconcrete construction as an example, Giedion makes much of how concrete is not only a “laboratory product,” but also made in a laboratory. [9] This language is more than metaphorical, as demonstrated when he places new advances in iron construction on an aerodynamic footing: Instead of the rigid balance of support and load, iron demands a more complex, more fluid balance of forces. Through the condensation of the material to a few points, a creation of the airspace, des combinations aériennes that Octave Mirabeau recognized already in 1889. This sensation of being enveloped by a floating airspace while walking through tall structures (Eiffel Tower) advanced the concept of flight before it had been realized and stimulated the formation of the new architecture. [10] Giedion’s reference to Eiffel Tower is not accidental. Since its construction for the 1889 Exposition Universelle and until the early 20th century, Gustave Eiffel’s iconic structure was the ineluctable center of aviation in the world. In 1901, the Brazilian aviator Alberto-Santos Dumont won the Deutsch de la Meurthe prize after circling the Eiffel Tower in his No.6 Airship. Similar feats would have more lasting influences on architecture culture. Hence in Aircraft (1935), Le Corbusier writes of his early days as an apprentice in Auguste Perret’s office in 1909, sequestered in a “student’s garret on Quai St. Michel,” and hearing the noise of the Comte de Lambert’s Wright Flyer circle the Eiffel Tower. [11] Le Corbusier’s life-long romance with flying machines is well known. And not surprisingly, Giedion would describe Le Corbusier’s own architecture in aerodynamic terms. Writing about the Cité Frugès à Pessac in Bordeaux, Giedion describes the building as something not unlike a wind tunnel: “Corbusier’s homes are neither spatial not plastic: air flows through them! Air becomes a constituent factor! Neither space nor plastic form counts, only RELATION and INTERPENETRATION!” [12] This is a description of a new kind of architecture comprised of light structures, many appearing “as thin as paper” that transform buildings into “cubes of air” and make an “immediate transition to the sky.” [13] Architecture, now aloft, seems to have taken on the qualities of the airplane.

André Devambez (1867-1944), Le seul oiseau qui vole au-dessus des nuages (The Only Bird That Flies Above the Clouds), 1910, H. 45; W. 68cm, © ADAGP, Paris-RMN (Musée d'Orsay)/Hervé Lewandowski. A reproduction of this painting would appear in L'Illustration (September 17, 1910) Consider, for example, André Devambez’ painting of an ungainly aircraft grazing the clouds high above Paris for the September 17, 1910 issue of L’Illustration. The machine — an Antoinette V monoplane — was one of the most celebrated aircraft in early twentieth century French aviation. Designed by the engineer and inventor Léon Levavasseur, Antoinette aircraft were lightweight machines that were as pleasing to the eye as they were to fly. One reason for this was that Levavasseur, who began his career as an engine designer for speedboats, created a lightweight, aluminum-cast, gasoline-injection engine with a high power-to-weight ratio for all his aircraft. His engines powered some of the most important aircraft of its day: Farmans, Blériots, Esnault-Pelteries. Not wonder, then, that Devambez portrays the Antoinette as a bold, graceful, dragonfly-like machine, freed from its earthly shackles, hovering lightly above a bank of cumulus clouds. Like others, he would have known that French aviator Hubert Latham prized the machine precisely for these characteristics. A dashing figure known as “The Storm King,” Latham set multiple records in Antoinette aircraft. And despite two failed attempts to cross the English Channel, Latham and his Antoinette were a familiar presence in the skies of cities like Paris and Berlin.

(Top and Bottom) From A. Cléry, “L’Aéroplane ‘Antoinette V’” L’Aerophile: revue technique et pratique des locomotions aériennes (Jan. 1, 1909)

(Top) Wing assembly for Antoinette V, from A. Cléry, “L’Aéroplane ‘Antoinette V’” L’Aerophile: revue technique et pratique des locomotions aériennes (Jan. 1, 1909); (Bottom) Advertisement showing Levavasseur’s lightweight Antoinette engine, from L’Aerophile (Jan. 1, 1909) In January 1909, the French aviation impresario Georges Besançon published a lengthy article about the Antoinette V in L’Aerophile, the Aéro-Club de France’s monthly journal. The article celebrated many of the airplane’s innovations, and yet focused especially on its construction. Images and drawings from the article show the wings and fuselages before the application of painted and lacquered fabric as skeins of wooden spars joined with aluminum gussets—these give the aircraft a fragile, skeletal appearance. The author, A. Cléry, reminds readers how the Antoinette’s wings and fuselage are made from combinations of triangles and pyramids—a construction technique that not only accommodates traction and compression, but also does so with a minimum amount of materials. This, Cléry observes, is “the same principle of the construction of steel bridges and the Eiffel Tower. Its application to the construction of airplane wings has resulted in an absolute rigidity and strength, combined with the greatest possible lightness.” [14]

(Top) Alexander Graham Bell’s “Siamese Twin” kites, from Alexander Graham Bell, “Aërial Locomotion, With a Few Notes of Progress in the Construction of the Aërodrome,” National Geographic Magazine (Jan., 1907), 1-33; (Bottom) Bell’s “Cygnet II,” February 25, 1909. Bulletins, from January 4, 1909 to April 12, 1909, Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers at the Library of Congress, 1862-1939, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Cléry was not the only one to make a connection between Eiffel and Levavasseur. As one of L’Aerophile’s most avid readers, the American inventor Alexander Graham Bell would take a particular interest in Cléry’s article about the Antoinette V. Since 1899, Bell had been preoccupied with building kites that improved on Lawrence Hargraves’ “box” designs. He settled on kites composed of multiple cells of tetrahedral structures, a design that would increase the amount of surface area with a minimum of materials. His first kites were small, wood-and-cloth pyramids consisting of smaller tetrahedral units. And as he became more ambitious with his designs, he created large, ungainly tetrahedral space frames that had to be towed out into the open water in order to be set aloft. Of these, the largest were the “Cygnet” series, which were gigantic structures comprising of 3,393 tetrahedral cells. Tested out in the waters of Keuka Lake, near Hammondsport, New York from 1907 to 1908, the Cygnets were temperamental things. In the words of their pilot, Thomas Selfridge, the Cygnets “persistently refused to fly.” [15]

(Top and Bottom) Alexander Graham Bell’s Tower, from “Dr. Bell’s Tetrahedral Tower,” National Geographic Magazine (Oct., 1907), 672-675. Despite the Cygnet’s perceived stubbornness, Bell found solace in Cléry’s emphasis on tetrahedral structures. Later in 1909, Bell noted how the Antoinette “seems to be constructed throughout upon the tetrahedral plan.” [16] The emphasis on “construction” should not be taken lightly, for Bell’s Cygnets were more architectural than aerodynamical. And in a series of spreads for the October 1907 issue of National Geographic Magazine, editor Gilbert M. Grosvenor depicted what would be the fullest architectural expressions of Bell’s aeronautical work. Titled “Dr. Bell’s Tetrahedral Tower,” the piece shows images of an 80-foot observation tower built in 1907 at Bell’s estate in Beinn Bhreagh, Nova Scotia. With legs made of tetrahedral-celled trusses that intersected high above to ground to form a platform, Bell’s structure was touted for its lightness and ease of assembly. Its use of eight-pin joints to hold the frame no doubt foreshadowed similar innovations by Max Mengeringhausen, Konrad Wachsmann, or R. Buckminster Fuller. Bell’s truss system resulted in a kind of building that was light and that, echoing Giedion’s description of the Eiffel Tower, gave one the sensation of being aloft. It was an aerodynamic building in the sense that it could accommodate moving air. But it was also aerodynamic because it was a structure originally designed to fly. When we normally think of flying buildings, we immediately conjure images of architecture outfitted with streamlined forms not unlike those made memorable by Erich Mendelsohn or Norman Bel Geddes. Bell’s tetrahedral tower is radically different from these, however. As an assemblage of pipes joined into lightweight pyramids and tetrahedrons, Bell’s tower nevertheless captivates us because it is one of the few instances where we can talk of a flying machine that has truly evolved into architecture. (An Italian version of this article appeared in September 2011 in Materia 70. Many thanks to Daria Ricchi for her beautiful translation.) __________________ Notes

[1] Louis-Pierre Mouillard, “The Empire of The Air,” Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, Showing the Operations, Expenditures, and Conditions of the Institution to July, 1892 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1893), 398. This is an abridged translation of Mouillard, L’Empire de l’air: essai d’ornithologie appliquée a l’aviation (Paris: Masson, 1881). [2] Franz Kafka, “Die Aeroplane in Brescia,” Bohemia (29 September 1909), quoted in Peter Demetz, The Air Show at Brescia, 1909 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 115. [3] Kafka, "The Metamorphosis," in Joyce Crick, ed. The Metamorphosis and Other Stories (London: Oxford University Press, 2009), 82. [4] Friedrich Nietzsche, “Of Reading and Writing,” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, R.J, Hollingdale, trans. (New York: Penguin, 2003 [1961]), 68. [5] Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Teoria e invenzione futurista, Luciano de Maria, ed. (Milan: Mondadori, 1968), 116, quoted in Jeffrey T. Schnapp, “Propeller Talk,” Modernism/Modernity Vol 1.3 (1994), 165. [6] Le Corbusier, Sur les 4 routes (Paris: Gallimard, 1941), 125. [7] “aerodynamics, n.” The Oxford English Dictionary. 3d ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford University Press. 10 June 2011 . [8] John D. Anderson, Jr., A History of Aerodynamics and its Impact on Flying Machines (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 5. [9] Sigfried Giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferroconcrete, J. Duncan Berry, trans. (Los Angeles: Getty Center Publications, 1995), 150-151. [10] Ibid., p. 102. [11] Le Corbusier, Aircraft (London: The Studio, Ltd., 1935), 6. [12] Giedion, Building in France, p. 169. [13] Ibid. [14] A. Cléry, “L’Aéroplane ‘Antoinette V’” L’Aerophile: revue technique et pratique des locomotions aériennes (Jan. 1, 1909), 7-8. [15] Report of Flight of Cygnet II, Monday, March 2, 1908. Notes by Thomas E. Selfridge, from September 24, 1907 to July 24, 1908. “Series: Subject File, Folder: Aviation, Aerial Experiment Association vs. Meyers, 1908-1912, undated.” Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers at the Library of Congress, 1862-1939, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. [16] Bell, “The Antoinette V.” Bulletins, from January 4, 1909 to April 12, 1909, Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers at the Library of Congress, 1862-1939, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

02/20/12--19:35: Attributing Modernism

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Antonin Raymond, Summer House at Karuizawa, South and East Facades, Nagano Prefecture, Japan (1933) (Source: Kurt Helfrich and William Whittaker, eds. Crafting a Modern World: The Architecture and Design of Antonin and Noémi Raymond (New York: Princeton Architectural Press), 155) The idea of copying necessarily invokes problems of authorship. Before a quick-minded reader evokes Benjamin Franklin’s calls to “Imitate Jesus and Socrates”[1] or Ralph Waldo Emerson’s invective that the “imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity,”[2] or even before any heart-wrenching calls that decry the loss of the “aura” in the face of rampant “mechanical reproduction” or “technical reproducibility”[3] can be made, I only offer the idea that a copy presupposes an author. There are two ways in which this can happen. On the one hand, there is the unauthorized copy, a canvas, novel, or piece of music that is actionable because it was not sanctioned by the original’s author. On the other hand, there is the authorized copy, the so-called “derivative work”[4] that merits its own recognition though it incorporates another author’s work. An example of this would be a translation of a foreign-language novel, or a scholar’s annotations to a previous work. Thus a copy also invokes a chronological lockstep: it summons or copies a piece of art that existed before. The actionable counterfeit, fake, or simulacra cannot exist without a previous source. Copyright, patent, and trademark laws provide a series of useful cultural barometers that shed further light on authorship. These statutes contain some very important boilerplate language defining the deceptively simple question: what is copyrightable? The United States Copyright Acts of 1909 and 1976 maintain a tried and true formulation and affirm that a copyrightable work is an “original work of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression.”[5] All the non-conjunction words in that definition have been the subject of countless litigations and exegeses in American and international jurisprudential circles. But for our purposes, the words “original” and “authorship” are of greatest importance. This is because though the author may be able to copyright an “original” work, he or she can also assign the right of that work to a third party. Should an author decide to copyright a derivative work, however, then he or she must recognize the copyrighted material that inspired the new material. This is done through attribution; quite literally, through quoting and giving cognizance to someone else’s work.[6] A specific instance from Czech-American architect Antonin Raymond’s career in Japan may shed some important light on the architectural significance of attribution. Raymond’s Summer House and Studio in Karuizawa, Japan (1933), is one of the architect’s most well-known and critical successes. Built on a mountain retreat near the Karuizawa Golf Course, the house is nestled between a series of ponds and grassy berms. The house plan reveals a distinct emphasis on observing these landscapes. By ignoring the biaxial plan common to regional Japanese architecture, and by subsequently adopting a distinct asymmetrical scheme inherited from Weimar modernism, Raymond’s plan allows the house to take in different views of the landscape. The house also is not perpendicular to the plot of land, a strategy that allows for a maximized view of the surroundings. The desired effect, if not of a house that blends into its immediate surroundings, is then of a project that at least indexes the region via a carefully deployed articulation of material flourishes and tectonic strategies. Raymond used chestnut logs for the supporting structure as well as cedar for other structural elements as well as siding and other furnishings. The house’s metal roof is covered with branches of Japanese larch, which not only protect the roof from heat, but also deaden the sound of frequent summer rains. The house’s interior provides more evidence of what Fritz Neumeyer calls a “viewing machine,” a “set of frames and sequential spaces” that emphasize the role of the observer.[7] The house circulation patterns center around a main living room and fireplace, an area opening up into double-height spaces and allowing an unobstructed view of the surrounding countryside. Yet the elision between inside and outside is only one of a set of binary oppositions that characterize Raymond’s project. Although the building’s foundations are of poured concrete, it also features the use of local woods and other strategies that “mask” an otherwise European building into the rolling, grassy berms of Nagano prefecture. At a glance, the regional vestments literally dressing the Karuizawa house exemplify Raymond’s “initial idea of an architecture unified with its regional landscape and culture … an ideal that transcended the context of an individual country” yet was “deeply connected to these settings.”[8] In the end, this combination of disparate elements and inspirations, combined in a single, small-scale domestic project, emphasized Raymond’s “self-conscious understanding and appreciation of these materials to compose the poetics of ‘country life’ and ideals of the ‘natural’ and the ‘country.’”[9]

(Top) Le Corbusier, drawings of Mattias Errázuris House (1929-1930) (Source: Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, Oeuvre Complète de 1929-1934, Willy Boesiger, ed. (Zurich: Les Editions d’Architectures, 1964 [7th ed.]), 48. (Bottom) Raymond’s Karuizawa House, as it appeared in Le Corbusier’s Oeuvre Complete (Source: Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, Oeuvre Complète de 1929-1934, 52) Except for material flourishes, such concerns were not far from Le Corbusier’s mind when he was busy conceptualizing the Mattias Errázuris house (1929-1930). He designed the project for a coastal resort in Zapallar, Chile, a small town on nestled between the tall escarpments of the Andes Mountains, and the ultramarine hues of the Pacific Ocean. Like Raymond, Le Corbusier sought to create circulation spaces that allowed the residents to partake in these stunning landscapes. Yet the similarities between these two projects do not end there. A comparison between one of Le Corbusier’s renderings of the Errázuris House and the interior spaces of Raymond’s Karuizawa House and Studio will reveal some uncanny similarities. In addition to a double-height ceiling, both featured circulation ramps (reminiscent of the promenade ramps from the Villa Savoye) and a distinct preference for local materials. The floors of the Errázuris House were also of local woods, and a series of sparse cross-hatching on the walls suggest the use of local stone. And when Raymond published photographs of the Karuizawa House in a November 1935 issue of Architectural Forum, Le Corbusier noticed. A review of Raymond’s 1935 monograph, Antonin Raymond: His Work in Japan, 1920-1935 in the same issue criticized the Karuizawa House for its less-than-subtle nod to the Errázuris House. The negative criticism both stung and bewildered Raymond. In a letter to the editor of Architectural Forum, he countered, “I feel … that you lay too much stress on the question of the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright and Corbusier on my work at the expense of those vital qualities which make it valuable. Even to speak of the Japanese influence in my work is to see the truth only from a superficial angle. There is a strong Japanese influence in my work, but it is one of spirit and not of form … Should we be too afraid of precedent or influence we could do nothing at all. It does not matter from where we take anything but what we do with it.”[10] Le Corbusier was equally astonished at the Karuizawa House, so much so that (in addition to accusing Raymond of plagiarism) he was inclined to feature a picture of Raymond’s work along side his own in the third edition of the Oeuvre Complete (1935). Le Corbusier makes note of this in a May 1935 letter to Raymond, written shortly before the two architects resolved their differences: Dear Sir: I have received your letter of April 8th, which I found upon my return from a trip abroad. I am pleased to hear from you. Please be assured that there is no bitterness between us, but — as you yourself say — you made a slight mistake, that is, you neglected to send me a note when you published the images of your Tokyo house, which is very pretty by the way. I do not have time to read the journals that I receive; I just laid eyes on the photographs, and since I have rather quick reactions – and since in addition, I was at that very moment in the process of dictating the captions for the book published by Boesiger – I seized that opportunity and introduced a little dig that would wake up the book’s readers. Incidentally, my note was not mean; on the contrary, it praises Japan for its technical achievements and you for the taste of your intervention. I would even go further, that is, you give such a pretty interpretation of my idea that page 52 of the Boesiger book is perhaps the prettiest of the whole volume. I will even extend my compliment further: if I allow all journals to publish my works, it is not in order for my ideas to remain buried in people’s drawers. On the contrary, it is for them to be of some use. Yet my designs are often copied very badly, very unskillfully, or very stupidly. This is where my compliment comes in: your interpretation of my drawings is quite witty, and this is a sincere compliment. I hope it will please you. In any case, please be assured, dear Mr. Raymond, that I bear no grudges and am quite incapable of doing so. You may use as you like the note I am writing to you, for the end of your letter appears to call for some involvement on my part that I do not fully understand. It is now my turn to give you license to use the present letter in whatever manner will appear most pleasant to you. Sincerely, Le Corbusier [11] One of the most remarkable things about this incident is Raymond’s and Le Corbusier’s casual attitude towards issues of authorship and plagiarism. Although Raymond’s attitude is a distant echo of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s claim that copying is unavoidable, he not only admits the Corbusian influence, but casts that issue aside in favor of the more pertinent issue of “spirit” and “form.” Le Corbusier also recognizes potential plagiarism, but in a brilliant masterstroke, he still wins by dint of his larger-than-life personality. The ability to print a small version of the Karuiazawa house along the Maison Errázzuris is a powerful gesture indeed: in lieu of being slighted by an upstart follower or devotee, Le Corbusier is still able convey the power of his creative spark and the breadth of his influence. Attribution, therefore, could be conceived as a measure of power and influence. Though the architects summarily disposed of the issue of authorship and plagiarism, at least the subject came up. Litigation surrounding the copyrighting and patenting of modernist design continues to this day. But in the early 20th century, such adversarial lawyering did deal with some pertinent issues of the time, such as original versus copy, or form versus process.[12] Architects and designers in the 20th century tended to be a savvy lot, especially in legal and business matters. As a matter of fact, both Antonin Raymond and Konrad Wachsmann made prolonged efforts to patent their designs.[13]

Raymond, “Window Construction” U.S. Patent No. 2,282,885 (Filed June 23, 1939) Antonin Raymond’s patents provide additional guidance on issues of attribution. On June 23, 1939, Raymond submitted a patent application for a “Window Construction," a type of window that allowed for “horizontal-moveable” sashes.[14] The patent abstract, in addition to stating why the invention is significant, states that the horizontal sash is a new type of architectural element that improves on window-making techniques.[15] This patent application is significant because it is in stark contradiction to his cavalier handling of the Errázuris house. Whereas Raymond seemed naïve in his claims that too much significance was made of the Karuizawa House’s overt Corbusian influences, here, he has not only found a specific architectural detail, but has also located one that is patentable and profitable.[16]

Raymond, Architectural Details (Tokyo: Kokusai Kenchiku Kyôtai, 1938) It is significant that Raymond’s métier was to exacerbate a tension between the grand project of incorporating Japanese “spirit” and “form” into his designs and the didactic enumeration of building elements. The latter is especially poignant as it is the subject of Architectural Details, a book he co-authored with his wife Noémi in 1938. Consisting of 250 photographs and 530 measured drawings, Raymond considered the book as a vital contribution to modern architecture, consisting not of “abstract phrases, but also of actual work considered.”[17] Architectural Details also operated on the level of polemic: the layout of the book emphasized how traditional Japanese architectural elements could be utilized in modern architecture. Whereas the right-hand page contained Raymond’s measured drawings of roof, ceiling, and window details, the left-hand photographs showed such elements being used in contemporary buildings (some of which, like the Tokyo Golf Club House of 1931-1932, contained such details). It is worth noting, for instance, how pages 15 and 16 of Architectural Details not only show drawings of “horizontally-moveable” sashes, but also suggests that such sashes and window units are commonly used in the wood-sliding windows and shoji (sliding doors) in traditional Japanese construction.

Revere Brass and Copper Advertisement featuring Raymond’s Louis Stone House, The Saturday Evening Post (7 August 1943) (Source: Helfrich and Whitaker, eds., Crafting a Modern World: The Architecture and Design of Antonin and Noémi Raymond, 54). The enumeration of these architectural “details” and their subsequent economic potential and attribution potential becomes evident in an 1943 magazine advertisement for Revere Brass and Copper featuring Raymond’s Louis Stone House (1939), also known as the “tri-level” house. Published in The Saturday Evening Post, the advertisement is typical of those from the era. Under a black-and-white watercolor wash of the Louis Stone House is a heading stating “A Hillside Built this House: Copper and Brass Keep it Snug and Trim.” Beneath that is an extended quotation from Raymond that also suggests a binary opposition between larger design philosophies and the minutiae of everyday construction: in addition to abating “stiffness,” “falseness,” and “fussiness,” the ad makes a special note of copper used in roof-flashing and window screens. The ad also features a small profile of Raymond, who implores the reader, “I urge you to send to Revere for a free booklet with complete plans, photographs, and information. It may inspire you to build a better house!”[18] The idea that an architect would willingly send off plans and drawings to anyone seems ridiculous at first. And although it is not known whether anyone took up Raymond’s claim or took the ad seriously, it was one of several ads promoting future (i.e. postwar) uses of copper products. The Revere Copper and Brass Company also enlisted the services of other architects and designers, including R. Buckminster Fuller, Norman Bel Geddes, Louis Kahn, Walter Dorwin Teague, and William Wurster.[19] It is worth noting how Raymond and others were willing to lend their name to a series of print commercials — less than a decade earlier, criticisms of Raymond’s Karuizawa House’s summarily invoked the names “Wright” and “Corbusier.”[20] It is reasonable to believe that the two masters would never lend their plans and drawings to anyone requesting them.

(Top) Konrad Wachsmann, “Building Construction” U.S. Patent No. 2,491,882 (Filed June 22, 1945 ); (Bottom) Raymond, “Airplane Hangar” U.S. Patent No. 2,590,464 (Filed March 2, 1946) A cursory examination of some postwar transactions show a similar willingness to deal with corporate interests. Both Antonin Raymond and Konrad Wachsmann were busy securing patents for airplane hangars and trying to solicit bids from the United States Army Air Force. On June 22, 1945, Wachsmann filed a patent for his “Building Construction,” the famous space frame he developed for the United States Air Force. The application states that the frame “relates to building construction and is more especially concerned with portable structural wall units primarily designed for buildings of huge proportions, as for instance for hangars capable of housing dozens or hundreds of large planes, but applicable also to warehouses, auditoriums and other types of building constructions.”[21] Wachsmann did not, however, reserve all the rights to the space patent: he assigned one-fourth interests each to Albert and Charles Wohlstetter.[22] Likewise, on March 2, 1946, Antonin Raymond filed a patent for an “Airplane Hangar,” an invention that “relates generally to buildings and more particularly to airplane hangars.”[23] Raymond assigned all interests in his hangar to the National Steel Corporation of Delaware.[24] And though Wachsmann only assigned one-half of his interests to the Wohlstetters, he and Walter Gropius did assign all their legal interest in their packaged home system to The General Panel Corporation.[25]

Konrad Wachsmann and Walter Gropius, “Building Structure” U.S. Patent 2,421,305 (Filed August 10, 1945) Attribution has a decidedly political function as well. The very instances where Raymond and Wachsmann assigned their interests and their name to particular interests were all in service of the war effort.[26] But a look at one last patent reveals the true nature of this type of attribution. On November 1, 1943, Harvard chemist Louis F. Fieser filed an application for “Incendiary Gels,” his contribution to the war effort that would eventually be known as “napalm.”[27] The patent abstract states that the novelty of Fieser’s invention lies in “the production of new and improved gelled hydrocarbon fuels and gelling agents therefore, for use in incendiary munitions of both the burster and tail-ejector types, in flame throwers, in hand grenades, in fire starters and generally, in any incendiary munition which utilizes a combustible liquid or low-melting solid or gelled fuel.”[28] The heading to the patent abstract not only states that Fieser is the “assignor to the United States of America as represented by the Secretary of War,” but the opening paragraph indicates “The invention described herein may be manufactured and used by or for the Government for governmental purposes without the payment to me of any royalty thereon.”[29] The sentence is a boilerplate clause that requires inventors to assign their interests to the United States Government particularly for matters of national security of military intelligence.[30] Although Fieser never obtained any royalty for his patents, his application is often quoted for applications concerning similar military technologies. For him, as well as for Antonin Raymond and Konrad Wachsmann, intellectual property law provided a vehicle that recognized their status as authors or inventors. The above documents reveal some tried and true assumptions about authors and their artistic products. First of all, the correspondence, patent abstracts, as well as magazine advertisements presuppose not only the existence of an artistic work or invention that merits legal protection, but highlight that such work can be attributable to an author or inventor. This means that there are also certain circumstances when a person can suspend legal protection for a work of authorship or invention. For example, an architect can assign rights in a design drawing or building process to a third party such as the United States Government. But the parrying between Antonin Raymond and Le Corbusier over the Karuizawa House, as well as Raymond’s subsequent involvement with Revere Brass and Copper provide a useful conundrum. In both of these circumstances, an architect is fast and loose with the idea of authorship. As Le Corbusier freely lets Raymond use his letters and drawings regarding the Maison Errázuris, Raymond seems all too willing to let people have drawings of his Louis Stone house. The idea here seems to be one of comfort and power: even if Raymond were to publish and republish drawings of the Karuizawa House as well as the Maison Errázuris, or if he were to send off thousands of copies of the Louis Stone house to a Saturday Evening Post audience, no one’s reputation as an architect would ever be tarnished. Each would still be recognized as the designers of their individual houses, and this despite the fact the architects have evaded some typical legal issues. [Author's note: This article is based on research completed at the Yale School of Architecture from 2005 to 2007, as well as on papers presented at the University of Virginia in September 2006 and Harvard University in February 2007. This article was also inspired by my MED thesis, completed in May 2007, titled Built to Destroy: Erich Mendelsohn’s, Konrad Wachsmann’s, and Antonin Raymond’s “Typical German and Japanese Test Structures at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah. An earlier version of this article appeared in Pidgin 10 (2011)]

________________________________ Notes

[1] Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Leonard W. Larabee, et al., ed., (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 149. [2] Ralph Waldo Emerson and Stephen Emerson Whicher, Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson: an Organic Anthology (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), 113. On the other hand, Emerson’s “Quotation and Originality” provides a different point of view. There, Emerson writes, “We prize books, and they prize them most who are themselves wise. Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our protest or private addition so rare and insignificant, — and this commonly on the ground of other reading or hearing, — that, in a large sense, one would say there is no pure originality. All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. We quote not only books and proverbs, but arts, sciences, religion, customs, and laws; nay, we quote temples and houses, tables and chairs by imitation.” See “Quotation and Originality” in Letters and Social Aims (J.R. Osgood, 1876): 158. [3] A further source of ambiguity is evident in the different translations for Walter Benjamin’s seminal 1936 essay. The most oft-quoted is the Harry Zohn version, known to generations of architecture students as “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” A more correct translation of the title (“Das Kunstwerk im Zeitaler siener technischen Reproduzierbarkeit”) is provided in Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings’ volume of Benjamin’s selected writings. There, the essay is titled “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility.” [4] The United States Code defines a “derivative work” as “a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a ‘derivative work’.” 17 U.S.C. §101. [5] The Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. §102(a) indicates that “Copyright protection subsists … in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.” [6] See 17 U.S.C. §106(a)(1)(B), et seq. [7] Fritz Neumeyer, “A World in Itself: Architecture and Technology” in Detlef Mertins, ed. The Presence of Mies (New York: Princeton, 1994), 78. [8] Ken Tadashi Oshima, Constructed Natures of Modern Architecture in Japan 1920-1940: Yamada Mamoru, Horiguchi Sutemi, and Antonin Raymond, PhD dissertation, Columbia University (2003), 120. [9] Ibid., p. 209. [10] Antonin Raymond, “Letter to the Editor,” Architectural Forum 63 (November 1935), 4, quoted in Kurt G.F. Helfrich and Mari Sakamoto Nakahara, “Rediscovering Antonin and Noémi Raymond,” introduction to Kurt G.F. Helfrich and William Whitaker, eds. Crafting a Modern World: The Architecture and Design of Antonin and Noémi Raymond (New York: Princeton, 2006), 26. [11] Le Corbusier to Antonin Raymond (Paris, 7 May 1935) in Helfrich and Whitaker, eds. Crafting a Modern World, 332. [12] A famous example of this are the famous “Chair” lawsuits: the first was a 1929 claim by Hungarian furniture impresario Anton Lorenz against the international furniture company Gebrüder Thonet Aktiengesellschaft (AG); the second, a 1936 claim by Mauser Kommaditgesellschaft (KG) against Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. In the first lawsuit, the form of a cantilevered chair was considered evidence of authorship. In the second action, Mies’s attorneys won by claiming that the industrial processes used to manufacture a particular chair were copyrightable and patentable. For a good discussion of the significance of form in furniture design, see Marcel Breuer,, “Metal Furniture and Modern Spatiality” (1928), in Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, eds. The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley: University of California, 1994). For a more detailed discussion of these two lawsuits and their significance, see Otakar Macel, “Avant-Garde Design and the Law: Litigation over the Cantilever Chair,” Journal of Design History Vol. 3, No. 2/3 (1990), 125-143. [13] In the United States, patent law was established “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries,” U.S. Constitution, Art. I, §8(8) (1796). As opposed to legal frameworks in other countries, patent law in the United States is based on a “first to invent” as opposed to “first to file” system. In other words, patent protection extends to first-in-time inventions. In the United States, a patent is a right to exclude others from making, selling, offering for sale an inventor’s device. The right to obtain a patent belongs to “Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof” 35 U.S.C. §101. The term “process” is defined as an “art or method, and includes a new use of a known process, machine, manufacture, composition of matter, or material” 35 U.S.C. §100(b). [14] U.S. Patent No. 2,282,885 (June 23, 1939). [15] Ibid. “It is well-known to architects and other skilled in the design and construction of buildings that window constructions in which the sashes are horizontally-moveable offer certain and considerable advantages over the usual vertically-moveable arrangements, and many constructions embodying horizontally-moveable sashes have been proposed. It is significant, however, that none of these proposed structures have been adopted, in spite of the known advantages of the horizontally-moveable sashes, the reason being that no practical construction, which may be simply installed and operated, has yet been proposed.” [16] Ibid. [17] Antonin and Noémi Raymond, “Preface” in Architectural Details (Tokyo: Kokusai Kenchiku Kyôtai, 1938) quoted in Helfrich, “Antonin Raymond in America, 1938-1949” in Helfrich and Whitaker, eds. Crafting a Modern World, 47. [18] Ibid., p. 54. [19] Each completed a pamphlet to be distributed by Revere: in addition to Raymond writing "A Hillside Built This Home for Revere," other titles in the series (all from 1943) included "Better Homes for Lower Incomes" (Buckminster Fuller), "Tomorrow’s Homes for the Many" (Bel Geddes), "You and Your Neighborhood" (Kahn), "New Homes for Better Living" (Teague), and "A Flexible House for Happier Living" (Wurster). Ibid. [20] It is likely that if Raymond ever sent away any of his drawings, they would have a copyright notice. [21] U.S. Patent No. 2,491,882 (June 22, 1945). [22] Ibid. Albert Wohlstetter was a consultant and senior strategist for the RAND Corporation from 1951 to 1963 and is known today for his theories on nuclear proliferation and mutually-assured destruction. He is also known as a seminal figure in the neoconservative movement. For more about Wohlstetter and his affiliation with design circles as well as his dealings with Meyer Schapiro, see Pamela M. Lee, "Aesthetic Strategist: Albert Wohlstetter, the Cold War, and a Theory of Mid-Century Modernism" October No. 138 (Fall, 2011), 1536 [23] U.S. Patent No. 2,590,464 (March 2, 1946). [24] Ibid. [25] U.S. Patent No. 2,355,192 (May 30, 1942). The principal reason for this was to shield both Wachsmann and Gropius from any personal legal or pecuniary liabilities incurred by the General Panel Corporation. The assigning of all interests to a corporation or business association is fairly commonplace for these reasons. For more about Wachsmann’s and Gropius’ Packaged House System, see Wachsmann, The Turning Point of Building: Structure and Design (New York: Reinhold, 1961 (translation of Wendepunkt in Bauen [Wiesbaden: Krausskopf Verlag, 1959) and Michael Tower, “The Packaged House System (1941-1952)” Perspecta 34 (2003), 20-27. [26] In 1943, along with Erich Mendelsohn, Raymond and Wachsmann were both employed by the Standard Oil Development Company and the U.S. Army’s Chemical Warfare Service to design “Typical German and Japanese Structures” at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah to test the efficacy of the brand-new AN-M69-X napalm incendiary bomb. For more on this project, see Enrique Ramirez, “Fata Morgana” Thresholds No. 33 Form(alisms) (July 2008), and “Erich Mendelsohn at War” Perspecta 41: Grand Tour (Cambridge, MIT Press, 2008), 83-91. I have also written about this project, albeit in a more interpretative manner in “A Sphinx in Utah’s Desert” and “An Ithaca of Sorts” . [27] For a brief overview of Fieser’s involvement, see Ramirez, “The Harvard Candle” . [28] U.S. Patent No. 2,606,107 (November 1, 1943). [29] Ibid. [30] The statutory language enabling this type of assignment is as follows: “Applications for patent, patents, or any interest therein, shall be assignable in law by an instrument in writing. The applicant, patentee, or his assigns or legal representatives may in like manner grant and convey an exclusive right under his application for patent, or patents, to the whole or any specified part of the United States. A certificate of acknowledgment under the hand and official seal of a person authorized to administer oaths within the United States, or, in a foreign country, of a diplomatic or consular officer of the United States or an officer authorized to administer oaths whose authority is proved by a certificate of a diplomatic or consular officer of the United States, or apostille of an official designated by a foreign country which, by treaty or convention, accords like effect to apostilles of designated officials in the United States, shall be prima facie evidence of the execution of an assignment, grant or conveyance of a patent or application for patent” 35 U.S.C. § 261. Other patents that borrow from Fieser’s application offer similar language. See John A. Southern, Lloyd J. Roth, Francis J. Licata, and Joseph Cunder, “Fuel Compositions and Their Preparation” U.S. Patent No. 2,570,990 (April 26, 1944) and Jerome Goldenson and Leonard Cohen, “Thickener for Hydrocarbon Fuels” U.S. Patent No. 2,769,697 (April 29. 1953).

03/26/15--19:32: Thomas Pynchon's 115th Dream

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Hibbing High School, Hibbing Minnesota, From The Air (Source: Minnesota Historical Society)

"I think I'll call it America" / I said as we hit land" -Bob Dylan (né Robert Allen Zimmerman), Hibbing High School, Class of 1959 [1]

Dear Reader, for this inaugural excursion into the American landscape, indulge me for a moment and let me parse the above epigram. If your tastes gravitated once towards the mythical and legendary, this brief quote may cause you to recall a series of stories and images, of the Mayflower, an oaken sloop dashed upon a rocky Massachusetts coast, of Colonies of the Bay and Lost varieties, of Myles Standish standing proud, or even of the Wampanaog emissary Tisquantum planting oily mossbunker in the Plymouth loam. You may even imagine the leathery boot with rusted lachets making transition from gunwale to granite, with a weatherbeaten William Bradford in oilskin frock declaring the visto unfurling before his eyes a map made real, of meridians and parallels, hachures and rosaventorum—all becoming trees and sand. He thinks he’ll call it America, so the epigram goes, with nary a mention of Vespucci or Vinland, at least not yet. Here are the beginnings not of America, but of “America,” words belonging to one “Captain Arab,” the Captain of the Mayflower who is not ingrained in our historical consciousness as much as he is part of our pop cultural landscape. He is a character in “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” Bob Dylan’s raucous send-up of the American originary myth from his 1965 album, Bringing it All Back Home. It is a song known as much for its false start—Dylan begins to sing “I was riding on the Mayflower/When I thought I spied some land”[2] before breaking down in laughter and having to restart the song—as for its fabulous concoction of a New World replete with French bistros (staffed by angry servers and exploding cookware), English hot dog stands, “hobo sailors,” malfunctioning telephone booths, bowling alleys, and even a cameo appearance by a jail bound Christopher Columbus. This is not the duck-jacketed Dylan we see on the hazy cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, huddled with Suze Rotolo on the corner of Jones and West 4th Streets—as idyllic an image of Greenwich Village as we will ever know. This is Electric Dylan, appearing rakish and squinty-eyed on the cover of Bringing it All Back Home, sitting on a musty couch in a cluttered living room in Woodstock, New York with a reclining Sally Grossman. They are surrounded by mid-sixties ephemera, from Robert Johnson and Françoise Hardy albums, to a Time magazine cover featuring Lyndon B. Johnson, and even a wayward Fallout Shelter sign. (Aficionados of this album will recall that the original version this photo shoot reveals a book at Dylan’s feet—the Bollingen edition of Richard Wilhelm’s translation of the I Ching, the same version that inspired Philip K. Dick to write The Man in the High Castle three years before.) “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” finds our former folk revivalist about to become the Stratocaster-wielding De Tocqueville we know from the 1965 Newport Folk Festival—parrying his sonic parting shot on unsuspecting ears thanks to a rollicking version of “Maggie’s Farm” (the third track from Bringing it All Back Home), barely drowning out the audience’s caterwauling. This historical comparison is not far-fetched. Something like the booing at Newport can be found, perhaps not surprisingly, in some of the first travelogues of the American landscape. In 1709, the English explorer John Lawson wrote A New Voyage to Carolina, an account of his experiences among the Catawba and Waxhaw tribes in North and South Carolina. He took keen interest in how their warriors “have a Tune, which is allotted for that Dance; as, if it be a War-Dance, they have a warlike Song, wherein they express, with all the Passion and Vehemence imaginable, what they intend to do with their Enemies; how they will kill, roast, sculp, beat, and make Captive, such and such Numbers of them; and how many they have destroy'd before.”[3] Alexis De Tocqueville, in the first chapter of the first book of his Democracy in America (1835), would map his own interest in song to the physical “Outward Configuration of North America”—a true description of the North American landscape on par with Lawson’s. Pages of rapturous prose evoking everything from the tributaries feeding into the Great Lakes, spreading into “vast marshes, losing themselves in the watery labyrinth,” to the fertile valleys between the Alleghenies and the “godlike” Mississippi, find De Tocqueville noting how the “Indian knew how to live without needs, suffer without complaint, and die with a song on his lips.”[4] I am partial to the version of this passage appearing in the 1835 Henry Reeve translation —“The Indian could live without wants, suffer without complaint, and pour out his death-song at the stake.”[5] In his notes, Reeve traces De Tocqueville’s knowledge of Indian death rattles to Jesuit writer PierreFrançois-Xavier de Charlevoix’s history of the French-Indian war, Histoire de la Nouvelle-France (1744). Reeve, a cautious documenter as there ever was (he was a lawyer and friend of the blind Swiss naturalist, François Huber), also noted Charlevoix’s account of French explorer Samuel de Champlain’s travels with Iroquois and Huron war parties, yet did not delve into a well-known part of this episode: while one war party was torturing its prisoners, Champlain, who refused to participate initially, resolved any moral dilemma by ending one captive’s suffering with a coup de grâce to the skull with the bloodied stock of an arquebus. Instead, Reeve gave ear to a Huron warrior berating a prisoner for “all the cruelties which he had practised upon the warriors of their nation,” who, before the violent deed, tells the prisoner “that if he had any spirit he would prove it by singing.” Thanks to Reeve, the whole incident becomes a kind of musical commentary. The Huron warrior “immediately chanted forth his death-song, and then his war-song, and all the songs he knew, ‘but in a very mournful strain,’ says Champlain, who was not then aware that all savage music has a melancholy character.”[6] Could this be one of the earliest descriptions of the Blues? It would not be hard to imagine a Lawson or De Tocqueville, in essence musical anthropologists in disguise, transforming into an Alan Lomax, plumbing the depths of the wilderness to catalogue the distinct strains of a musical America, searching along the Mississippi for the elusive blues guitarist Robert Johnson, who would, of course, haunt Dylan’s early work. Dylan would later craft a kind of musical theogony, casting Johnson as an Alabama Athena or Mississippi Minerva, “a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armor.”[7] And such talk of crazed wanderings, of lightning bolts and explosions of mad genius should remind us that Dylan’s “Arab” is a cipher for that other famous American seagoer, the mercurial, monomaniacal, “ungodly, god-like” Captain Ahab of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851). Like Leo Marx, we would declare Melville’s seaborne yarns as constituting that most American of conventions, the landscape tale, incorporating everything from a young harpoonist in Typee securing passage “across an inscrutable Pacific wilderness” to the whaleship Pequod leaving a foamy wake like “the track of a railroad crossing a continent.”[8] Now, the landscape metaphor is more deeply ingrained, literally. Ishmael, who has assumed Moby-Dick’s narrative mantle only because he has “lived to tell the tale,” considers a deep, grim significance under Ahab’s impassioned fervor: the Captain’s “full lunacy subsided not, but deepingly contracted; like the unabated Hudson, when that noble Northman flows narrowly, but unfathomably through the Highland gorge.”[9] The riverine metaphor, with its relentless directionality, suggests something of a sinister corridor raging through the mad captain’s designs, a mania perhaps best encapsulated in his tête-à-tête with Moby-Dick, “from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee,”[10] a moment punctuated by the launch of blood-tempered harpoon. “Arab” has no pretensions, and playing electric bard to Melville’s Ishmael, Dylan sings: He said, “Let’s set up a fort And start buying the place with beads” Just then this cop comes down the street Crazy as a loon He throw us all in jail For carryin’ harpoons.[11] For Dylan, his 115th dream was a hallucinatory romp, part-Woody Guthrie, part-Rimbaud, echoing other famous travels. I would be remiss in not mentioning Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Huck, who channels Twain’s own experiences as a river pilot, drifts lazily, memorizing the landscape, using his own words to animate the world along the banks of the Mississippi. Here, explorer, folk and blues singer, and river pilot alike are allied in a kind of cultural revision with fabulist, humorist, and scholar, all sounding a course through their own personalized America, transforming its landscape into a shared memory, an “America” for all. No wonder, then, that Constance Rourke introduces her own excursus on “American Humor” with another riverine metaphor, one less glib than Ishmael’s: “In the nation, as comedy moves from a passive effervescence into the broad stream of a common possession, its bearings become singularly wide.”[12] The main device for wanderings along the internal navigable waters of the “American” consciousness is the line. Were I to share my own impressions of “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” to a friend, I would say something like, “There’s this line I really like. It’s really funny. It goes like this …” Yet the line can also be quite literal, for when Huck meanders down the Mississippi, taking in the world from horizon to horizon, he “sets out” anchoring lines along the cottonwoods, notices the “pale line” marking the transition from river to sky, the “long black streaks” formed by currents in the still, morning waters. For Leo Marx, Huck’s lines are especially apposite, as “Sentences flow in perfect cadence, without strain or stilted phrase or misplaced word.”[13] In short, to mark a course through the landscape is to write the landscape. And to write the landscape, the implement of choice creates a mark, from a harpoon’s jagged scar, to a flatboat’s spumy backwash, to the groove on a 33 1/3 rpm long-player. Leave it to Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, astronomer and surveyor, respectively, to engage in the original act of writing the American landscape. Like their historical namesakes, the titular heroes of Thomas Pynchon’s 1997 novel Mason & Dixon are entrusted with creating, and more importantly, inscribing the figurative lines of demarcation that will separate Pennsylvania from Maryland, and Maryland from Delaware —the “purest of intersections mark’d so far upon America.”[14] It is Pynchon’s most linear (and in a sense, straightforward) narrative. Matching “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” in hilarity and tone (if not in subject matter), Mason & Dixon charts a different course for the founding of America. Astronomers and surveyors hobnob with familiar figures cast in comic light, such as a marijuana-growing George Washington who moonlights as a stand-up comic and a mysterious, smoke-lensed Benjamin Franklin crafting his own version of the Dutch East India Company in the Ohio Valley. The art and science of geodesy still takes center stage as Mason and Dixon travel throughout the world to first record the Transit of Venus before interacting with shadowy syndicates and marshal arts societies on the eve of the American Revolution. In the end, the novel progresses along with the line of demarcation, a fact not lost upon the narratives, weaved often into interlacing, coiled strands that in some way or form always seem to concern lines, whether figurative or literal. The act of surveying and casting meridians and parallels begins with taking the readings of stars, a process that is not unlike the writing of narratives—at least this is how in one of the novel’s manifold inspired moments, Mason describes geodesy to Dixon as “Numbers nocturnally obtain’d be set side by side, and arrang’d into Lines, like those of a Text, manipulated until a Message be reveal’d.”[15] Conversations hardly stray away from such conceits, and the link between map, landscape and writing culminates in a moment echoing De Tocqueville’s “Outward Configuration of North America” (translated by Reeve as “Exterior Form of North America”) when a fellow surveyor tells Dixon, “This ‘New World’ was ever a secret Body of Knowledge,— meant to be studied with the same dedication as the Hebrew Kabbala would demand. Forms of the Land, the flow of water, the occurrence of what us’d to be call’d Miracles, all are Text,— to be attended to, manipulated, read, remember’d.”[16] But to what extent is the creation of such lines fiction? As recounted by one of the novel’s main narrators, the Rev’d Wicks Cherrycoke, “The Line makes itself felt,” and yet “as long as its Distance from the Post Mark’d West remains unmeasur’d, nor is yet recorded as Fact, may it remain, a-shimmer, among the few final Pages of its Life as Fiction.”[17] The fictions in Mason & Dixon are recursive, layered upon each other and creating a dense narratological web. As in Dylan’s 115th dream, here fact also mixes with fiction, as evidenced by the epigrams from nonexistent books that appear alongside more familiar names. Those with an inclination towards Aristarchus and Hipparchus, and who have also just taken in cameo appearances by novelist Patrick O’Brian as well as colonial American analogues for Popeye and “Mister” Spock, may take some refuge in the following passage from Timothy Tox’s fake-epic poem, the epically titled Pennsylvaniad, itself another example of Mason & Dixon’s“geodesickal” imagination: Let Judges judge, and Lawyers have their Day, Yet soon or late, the Line will find its Way, For Skies grow thick with aviating Swine, Ere men pass up the chance to draw the Line.[18] With such talk of “aviating swine,” we remind ourselves that sometimes pigs do indeed fly—and they surely do in Mason & Dixon. Dixon is a protégé of the mathematician William Emerson, who teaches surveying as literal flight above the landscape (reducing the modernist notion of the aerial “God’s eye view” into pure technique) and claims that before surveyors “learn’d to fly, they had to learn about Maps, for Maps are the Aides-mémoires of flight.”[19] And mapmaking is “a journey onward, into a Country unknown,—an Act of Earth, irrevocable as taking Flight.”[20] Making maps, telling stories, writing lyrics—all these are “Acts of Earth” which not only document, but also create the American landscape. And the process is translated ninety degrees, from the orthogonal space of map to the rough surface of a wall. At least this is that the Wolf of Jesus, a Jesuit operative plotting not cartographical revenge, but true bloodlust against Colonials from a fortified monastery in Québec, reveals during one of the many fantastical passages in Mason & Dixon: “As a Wall, projected upon the Earth’s Surface, becomes a right Line, so shall we find that we may shape, with arrangements of such Lines, all we may need, be it in a Crofter’s hut or a great Mother-City,—Rules of Precedence, Routes of Approach, Lines of Sight, Flows of Power,—.”[21] To make a map is to make a wall, and to cast something on a wall is to tell a story of the land. George Rippey Stewart, that erstwhile documenter of American place-naming, wrote of this urge to project when he noted how “The frontier was not only of the land, but also in the minds of men” who “enjoyed pastoral landscapes no longer, but looked admiringly at the canvases of the Hudson River School —chasms and waterfalls and rough mountains in the mist.”[22] These canvases, hung on American walls in Stewart’s idyllic New England are not unlike those found by rock critic Greil Marcus in 2007 on a pilgrimage to Hibbing, Minnesota to see Dylan’s alma mater, Hibbing High School. Marcus lit off on this trip based on a former Hibbing resident’s testimony, “If you’d been to Hibbing, you’d know why Bob Dylan came from there. There’s poetry on the walls.”[23] Upon his arrival to Hibbing High, Marcus indeed did see something on its walls: “We gazed up at old-fashioned but still majestic murals depicting the history of Minnesota, with bold trappers surrounded by submissive Indians, huge trees and roaming animals, the forest, and the emerging towns.”[24] The tour of Hibbing High concludes with a dream-like vision of the very auditorium where Robert Zimmerman began his transformation into Bob Dylan. There, on the auditorium walls, “gilded paintings of muses waited; they smiled over the proscenium arch, too, over a stage that, in imitation of thousands of years of ancestors, had the weight of immortality hammered into its boards.”[25] It is a lovely image, of ghosts from time immemorial, of landscapes fading into an earlier history. Here, then, are the origins of Dream Number 115, our peregrination through the heart of the wilderness into something that is truly, deeply, ours. America. At least that’s what we think we’ll call it. __________________________________ Notes

A version of this essay was first published in the first issue of Manifest: A Journal of American Architecture and Urbanism(2013). Infinite thanks are in order to the editors Anthony Acciavatti, Justin Fowler, and Dan Handel, for allowing me to be part of this issue. This essay is for them.

[1] Bob Dylan, “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” by Bob Dylan, in Bringing it All Back Home, CBS, 1965, 33 rpm. [2] Ibid. [3] John Lawson, A New Voyage to Carolina; Containing the Exact Description and Natural History of That Country: Together with the Present State Thereof. And A Journal of a Thousand Miles, Travel'd Thro' Several Nations of Indians. Giving a Particular Account of Their Customs, Manners, &c. (London, 1709). [4] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Arthur Goldhammer, trans. (New York: Library of America, 2004), 21, 28. This reads a bit less dramatic in French: “L’Indien savait vivre sans besoins, souffrir sans se plaindre, et mourir et chantant.” De Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique, Volume 1 (Paris: Lévy, 1864), 37. [5] De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Book 1, Henry Reeve, trans. (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1862), 9. [6] Henry Reeve, Appendix to De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume 2 (New York: Appleton, 1899), 833. [7] Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One (New York: Knopf, 2004), 282. [8] Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000 [1964]), 196, 282. [9] Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1851), 204. [10] Ibid., 633 [11] Dylan, “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” CBS, 1965, 33 rpm. [12] Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Study of the National Character (New York: NYRB Classics, 2004 [1931]), 11. [13] Marx, “Pilot and Passenger: Landscape Conventions and the Style of Huckleberry Finn,” American Literature, Vol. 28, No. 2 (May, 1956), 146, 131. [14] Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), 469. [15] Ibid., 479. [16] Ibid., 487. [17] Ibid., 650. [18] Ibid., 257. [19] Ibid., 504. [20] Ibid., 531. [21] Ibid., 522. [22] George R. Stewart, Names in the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States (New York: NYRB Classics, 2008 [1945]), 270. [23] Greil Marcus, “A Trip to Hibbing High School,” Daedalus, Vol. 136, No. 2, On Sex (Spring, 2007), 116. A version of this essay appears in Marcus, “Hibbing High School and the ‘Mystery of Democracy,” in Colleen Josephine Sheehy and Thomas Swiss, eds. Highway 61 Revisited: Bob Dylan’s Road from Minnesota to the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 3-14. [24] Ibid., 119 [25] Ibid.

03/27/15--05:36: Centerville/Interzone, or: Map Ref. 41°N 93°W

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(Figure 1) “Views of Centerville” (Source: L.L. Taylor, ed. Past and Present of Appanoose County, Iowa: A Record of Settlement, Organization, Progress and Achievement (Chicago: S.J. Clarke, 1913), n.p.)

From the root of our national psyche, an Exhibit of sorts. The evidence is probative, sure, but what other admissible facts, what other morsels of conjured truth are there to be found? To our esteemed Jury of Peers, to this coterie of readers whose only task is to take in this skein of confabulation, let me assure you that this Exhibit is real, but only in the sense that it is something that occurs in space and time. Like Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom (né Virag) in the “Ithaca” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), we levitate into air, beyond the stratosphere, holding our breaths as satellites and space junk whir by our geostationary lockstep. We peer into the cerulean and phthalo patchwork world below and there, a surface once familiar rendered now into a joining of parallel and meridians. Decumanus and cardo intersect somewhere in the glacial moraines of southern Iowa, among the hills the Sioux call paha. Rivers of anthracite once flowed underneath this rolling, hummocky prospect like blackened veins. On the surface, railroad lines scored the land’s carboniferous circulatory system with iron spurs. Steam locomotives bear their bills of lading, emissaries of shipping lines that read like an abecedarium of Midwestern capital: Chicago, Burlington & Quincy; Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul; Keokuk & Western; Iowa and St. Louis. Affluents of coal and iron join at the headlands of the Mystic Coal Bed, near a city founded in 1846, first as “Chaldea,” a riverine name, reminiscent of that alluvial flat where the Tigris and Euphrates once joined, now a settlement attracting a host of New Englanders, Central Europeans and Scandinavians, as well as profiteers seeking bounty from individual treaties with Sac, Fox, and Winnebago tribes in the wake of the Black Hawk War. Less than a year later, on January 18, 1847, a law issued by the first Iowa legislature proclaimed that this town, the seat of Appanoose County, be renamed Centerville (instead of “Senterville,” for the Tennessean William Tandy Senter, long admired by the city’s founder, the surveyor Jonathon F. Stratton). Stratton himself was an expert in all things Centerville, and in 1878, along with other early Iowans, became one of several sources for an oral, comprehensive history of Appanoose County. Of these men, Colonel James Wells, a veteran of the War of 1812 and the Black Hawk War, became known as one of Iowa’s most famous homesteaders. Around 1839, he built a cabin in “Section 16, Township 67, Range 16” in the County, a platted quadrant near the berm where the Missouri, Iowa & Nebraska railroad passed over the Indian River. And three years later, walking near a cabin owned by one “A. Kirkendall,” Wells spotted a man sitting at the base of a tree with his torso slumped forward. He approached the body and noticed a small, charred bullet hole rimmed with dried blood in the middle of the man’s forehead. He must not have been aware of the marksman sighting him from a distance before the fatal shot—Wells found a pencil and small, lined ledger book in the man’s hands with entries resembling “the notes of someone looking up lands; but as the township lines had not been laid, this seemed inexplicable.”[1] This was the county’s first recorded death, a plot line braided into a larger, malevolent act of fiction, for “It is barely possible that the man had been riding away a horse not his own, had been followed, captured and put to death, and that the entries had been made by his executioners, in order to lead possible inquiry on a false scent.”[2] Plot line is no different from plat line, as Wells’ homesteading is also a supreme act of fiction, a conjuring of something tangible from what once was a series of orthogonal lines on paper. Such narratives could be skewed, literally. In his Past and Present of Appanoose County, Iowa (1913), L.L. Taylor, a former Justice of the Peace for the County, claimed that a “brief historical sketch” would suffice as a “fitting introduction to the history of the young and thriving state of Iowa.”[3] Yet the editor of the 1878 history of Appanoose County informed the reader, “In the absence of written records, it has often occurred that different individuals have given sincere, honest, but, nevertheless, somewhat conflicting, versions of the same events, and it has been a matter of great delicacy to harmonize these conflicting statements.”[4] For his own history of the County, Taylor included photographic plates (Figure 1), taken from the tops of buildings or at street level, of various locales within Centerville. Places like South Eighteenth Street and even the Shawville Mine appear devoid of people. The exception is the photograph of North Main Street, capturing a gathering of people and horses around a trolley making a slow jug-handle turn into the street, the only photograph that is not clipped or placed at an odd angle. These six “Views of Centerville” are distributed roughly into dual columns, yet some of the images are rotated and layered upon each other. It is far removed from the rough 4x4 grid of townships that give Appanoose County its fixed, quadrangular shape. These two images, map and photograph, offer competing narratives of Centerville. And yet the obsessive regularity of the Appanoose grid does not necessarily hint at any kind of veracity.

(Figure 2) Map of Appanoose County, Iowa (Source: Western Historical Society, The History of Appanoose County, Iowa: Containing a History of the County, Its Cities, Towns, &c., a Biographical Directory of Citizens, War Record of Its Volunteers in the Late Rebellion, General and Local Statistics, Portraits of Early Settlers and Prominent Men, History of the Northwest, History of Iowa, Map of Appanoose County, Constitution of the United States, Miscellaneous Matters, &c. (Chicago: Western Historical Society, 1878), n.p.

Centerville, however, is a name that hints to space, location, and orientation. It is the middle of a grid, a town in the cartographic center of Appanoose County. (Figure 2) Centerville finds its kindred, toponymical spirit in Interzone, a name given by another Midwesterner, William Seward Burroughs, as shorthand for the International Zone in Tangiers, an exotic destination in our literary imagination that, like Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria, becomes a code for something illicit. Whereas Durrell’s Alexandria became a purgatory for lovesick expatriates, Interzone was something much darker, last stop in a circuit for dead-eyed junkies craving for pyrethrum (distilled from the crushed flower heads of the Dalmatian Chrysanthemum, T. cinerariifolium), seeking night passage across the rachial divides of the Hindu Kush and into the incensefilled foyer of the Hotel Massilia on Rue Marco Polo, marking their transit across the continents as if dragging a leadened spike across a map. Two such itineraries begin their convergence, gliding between the Galeries Lafayette and storefronts advertising passage across the Strait of Gibraltar, on to the Boulevard Pasteur and intersecting at the Hotel Rembrandt in the nouvelle ville de Tanger. It was there that Burroughs saw Carnet de Voyage au Sahara, a show featuring English painter Brion Gysin’s aquarelles made in the North African dune seas, among the seif and barkhan. The two met briefly, with Gysin describing Burroughs as trailing “long vines” of peyote plant and adorned by an “odd blue light” emanating from his hat.[5] Another convergence occurred in 1960 in Paris, where Gysin introduced Burroughs to the Dadaist penchant for composition via the “cut-up” and “fold-in,” a method of writing by literally manipulating physical scraps of text to conjure sentences, paragraphs, and even entire novels. Burroughs embraced the cut-up technique only shortly after he dispatched his first and most well known novel, Naked Lunch (1959), a dense, hallucinatory journey through the belly of America, via Tangier, that ends with an augur’s instructions to the reader, a channeling from a near-future: “You can cut into The Naked Lunch at any intersection point.”[6] In reaching this and subsequent “intersection points,” Burroughs transforms writing into a kind of autobiographical transport whose docket conveys grim spectra spanning everything from an addicts’ aphorism to a dopers’ needle. In a typical jeremiad, perhaps written under an oneiric haze of chloral hydrate, Burroughs channels his grandfather, William S. Burroughs I, founder of the American Arithmometer Company, invoking something of a junky’s notion of eternal return when he writes, “So listen to Old Uncle Bill Burroughs who invented the Burroughs Adding Machine Regulator Gimmick on the Hydraulic Jack Principle no matter how you jerk the handle result is always the same for given co-ordinates.”[7] Unlike grandfather Burroughs the First, famous for his hardline drawings, etchings, and centers rendered with sharpened styluses under the mirrored arc of a microscope, Burroughs opted for something more expansive: “In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, […] a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.”[8] This mania for maps and mapmaking would continue in The Ticket That Exploded (1962), a true “cut-up” novel, a science fiction nightmare where giant crabs roam the landscape at the behest of the nefarious, intergalactic enterprise known as the Nova Mob. In this novel, the autobiographical and cartographical collapse into a single line of text, a moment when Burroughs maps his family history onto his own fictions: “Word is an array of calculating machines from Florida up to the old North Pole—Image track goes with it.”[9] Indeed, Burroughs jettisons linear narratives in favor of something more like a film unspooling to the end only to spool back to the beginning in an ouroboros-like manner. The dead man slouched in front of Kirkendall’s cabin, trepanned in order to unburden a secret of Iowa history, who finds a parallel in Burroughs shooting his common-law wife Joan Vollmer in the head during a drunken game of “William Tell” in Mexico City on January 6, 1951—a montage connecting, compressing, and circulating images from disparate histories. Yet as critic Mary McCarthy observed in her review of Naked Lunch, Burroughs “has no use for history, which is all ‘ancient history,’” a moment reminiscent of another doper, the nefarious Wimpe, salesman for Ostarzneikunde GmbH (a subsidiary of I.G. Farben) in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), divulging to the Red Army operative Vaslav Tchitcherine that his role is not to interpret history, but rather to “Die to help History grow to its predestined shape.”[10] Like Bloom and Dedalus, Burroughs levitates into outer space, a “planetary perspective” that reveals another form, one where history is a “sloughed-off skin” that “shrivels into a mere wrinkling or furrowing of the surface as in an aerial relief-map or one of those pieced-together aerial photographs known in the trade as mosaics.”[11]

(Figure 3) Dust Jacket to Traveller’s Companion Series No. 91, William S. Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded (Paris: Olympia, 1962) (Source: TRB Booksellers, Albany, NY)

(Figure 4) William S. Burroughs, “Warning Warning Warning Warning Warning Warning Warning Warning Warning Warning,” My Own Mag, No. 4 (1964) (Source: Reality Studio: A William S. Burroughs Community, http://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/my-own-mag/my-own-mag-issue-4/)

“[C]ut the prerecordings into air into thin air”[12]: so concludes The Ticket That Exploded with a statement that is not of the air, but all-too-grounded, a reminder that the authorial act, the committing of words to the page, is really no different than cutting and pasting them on the flat surface of a page. Stories, characters, and fictions may be communicated from hands to paper via a keystroke on the ribbon of an Antares or Hermes Rocket typewriter (or with a microphone that commits the author’s words as magnetized particles onto cellulose acetate, spun through a Nagra recorder’s tape head), yet they are a heaped into a jumble of words, sentences, and paragraphs that become something recognizable, something readable. What is a novel but a mosaic of words, a pact between author and reader that the stochastic jumble of text, the endless non-sequiturs, the breakneck changes in rhythm and pacing, will resemble something like a story, one that makes up for a lack of resolution with a relentless direction and energy? Narrative becomes a topographical construct, a bailiwick with its own features, courses, and jurisdictions. It is a world unto itself, its essence captured on the dust cover to Book No. 91 of the Traveller’s Companion Series of Maurice Girodias’ Olympia Press (Figure 3), the 1962 first edition of The Ticket That Exploded. Here, an aerial photograph, presumably of a World War One-era French countryside, reveals a silvery, hoary ground of convex, concave, and cyclic polygons stitched together randomly. It covers only half of the dust cover, with a simulated tear delimiting the border between image and text, an allusion to cutting-up, and underneath, “The Ticket That Exploded” appears in red grease pencil with Burroughs’ name typeset in all caps. Aerial photography and cut-up writing here become literary equivalents for the first time, a terrain where two modernist tropes—the aerial regard surplombant and fragmented, multiperspective writing—intersect to create their own terrain. More evidence of this appeared in 1964, when Burroughs published a small single-page cut-up entitled “Warning Warning Warning Warning Warning Warning Warning Warning Warning” (Figure 4) for the experimental literary magazine My Own Mag. At the very top of the page, an admonition, also typeset in all caps, refers to aerial nuclear bombardment, while at the bottom, sentence fragments assemble into an 8x4 grid, “to be read every which way.” Yet the numbered columns point to a contradiction, one where the orthogonal arrangement of meridians and parallels results in something that is not regular, not ordered, but produced and fortuitous. This has always been the case with maps and aerial photographs, avatars for an incontestable way of looking at the world, an ironclad epistemology that is but a kind of highly-attenuated, high-altitude abstraction succumbing to all the vagaries and caprices of interpretation. As the sociologist Hans Speier noted in 1941, aerial views and maps are instances where science and technology “become subservient to the demands of effective symbol manipulation.”[13] An assembly of plats into an aerial mosaic, the identification of “Section 16, Township 67, Range 16” in Appanoose County—these may correspond to a cartographic reality, yet they are fictions that appease our desire to conjure order out of disorder.

(Figure 5) (Top) Wire, 154,, 33 1/3 rpm (EMI Records, 1979) (Bottom) Wire, Map Ref 41°N 93°W, 45 rpm (Harvest Records, 1970)

Buoyed above the Midwest in geosynchronous orbit, we once again peer below through our splayed feet at another series of lines, intersecting slightly north of Centerville, in Monroe County, Iowa, a point between Chariton and Ottumwa, on the asphalt surface of U.S. Highway 34, the Red Bull Highway, named after the 34th Infantry Division, the first Army unit deployed to Europe during World War II. There are even coordinates: 41°N 93°W, or simply, “Map Ref. 41°N 93°W,” which is the fourth track of the second side of English band Wire’s 1979 album 154. (Figure 5) Recall vocalist Colin Newman’s words in the first verse, a reminder of what is underneath the North American grid: Straining eyes try to understand The works, incessantly in hand The carving and paring of the land The quarter square, the graph divides Beneath the rule, a country hides [14] With this evocation of the telltale Jeffersonian grid firmly in place, now listen to what is “beneath.” Now, carve and pare the Ampex tapes, cut the prerecordings into air into thin air acetate inscribed and sprinkled with magnetized particles corresponding to the peaks and valleys of an audio recording. Take out the strands of horsehair from your violin’s bow. Replace with a strip of tape, a recording of William S. Burroughs’ reading the words “LISTEN TO MY HEARTBEAT.” Replace your violin’s bridge with an amplified, magnetized tape head. (Figure 6) Push and pull the bow, collé, détaché, louré… until the author’s words become elongated and slowed down in sonic space. Now, listen as another singer, actually an artist, Laurie Anderson, also from the Midwest, enunciates, “Deep in the heart of darkest America. Home of the Brave. Ha! Ha! Ha! You've already paid for this. Listen to my heart beat.”[15] Landscapes become images. Images become words. And words recorded, cut-up, splice and reassemble to create a fictional America.

(Figure 6) Laurie Anderson, Tape-Bow Violin, from For Instants: Part 5, Amsterdam: De Appel, 1977 (Source: Museum of Modern Art, New York, Please Come to the Show: Invitations and Event Flyers from the MoMA Library, http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2013/please_come_show/)

From Earth orbit down to the depths of “darkest America” lurking somewhere underneath its patchwork topographies, from handwritten plats and grids inscribed into the first county registers in Appanoose County, Iowa, and moving forward to a more recent past where dead authors come to life as voices bowed across electric violins, consider the lines journeyed, the paths traversed. We can use any number of devices to describe these spatial and temporal transits, from lines of longitude and latitude to timelines. These lines meet in locales recognizable because of names like Centerville or titles like “Map Ref. 41°N 93°W.” We can even arrange these lines spatially, an ordered logic where lines marking changes in vertical altitude and passages from past to present to future time become vectors, and their intersecting planes form, of all things, a structure. And of this structure, let us give it a name. “Fiction” has a nice ring to it. _______________________________ Notes

An earlier version of this essay appeared in Pidgin Magazine's "Fiction" issue from 2013. Many thanks to Nick Risteen for allowing this slightly odd piece of writing to see the light of day.

[1] Western Historical Society, The History of Appanoose County, Iowa: Containing a History of the County, Its Cities, Towns, &c., a Biographical Directory of Citizens, War Record of Its Volunteers in the Late Rebellion, General and Local Statistics, Portraits of Early Settlers and Prominent Men, History of the Northwest, History of Iowa, Map of Appanoose County, Constitution of the United States, Miscellaneous Matters, &c. (Chicago: Western Historical Society, 1878), 334. [2] Ibid. [3] L.L. Taylor, ed. Past and Present of Appanoose County, Iowa: A Record of Settlement, Organization, Progress and Achievement (Chicago: S.J. Clarke, 1913), 1. [4] Western Historical Society, Preface to The History of Appanoose County, Iowa, n.p. [5] Brion Gysin, Let The Mice In (New York: Something Else Press, 1973), 8. [6] William Burroughs, Naked Lunch (New York: Grove Wiedenfeld, 1992 [1959]), 203. [7] Burroughs, Introduction to Naked Lunch, xviii-xix. [8] Burroughs, “The Future of the Novel” (1964), in Randall Packer and Ken Jordan, eds. Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), 294. [9] Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded (New York: Grove Wiedenfeld, 1994 [1962]), 147. [10] Mary McCarthy, “Dejeuner sur l’Herbe,” The New York Review of Books, Vol. 1, No. 1 (February 1, 1963), n.p. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (New York: Viking, 1973), 715. [11] McCarthy, "Dejeuner sur l'Herbe," n.p. [12] Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded, 217. [13] Hans Speier, “Magic Geography”, Social Research, 8:1/4 (1941), 313. [14] Graham Lewis, Colin Newman, and B.C. Gilbert, “Map Ref. 41°N 93°W,” by Wire, in 154, EMI, 1979, 33 rpm. [15] Laurie Anderson, “Sharkey’s Day,” in Mister Heartbreak, Warner Bros., 1984, 33 rpm. For her performance of “Late Show,” from her concert film, Home of The Brave (1986), Anderson played a tape-bow violin with a recording of William S. Burroughs’ saying “Listen to my heartbeat.”

03/29/15--16:05: Follow The Light

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Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937), The Annunciation (1899), Oil on Canvas, 57 x 71 1/4 inches (144.8 x 181 cm) Framed: 73 3/4 x 87 1/4 inches (187.3 x 221.6 cm)

Henry Ossawa Tanner’s The Annunciation (1898) is a study of illumination and intimacy. The angel Gabriel appears as a shaft of amber light, brightening the room where a young Mary humbly sits. We take in what others have already noticed. Mary appears all too young, free of any kind of religious adornment. The light casts a noonish shadow, shortened as if at vernal equinox. Hanging carmine and burgundy tapestry protecting against pockmarked walls; unkempt floor rug barely covering the cobbled floor; lapis lazuli gown issuing over a roughly-hewn wooden chest; clay urns; an oil lamp whose flickering barely registers against the glowing visitant: these are all known, and yet what is truly striking about the painting is the way it captures a moment of intense intimacy. Mary is learning that she will give birth to the Son of God, and Tanner’s choice of warm, gilded hues seems at odds with the actual moment, an annunciation as expansive and radiating as it is hushed and secretive. Mary does not avert her gaze. She stares at a point above the glimmering, somewhere beyond the picture frame. Her eyes remain intelligent and searching, committed to an act of seeing familiar to us across various registers. All are premised on knowing more things, more people, more insights. As we “look down” on the offensive or “look askance” at a problem, we also “look up” words and “look up to” people: expressions that associate seeing with a specific vantage point. Or, the very objects and images that capture our sights reveal something different or surprising once we orient ourselves at various angles.

William Eggleston, Untitled n.d. from Los Alamos, 1965-68 and 1972-74 (published 2003.) 1965-68 and 1972-74. Dye transfer print, 12 x 17 ¾ inches (30.5 x 45.1 cm.) Private collection © Eggleston Artistic Trust, courtesy of Cheim & Read, New York.

This is one reason why I find William Eggleston’s work so arresting. His dye-transfer color photographs of supermarket aisles, car lots, hairdressing salons, and gas stations in the American South are mundane and meticulous. The subjects may be humdrum; a considered look reveals that they are everything but. For example, in Untitled (n.d.), a woman talks to a friend at a diner. At least, this is what we think is happening. Taken at eye-level, the photograph frames the back of the woman’s head, a greying bulb of symmetrical whorls restrained by clear, flower-topped combs. Her pink gingham dress reveals even more than what we think. The clasp on the necklace was once aligned on the center of the back of her neck, now only slightly off from the zipper top stops. This accentuates the difference in the angles between neckline and shoulder: the woman is shifting, perhaps in mid-sentence, or even covering her mouth as she is laughing at her companion’s joke. The woman is seated along the same axis her companion, each holds their cigarette with their left hand, a mirroring suggesting the two are familiar, comfortable. In this image, there is conversation without content, and yet the setting, dimly lit with seafoam green booths and dark, ruddy brickwork, reveals an intimate communiqué inside a Tennessee diner, on any night, at any time.

William Eggleston, "Red Ceiling," or Greenwood, Mississippi, Dye transfer print, 12.625 x 19.0625 in. (32.1 x 48.4 cm), 1973 (prints in MoMA and J. Paul Getty Collection)

William Eggleston, Untitled (Blue Ceiling) 1970-1973, Dye transfer print, 16 x 20 in. (40.6 x 50.8 cm.)

Should we elevate ever so slightly and train our eyes towards the ceiling, we may see something like Eggleston’s Greenwood, Mississippi (1973). Featured on the album cover of Big Star’s Radio City, the blood red ceiling in the photograph is remarkable because it is, for lack of a better term, so red. The photograph signaled Eggleston’s true arrival into the art-photographic establishment, announcing a new artistic potential for high-saturated, dye transfer color photography. Like his other works, this photographs captures many details, from the unfinished mouldings to the posters showing sexual positions. Eggleston took this photograph supposedly inside a brothel, and though there is much to parse here in that regard, I am drawn to the light bulb. This is not necessarily because it appears as a kind of power node or nerve center, an object that conducts electricity and life into the room with cords and wires, but rather the opposite, for the bulb appears dark, and the only light in the room is the one coming from Eggleston’s camera. In fact, we are so close to the painted ceiling that it reflects the camera flash. A similar flashing appears in Untitled (Blue Ceiling), and yet here, the effect is wholly different. Other than the obvious difference in color—the blue paint does not appear as garish as the red ceiling in Greenwood, Mississippi—the light bulb in the blue room also radiates cords, wires, and lanyards, and yet it is lit, adding a bit of ambiance to the camera flash even if it still creates the harshest of shadows. Were we to tilt our heads downwards, we confront Eggleston’s Untitled (n.d.), a photograph of a small motel room whose only source of light comes from the fluorescent fixtures mounted above the bed. We are also drawn into the light, a soothing glow that gives this room an intimate, tranquil aspect. In these three photographs, light emanates and suffocates. Through these attenuated vantage points in cramped spaces, the light announces something previously unknown.

William Eggleston, Untitled, n.d. from Los Alamos, 1965-68 and 1972-74 (published in 2003.) 1965-68 and 1972-74. Dye transfer print, 12 x 17 ¾ inches (30.5 x 45.1 cm.), Private collection © Eggleston Artistic Trust, courtesy of Cheim & Read, New York.

René Magritte, The Pleasure Principle (Portrait of Edward James) (1937)

Following the light, I note that the illumination in this last image of Eggleston’s recalls the glowing, bulb-like head in René Magritte’s The Pleasure Principle (Portrait of Edward James) (1937). And my goal is not to use this image for invoking something like “enlightenment,” a term with its own historical and intellectual baggages. Rather, I use Magritte’s curious portrait of Edward James, with its head exploding into a burst of radiating light, to remind (at least) myself, that ideas propagate outward. Like light, they are reflected back onto ourselves or refracted in other directions. I would like to think that this propagating light is a metaphor for writing, a practice that has been all too absent from my life of late, and which I embrace again.

08/03/15--19:22: The Law of Levity is Allowed to Supersede the Law of Gravity

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Cover to R.A. Lafferty, Space Chantey (1968)

It was an age of freaks, monsters, and grotesques. All the world was misshapen in marvelous and malevolent ways. Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination (1955)

Now this almost goes without saying: but why S, M, L, XL? Why this huge, unwieldy mess of a thing, poorly bound, weighing more than the stack of National Geographics you use to hold up the end of your musty couch? Would it not make more sense to devote a special issue to Delirious New York (1978), that most provocative of texts, one whose historical and theoretical contours are, at least in retrospect, a bit more clear? Yes, for one could then chart a sort of intellectual course for Rem Koolhaas, plot his stints in screenwriting, studio work at the Architectural Association in London, the oft-quoted “Exodus, Or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture,” and furtive intellectual encounters with Oswald Mattias Ungers—such tacking and jibing among meridians and parallels, useful materials for scholars, historians, theorists, and practitioners to consult in order to make sense of the work of Koolhaas and his Office for Metropolitan Architecture. And yet when confronting S, M, L, XL, we are—how best to put it—slackjawed? As a guest theme editor for this issue of the Journal of Architectural Education, I regret to inform you that our only response to “Why S, M, L, XL?” is “Why Not?” It sounds rather defeatist, does it not? As if we are scuttling any serious discussion of this text in favor of some other agenda. But rest assured that we are not. This issue of JAE is something altogether different. Sure, there are essays, design proposals, reviews. Look more closely at the contents, however. There are a lot of personal reflections. There is even an article about space stations! Seriously: what is this thing you are holding in your hands? For starters, it is not an issue devoted to an issue. There are no considerations on historical themes here, no ruminations on the meaning of inchoate terms like “Crisis”, “Utopia”, or “Design +”—which only remind us, is not this the very essence of a theme, to articulate some kind of putative outline for an idea, cast it off into the world, and let others respond to it? If this is so, then an issue dedicated to S, M, L, XL makes all the sense in the world because it makes no sense. Imagine, if you will, being in that most antiquated of spaces—a bookstore for chrissakes!!!!—during the mid1990s. At least for American audiences, the appearance of S, M, L, XL coincided with the appearance with a slew of other “big books.” We are not talking here about texts like Bernard Tschumi’s Event Cities (1994), Diller and Scofidio’s Tourisms of War (1994), or even the various oversized, overbound issues of El Croquis. Here, we are reminded of big books redolent with big ideas, of tomes that are worlds onto themselves, heavy, oceanic: the publication of a new, unedited two volume translation of Robert Musil’s unfinished The Man Without Qualities (1995), David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (1997), Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997). Yup, these books are big. Did you read them? Probably not. Do you want to? Well, should you find yourself in some kind of summer party at MoMA-P.S.1 feigning ennui while scanning the crowd for some seemingly more important person to talk to, or if you are pouring yourself a cup of stale, catered coffee in between sessions at a symposium where architecture students and faculty rhapsodize on the state of the field of architectural history, eyes locked on each others’ name tags, beguiled by institutional affiliations and academic pedigrees like moth to candle, you will probably say something like, “I own it, but have only read part of it.” You are now doing Rem Koolhaas and the Monacelli Press a huge favor because you are, in essence, equating S, M, L, XL to those other monuments to money spent capriciously on unread reams of paper—that is to say, add it to your shelf along your pristine copies of MobyDick, or the Whale, Ulysses, or Gravity’s Rainbow. Tell people you are a BOOK OWNER, and not a BOOK READER. Stack them up and use them in lieu of an ottoman or a floor jack should you find yourself in that most intractable of situations—on a deserted, two-lane blacktop with a flat tire and with a copy of S, M, L, XL. Build a house with a tiny setback from a major arterial street. Now use copies of the book as insulation from street noise. Yeah! Such levity may be a little off-putting to audiences more accustomed to your garden-variety mandatory namechecking of continental thinkers and media theorists. Here’s an idea: let science fiction author R.A. Lafferty be your guide. Be on the lookout for that passage from his sadly forgotten Space Chantey (1968) when a spaceship pilot named “Big Fellow” claims, “As regards very small celestial bodies of a light-minded nature, the law of levity is allowed to supersede the law of gravity.”[1] Which is to say that levity may be the only recourse when confronting a not-so-small thing like S, M, L, XL. Now “levity” also calls to mind the notion that “Comedy is Serious Business,” sometimes attributed to any of the members of Monty Python.[2] Yet “Levity” at once reminds us of the Book of Leviticus, the Biggest of all Big Books, an account of the postExodus (no, not the “Exodus” bound within a sundering wall, West Berlin-style, but rather Capital “E” Exodus, you know, that one, a staple of Sunday night family viewing, epic wanderlust courtesy of Cecil B. DeMille and Charlton Heston), edited and redacted on Mt. Sinai by Moses himself.[3] Inheritors of the name “Leviticus” are legion, from Primo Levi to Claude Lévi-Strauss, writers staking a claim to the world when facing its horrific maw. This is the kind of levity we read into Yossarian, the Army Air Force bombardier and antihero of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1963), a character whose various exchanges with bureaucratic structures, reminiscent of the Brothers Marx and Coen, are the antidotes to a surrounding world spinning out of control. Yossarian might as well burn some Thai stick and watch it all fall apart. Whereas your Michael Herrs and Ryszard Kapuścińskis bore witness in a dexedrine fog, its edges illuminated like St. Elmo’s Fire by tracer rounds cleaving meteoritic arcs in midair, here you may find Yossarian (perhaps navigator to Humbert Humbert’s automotive peregrinations) sitting on a Marin County hilltop and drinking Coca Cola in perfect harmony [4], holding hands with fellow travelers like Benny Profane, Oedipa Maas, Gnossos Pappadopoulis, Binx Bolling, Tyrone Slothrop, Rabbit Angstrom, and Ignatius C. Reilly.[5] Here are the modern updates to Herman Melville’s Bartleby, with levity now replacing recalcitrance as the most appropriate response to the travails of modernity. It all begs an important question: is S, M, L, XL a “funny” book? Is it a knee-jerk reaction, a calculated response? If so, to what? Well, in considering the jumbled combination of image and text, the breakneck oscillations between excursus and pornography, yes, there is reason to, as Vladimir Nabokov urges in Pale Fire (1962), to scour the text and “note the cloak-and-dagger hint-glint” and the “shadow of regicide in the rhyme.”[6] It is comically defiant in the way that Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson), the bespoke assassin and pistol-bearing hermeneuticist of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994), invokes Ezekiel 25:17 before not pulling the trigger, before choosing life over death: “I’m tryin’ real hard to be the shepherd.”[7] It is a book of a time of transsonic stealth fighters sneaking across No-Fly Zones, of modems sensing each other, 56k analog call-and-response peaks and valleys groaning across a world still spun by telephone wires. The book is unexpected, and somehow, you know, just right, like Cass Elliot, John Phillips, et al harmonizing mellifluously in “California Dreamin’”—by far the most memorable sounds in Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express (1994), here juxtaposed against the sodium-lit and steaming claustrophobias in Hong Kong’s Tsim Sha Tsui neighborhood. To paraphrase Laurie Anderson, “this is the record of the time.”[8] The essays, reviews, curatorial statements, and micro-narratives in this issue are only a first stab at a kind of revisitation of this time. Readers looking to this special issue of JAE as a kind of roadmap to the influence and legacy of S, M, L, XL will be disappointed. Indeed, there is much work to be done in locating this book within a galaxy of other approaches, from the history of architectural publications, to media and globalization theory, you name it! The authors featured here, all members of a younger generation of scholars taught by those who passed through OMA’s rosters (or who even worked on the publication of S, M, L, XL), are not so much staking new directions for understanding this work as they are asking difficult questions about the role of architectural publishing in our contemporary situation. So, how to read this issue alongside S, M, L, XL? Whether characterizing S, M, L, XL’s 1,376 pages as a moment of transition, as a “paradigm shift,” or perhaps even as an instance of metempsychosis, there is the ineluctable sense of a passing, that something has died only to be replaced by a Shelleyan monster or Lovecraftian “thing on the doorstep.”[9] There are many ways to invoke, prod, and understand this behemoth of a book by what appeared before it, and by what came in its wake. Caveat lector: be attentive to the wink and the nudge, choose your words as one chooses poison. Prick up your ears and listen to that other bard from the 1990s, Dean Wareham, crooning about mermaids and electrical storms, as if channeling Rem Koolhaas himself: “But I’m keepin’ all the secrets / And I have nothin’ else to say.”[10] (Note: This is a working draft of my introduction to the special issue of the Journal of Architectural Education dedicated to be published on the twentieth anniversary of the publication of S, M, L, XL. Alicia Imperiale and I are the special theme editors for this issue. Special thanks to the JAE editorial staff for involving me in this project. Extra-special thanks go to Alicia, for her comments and insight for the issue, and for taking me along as co-editor for this issue, which will be published later this month)

______________________________ Notes

[1] R.A. Lafferty, Space Chantey (New York: Ace Books, 1968), 111 [2] In preparing for this issue, I asked contributor Mimi Zeiger whether she would consider taking a photograph of someone throwing a copy of S, M, L, XL into the air: not so much a 90º translation of David Letterman dropping a watermelon off a midtown rooftop, circa 1989, but rather a moment inspired by King Arthur’s (Graham Chapman’s) reoccurring conversation about the “air-speed velocity of an unladened swallow” in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975). [3] Cf. Bob Dylan, “Tombstone Blues,” in Highway 61 Revisited, CBS Records, 1965, 33rpm, 180-gram vinyl (I think): “The king of the Philistines his soldiers to save / Put jawbones on their tombstones and flatters their graves / Puts the pied pipers in prison and fattens the slaves / Then sends them out to the jungle.” Ok, now look at Footnote 5. [4] A not-so-veiled reference to “Person to Person,” the final episode of Mad Men, when it is revealed (kinda sorta) that Don Draper (Jon Hamm), the show’s main character, came up with the famous Coca Cola “Hilltop” ad (1971) while weaning himself out of an existential crisis in a commune on a Marin County hilltop. [5] Following Footnote 4, see Michael Herr, Dispatches (New York: Random House, 1977) and Ryszard Kapuściński, Another Day of Life (New York: Vintage, 1976). Aside from Humbert Humbert, the pathological narrator of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), here I am listing the main protagonists from Thomas Pynchon’s V. (1963) and The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Richard Fariña’s Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (1966), Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer (1961), Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), John Updike’s Rabbit, Run (1960), and John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), respectively. [6] Nabokov, Pale Fire (New York: Random House, 1962), 79. [7] Pulp Fiction, directed by Quentin Tarantino (1994, Miramax Films). [8] Laurie Anderson, “From the Air,” in Big Science, Warner Bros., 1982, 33 rpm. [9] Not an altogether inappropriate simile, as it suggests that the book can be also used as a doorstop. Cf. Cliff Burton, Kirk Hammett, James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich “The Thing That Should Not Be,” in Metallica, Master of Puppets, Elektra Records, 1986, 33 rpm, especially the lyric, “Drain you of your sanity / Face the thing that should not be.” (A reference to H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos that might as well apply to S, M, L, XL). [10] Dean Wareham, “Sideshow by the Seashore,” in Luna, Penthouse, Elektra Records, 1995, Compact Disc.

09/30/15--08:21: 1979 (Book Zero)

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Spread from Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) (Source: The Newberry Library) 1. Ponce, Puerto Rico was the world I once knew best. It was a small city nestled on a leeward coastal plain, intensely hot, strangely arid, and occasionally dusty. And within this world, there was our house. Small, marble-floored, with brises-soleil and a large, concrete carport with black, cast-iron gates, it sat on the end of a cul-de-sac, Calle C D-12, on a bluff overlooking a large sugar cane field. A large Honduras pine marked the entrance to our driveway. From there, we watched as crop dusters strafed the field, the combustive whine of rotary engines sharpening in pitch as the pilots nosed their machines over the edge of the bluff, slatted wings trailing ribbons of atomized insecticide that descended on the houses in a murky, cooling cloud. Then there were the pre-harvest burn-offs—large, controlled fires that singed the leaves off the cane stalks and left a forest of draggled pikes. One never saw the flames during the day. There was only a grey billowing that smelled like burnt trash. The heated winds carried blackened slivers of ash that rained and dissolved into the air above. At night, if you looked hard enough, you could see a corona of flames through the haze. And then there were rats, scampering up the bluffs, dun phalanxes escaping the fires. Once over the edge, they helped themselves to the pigeon coop in our back yard, leaving slurries of feathers, blood, and eggshell in their inroad. On those days without smoke, insecticide, rats (or, once even, a late-night temblor that caused the iron gates on the carport to issue an infernal clanging)—that is, on most days—it was a world for the senses. We drank lime water underneath a hurricane fence canopy braided with bougainvillea and Indian mallow, a technicolor refuge from the sun’s cruel transit. Weekends were for excursions by station wagon. Driving inland, to where the coastal plains sloped up into the humid mountains, we went to a company picnic in an abandoned sugar cane farmhouse. Land crabs scampered along dilapidated floorboards, making a clicking sound as they sidled onto the manicured, virisdescent lawns. From dusk until darkest night, the air was noisy with animal banter, from a cane toad’s solitary staccato, to the coquí’s onomatopoetic mating call. A trip through a winding road at dusk in Adjuntas led to an emergency stop by a creek bed to tend to my carsickness, revealing a scene of wonder: jittery constellations of glowing fireflies and click beetles hovering slightly above the ground, a sight rivaled only by that of a spear fisherman jumping into a phosphorescent bay at night, emerging lambent and wraith-like, as if outlined by St. Elmo’s Fire. I often played by myself, either outside or in. And if I was not busying myself with die-cast cars and airplanes, I was always opening books. I was reading at age 2, but cannot remember the act of doing to so. I preferred the images inside encyclopedia or issues of National Geographic, searching for fighter jets, space capsules, solar systems and galaxies, anything that could be reproduced on a notebooks or graph paper with pen or pencil. That was one way in that I engaged with the world outside my home. Then there were times when my mother would wash the marble floors inside or the smooth, concrete carport with a garden hose, leaving pools of water. I would find one that was large enough and lie in it face down, turning and lowering my head so I could submerge my ear into the cool liquid. I listened as the world outside became a watery roar. The carport was my planetary conch shell, amplifying the surging of faraway oceans. 2. It is now May 1979, and I am in Moss Bluff, Louisiana. We moved here in February, to this little town north of Lake Charles, where my father took a position as an operations manager at a chemical plant. Our house was in a newish development, each plot of land carved out of a longleaf pine forest, with ditches running along either side of built and unbuilt streets. During the hot and hazy afternoons, my brother and I would run out to these ditches and check our crawfish traps. We evaded horseflies and if feeling mischievous, would catch as many dragonflies as possible, folding their wings back so we could look closely at their glazed eyes and alien mandibles. One of our neighbors had an impressive collection of reptiles, and an equally impressive swimming pool, with an unusually springy diving board that would cause panic in even the most forgiving of home insurance adjusters. We rode dirt bikes into the pine forest, jumping off ramps fashioned out of planks and logs. My room had a set of French doors that opened up into a glen, and beyond that, the hazy effluvia from a nearby bayou. Only a couple months earlier, I was in a second-grade classroom, staring through jalousie windows as a midday cloud burst overcame the green mountains. My new classroom had fake wood paneling and clerestory windows that offered no views outside. Even if they did, the scenery that would have been revealed was altogether different: a two-lane road with gas stations, strip malls, used car dealerships, and bait-and-tackle stores. My mother drove us into town on that same road. I pressed the black bakelite buttons on the radio, switching between the FM and AM bands, trying to find a station that was in English. Puerto Rico may have been remote and surrounded by water, but Western Louisiana was a portal to the world. I spoke Spanish at home, stumbled with English at school, and took French grammar lessons before lunch. Our teacher was a tall woman from Belgium (or at least that was my recollection) who wore long, grey wool skirts. She began each lesson by slowly unrolling a large piece of purple felt that she hung from the blackboard. From a canvas sack, she produced velcro-backed black-and-white cutout drawings of objects that would be covered in that day's vocabulary lessons. As we repeated "Je conduis la voiture," she stuck the car on the felt, adding trees, houses, and people. When it came teaching us "La Marseillaise" and other songs, she replaced these with the French flag, birds without tailfeathers, and children sleeping in beds. On a warm midmorning, sometime during May 1979, my second grade teacher appeared at our door bearing a gift: a hardbound copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 3. Call it Book Zero, the first I ever knew of as “a book.” It was not so much a bunch of pages with words in a language I was struggling with, but a thing that one person gave to another, evidence of an exchange, something one did to be nice. I was not exactly sure what the occasion was for this book, but giving it to me was as important as the book itself. I had no idea who Huckleberry Finn was, or for that matter, Mark Twain. I knew that Louisiana was close to Mississippi, and yet I had an inkling that the book would be forever linked to this particular place and this time. If, as Emily Dickinson counsels, “There is no frigate like a book,” then this one given to me on a hot afternoon in Southwestern Louisiana was more fata morgana than Flying Dutchman. It was an airy, fleeting prologue to the worlds beyond bedroom and printed page, an illusion so tangible and affecting, so altering. [Note: this is the piece I read aloud at Horizon House in Indianapolis, Monday, 28 September, as part of the Public Collection initiative. For more information, visit http://www.thepubliccollection.org/ . Many thanks to Stuart Hyatt for allowing me to be part of this wonderful project]

10/12/15--08:09: A Reader's Guide To A Reader's Guide

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(Left to Right) Dennis Wilson, Laurie Bird, and James Taylor, with a 1955 Chevrolet 210 Hardtop, from Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) It is easy to admire Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, Reyner Banham’s 1971 inspired take on Los Angeles, once thought of as the most elusive of American cities. This book has a lot to answer for, especially in the way it expands the way we analyze and study the contemporary city. Indeed, it is hard to imagine this book existing independent of William Cronon’s rigorous spatial history of Chicago, born under the occluding signs of Karl Marx and Walter Christaller, or even Lars Lerup’s Duchamp-fueled fever dream of Houston, one that may leave you seeing skyscrapers as chocolate grinders and marine layers as “zoohemic canopies.”[1] What in the hell have I just read? you may ask yourself, and this is why it is even easier to love Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, the 1972 BBC short documentary film that gives Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies visual grist for the literal mill and shows an avuncular, perhaps slightly stoned Banham taking a motorized gander around the so-called “Metropolis of the Future.” Now we know what the Plains of Id, Autopia, and Surfurbia look like, thank you very much. This paean to the technologically-mediated modern landscape resonates in an age when our primary means of knowing a city is not through the writings of a Cronon or a Lerup. (And in the case of Los Angeles, the Thomas Guide is all but an antediluvian spiral-bound sheaf of grids and coordinates, gone by the way of the Dodo, Great Auk, or Sabre-Toothed Cat.) Our reliance on smart phones and tablets for urban wayfinding is so common that it deserves only the most fleeting of mentions. Interfacing has become the new wayfinding, one brandishing its own peculiarities. The female voice on the Google Maps app can be too bossy, imploring you, “In 500 feet, TURN RIGHT.” Can we actually measure distance while staring ahead over a steering wheel? Indeed, that voice immediately takes me back to my eighth grade typing class, especially those moments when my teacher would demand that we type sentences, clackity-clack, in time to a record playing a kind of Lawrence Welk-ish champagne music with firecracker snares. Her voice was mellifluous, but not too much, barely containing a hair-trigger snarl that would uncoil the very instance you fucked up your keystroke. The female Google Maps voice is more forgiving—not as much as Scarlett Johansson's in Spike Jonze's Her (2013)—even while insisting that you turn around as she quickly reroutes your itinerary. Banham’s guide to Los Angeles is the “Baede-kar Visitor Guidance System,” a technology that straddles centuries, at once evoking Karl Baedeker’s travel guides from the 19th century, as well as guidance systems for modern intercontinental ballistic missile—two completely different ways of “knowing” a city, one as destination, the other as target. The female voice issuing from the molded speakers of the “Baede-kar Visitor Guidance System” is more Siri-like and soothing, but lacking the latter’s notable cheekiness. It is a shame that we do not pay more attention to the “Baede-kar,” its voice, or for that matter, the various technologies on display in Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles. They create their own constellations, each gizmo or doohickey bringing its own origins and relationships to bear, making connections in time and space, revealing something about our own mediatic situation in the process. Take, for instance, the opening scenes from Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles. Note how Banham, tweedy, with newsboy hat and giant sunglasses, walks from the Arrivals terminal at Los Angeles International Airport and boards a 1970 Pontiac Grand Prix Hardtop. And like in other films of this time, we immediately associate the driver with his car, each becoming the other. The Grand Prix Hardtop is a close cousin to the 1970 Pontiac GTO Judge that Warren Oates drives in Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), vying for the attention of consumers of American Muscle, especially those who took a fancy to the 1968 Dodge Charger or Mustang GT 390 in Peter Yates’ Bullitt (1968) (the last, of course, doing multiple star turns throughout San Francisco streets, Steve McQueen at the helm), or even the 1970 Dodge Challenger in Ricardo C. Sarafian’s Vanishing Point (1971). Jimmy Kowalski (Barry Newman), a Vietnam veteran, now driver on the professional and demolition circuits, is behind the wheel, although all the action scenes feature legendary stunt driver Carey Loftin, who wears a wig over his crash helmet. Singer James Taylor (the “Driver”) drove the 1955 Chevrolet 210 in Two-Lane Blacktop. It had a glass nose and Plexiglas windows. It would make an encore performance as Bob Falfa’s (Harrison Ford’s) ride in American Graffiti (1973), now wearing a fiberglass body, a M22 Muncie transmission (known to Hot Rod enthusiasts as the “Rock Crusher”), and gear rings and pinion gears (in 4.88 ratio) repurposed from an Oldsmobile. Those who purchased More Fun In the New World (1983), the fourth studio album by Los Angeles punk-a-billy scenesters X, will recall a similar automotive inventory in “The New World,” the album’s opening track, when bassist John Doe and singer Exene Cervenka map out the various parts of an car assembly: “Flint Ford Auto, Mobile Alabama / Windshield Wipers, Buffalo, New York / Gary, Indiana, Don’t Forget the Motor City ...”[2] In Two-Lane Blacktop, the “Driver’s” “Mechanic” was Dennis Wilson, better known as the drummer for The Beach Boys. One of their most beloved songs is “Little Deuce Coupe” (1953), with Brian Wilson singing, “She's ported and relieved and she's stroked and bored. / She'll do a hundred and forty with the top end floored.” [3] The Chevy is vain, thinking that the song is about her.[4] A brief inventory of other sonic ephemera comes to mind. We can imagine these playing through FM albumoriented rock (AOR) stations, 8-tracks, and even cassette tapes and compact discs, not so much instances of car and driver melding, but of driver and music interfacing the same way as Banham and the “Baede-kar,” coursing sonic maps for our technological predicament, from Daniel Miller (aka The Normal) droning “Hear the crushing steel / Feel the steering wheel” in “Warm Leatherette” (1978), to Steve Kilbey, lead vocalist and bassist for The Church, singing, “Cut your life into the steel / Take your place behind the wheel / Watch the metal scene just peel away” in “Chrome Injury” (1981), or Duran Duran lead singer Simon LeBon crooning “And the droning engine throbs in time / With your beating heart” in “The Chauffeur” (1982): all, in some way or another, derived from J.G. Ballard’s Crash (1973), itself a paean to the “Little Bastard,” the Porsche 550 Spyder, which, on the afternoon of September 30, 1955, flipped end-on-end as it was avoiding an oncoming 1949 Ford Tudor, killing James Dean, making him into a cult American figure almost instantaneously.[5]

Variants of "Moore Computer": (Top) the "Baede-kar" navigation system from Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles; (Bottom) Title card to Sydney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor (1975) As for the "Baede-kar," it is an 8-track tape, obviously. American car manufacturers started introducing 8track players as luxury feature upgrades by the mid-1960s, so it is not a surprise that Banham's Pontiac Grand Prix has one in the center dash. As for the technology, it was a product of the convergence of the aviation, automotive, and telecommunications industries. One of the inventors of the 8-track was Bill Lear, famous for the private jet bearing his name. The primary financial backers for the "Lear Jet Stereo 8" cartridge player were Ford and General Motors, with RCA, Motorola, and Ampex manufacturing the players and tapes. The typeface visible on the front of the “Baede-kar”appears as a derivative of “Moore Computer,” an E-13B Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR) font created by Steven Moore in 1968, and yet its stylish, italicized appearance suggests a combination of Data 70, designed by Bob Newman in 1970, or Westminster, a machine-readable typeface designed by Leo Maggs for Westminster Bank Limited (it is still used to print routing numbers on personal checks).

Print ad for Lear Jet Industries'"Lear Jet Stereo 8" The 8-track player, the most advanced technology in Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, was in fact quite limited. Stereo and quadrophonic sound came at an expense: users could not fast forward or rewind. It was a read-only medium, too. Playing an 8-track tape was therefore all too presentist, rooted in the then-now, preserving the music in real-time, moving forward, only to begin again, ensnaring the listener in an infinite aural loop—almost. Recall that an 8-track cassette was split up into four "programs" of equal length, and to find to a song earlier or later in the album, a listener had to guess where in the "program" the song ahead or behind would be and press the "program" button at the appropriate time. It took crackerjack guesswork and an intimate knowledge of the music on the album. And yet the program button switch only allowed the tape to advance forward time, from 1 to 2, 2 to 3, 3 to 4, and 4 to 1, until it reached the beginning. Though technically a dead medium, the 8-track player is resuscitated as another technology in Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, cloaked in the vestments from a near-future. It becomes the zero vector for a host of other technologies we know today, from dashboard-mounted Tom-Toms, to the plastic thingamajigs we attach to the air conditioning vents so we can look at Google Maps on our phones while we drive. The 8track cassette is the skeleton key that opens up environments for us to read, consume, and exhaust. Its spatial and temporal constraints mirror our own, as we must always locate our own futures and pasts, our physical presence in relation to our temporal present. The same goes with the “Baede-kar,” as Banham would have no choice but to let the 8-track move forward and surrender to the spatial narrative, always keeping his eyes on the road. Too bad he did not have a Thomas Guide.

Aerial view of Los Angeles International Airport, from Aviation Week & Space Technology, 14 November 1966 That the 8-track was born of the aerospace industry is again significant, and here we find novelist Thomas Pynchon, in Los Angeles, writing about the aftermath of the Watts riots, invoking airliners, perhaps not unlike the scene that would greet Banham when landing at LAX in 1972: Overhead, big jets now and then come vacuum-cleanering in to land; the wind is westerly, and Watts lies under the approaches to L.A. International. The jets hang what seems only a couple of hundred feet up in the air; through the smog they show up more white than silver, highlighted by the sun, hardly solid; only the ghosts, or possibilities, of airplanes.[6] This is by way of a piece he wrote for the The New York Times Magazine, published on June 12, 1966, entitled “A Journey Into the Mind of Watts.” Like the 8-track “Baede-kar,” or even the Porsche 550 Spyder, the passenger jet is a technology indelibly woven into its own impermanence.[7] The metal tape heads on the 8track wear down as aircraft and cars turn into corroding hulks of unrecognizable alloy. No wonder the jets on approach to LAX appear not as airplanes, but as images of airplanes, a moment causing Pynchon to remark on the “image-ined” city that is Los Angeles: What is known around the nation as the L.A. Scene exists chiefly as images on a screen or TV tube, as four-color magazine photos, as old radio jokes, as new songs that survive only a matter of weeks. It is basically a white Scene, and illusion is everywhere in it, from the giant aerospace firms that flourish or retrench at the whims of Robert McNamara, to the "action" everybody mills long the Strip on weekends looking for, unaware that they, and their search which will end, usually, unfulfilled, are the only action in town.[8] The whiteness of the sky, the whiteness of the jets, the whiteness of the “Scene”: testaments of how our grandest aspirations originate in a degree zero of color, casting a harsh light on our own misdeeds and misreadings. And that is perhaps why something like the 8-track tape, miscast as an advanced technology, flawed, imperfect, demands a closer look, for it causes us to be all too aware of the imperfections in our intractable, unavoidable present. If listening to an 8-track preserves us in the amber of our own time, then ours in an existence in which we continuously yearn for other media—pictures, sounds, words—that afford us the illusion of looking forward and backward.

Los Angeles, 1965: Phyllis Gebauer with Thomas Pynchon, in the back, flashing a peace sign behind a door. (Source: Los Angeles Times) Is this not the way we read? We engage, as Italo Calvino urges in If On A Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979), “in pursuit of all these shadows ... those of the imagination and those of life.”[9] Perhaps this is why fantasy novels like Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962) or Alan Garner’s Red Shift (1973) all look to things from bygone eras as a way to locate our own time and space. In the case of Dick’s novel, the provenance of a supposedly fake Colt revolver takes center stage, causing its buyer to experience the world as it was in 1962, and not the alternate history that drives the novel’s plot—one in which Germany and Japan win the Second World War and divide the United States into occupational zones. And in Garner’s Red Shift, the reader is actually experiencing three timelines—one in Roman antiquity, another during the English Civil War, and a final, contemporary one—all marked from the “point of view” of a stone axe found embedded in a chimney in Southern Cheshire, England. If Reyner Banham famously needed a car to “read Los Angeles in the original,”[10] then perhaps the only way to do so was with the help of a flawed technological artefact. Perhaps this is why in writing about writing about reading the city, the only recourse is to write topologically across different times, grasping at references of objects from those eras, from cars, the parts of cars, to images, sounds, and finally words. At least that’s what I have done. The references are mine, but they can be yours too. For writing on a warm weekend in Indianapolis, Indiana in 2015, this is how I have come to finally know Los Angeles, this city on the other side of the world, one that was my home from 1999 to 2005. For in writing about writing about reading the city, and reading about writing about writing, I only have done what we all do. We try to explain the here and now, and while doing so, we produce a reader’s guide to our own reader’s guide. __________________________ Notes

[1] I am referring here to two books that, in addition to Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, have shaped my own understanding of cities. There is, of course, environmental historian William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), which relies on German geographer Walter Christaller’s contributions to central place theory, as shown in texts like Die zentralen Orte in Süddeutschland (1933). My first understanding of the architectural “understanding” of a city came via Lars Lerup, After the City (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2001). A version of Lerup’s Duchampian take on Houston also appears in “Stim and Dross: Rethinking the Metropolis,” Assemblage 25 (1994), 82-101. [2] John Doe and Exene Cervenka, “The New World,” on More Fun In The New World, Elektra Records, 1983, 33 1/3 rpm. [3] Brian Wilson and Roger Christian, “Little Deuce Coupe,” on Little Deuce Coupe, Capitol Records, 1963, 33 1/3 rpm. [4] Not-so-veiled reference to Carly Simon, “You’re So Vain,” on No Secrets, Elektra Record, 1972, 33 1/3 rpm, especially the refrain, “You’re so vain / You probably think this song is about you.” Simon was married to James Taylor when she wrote the song. [5] The songs are as follows: Daniel Miller, “Warm Leatherette,” on T.V.O.D./Warm Leatherette, Mute Records, 1978, 45 rpm (the song would be made famous by Grace Jones in 1980); Steve Kilbey, “Chrome Injury,” on Of Skins and Heart, EMI Parlophone, 1981, 33 1/3 rpm; and Duran Duran, “The Chauffeur,” on Rio, EMI/Capitol/Harvest 1982, 33 1/3 rpm. [6] Thomas Pynchon, “A Journey Into the Mind of Watts,” The New York Times, June 12, 1966, https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-watts.html.

[Author's Note: This is a version of the essay I wrote for the exhibition, Now, There: Scenes From the Post-Geographic City, curated by Tim Durfee and Mimi Zeiger. The show is currently on display at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, and in December, will move to the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture in Shenzen and Hong Kong. For more on the exhibit, go here, or visit Art Center's Media Design Practices program site. Special thanks go to Mimi for asking me to be part of this exhibition]



10/14/15--08:43: The Face of the Earth ... Masked by Beard, Glasses and Wig

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130 year-old man from Minnesota, from László Moholy-Nagy, Von Material zu Architektur (1929) In Von Material zu Architektur (1929) (later translated to English as The New Vision), László Moholy-Nagy introduced a remarkable portrait of a 130-year old Minnesota man to demonstrate a point about photography and the perception of time. Remarking on the deep wrinkles that spread crevasse-like across the surface of the man’s skin, Moholy-Nagy reminded readers how the photograph was “essentially a time-compressing view of the alterations in the epidermis: an airplane view of time” (“Fliegeraufnahme der Zeit”).[1] This equating of physiognomy with aerial views is an important concept and deserves further scrutiny. In one sense, physiognomy became a metaphor for aerial photography of the landscape. Like the Minnesota Man’s skin in the photograph, the landscape was also an epidermis. The successive layering of soil and vegetation corresponded to the deep incisions of time visible on the Minnesota Man’s face. The “airplane view” became a heuristic for recording evidence of the passage of time, but only showing the latest stages of this passage. It only captured the evidence of change at the very point an image was captured on the photographic plate.

O.G.S. Crawford (1886-1957) Moholy-Nagy's contemporary, the English archaeologist and geographer Oswald Guy Stanhope (O.G.S.) Crawford (1886-1957), offered something closer to a method, one that would give this physiognomic aspect further temporal dimensions with the invention of the discipline he called “aerial archaeology.” In works like Wessex From the Air (1928) and Air-Photography for Archaeologists (1929), a manual he wrote as the Ordnance Survey’s self-appointed “archaeological officer,” Crawford defined aerial archaeology as a method “to indicate what kinds of ancient sites are suitable for air-photography, and what is the best time of year and day” for the examination of such sites.[2] On a first glance, Crawford’s texts were primers detailing the various procedures for taking and interpreting aerial photographs of archaeological sites in England.

(Top) Crawford, Wessex From The Air (1928); (Bottom) Air-Photography for Archaeologists (1929) Yet Crawford's version of aerial archaeology amounted to an attempt to understand the relationship between the physical remains of ancient English settlements and the various geological—and historical forces—that shaped them. Art historian Kitty Hauser explains how Crawford “thought prehistory should be approached not through texts (as many archaeologists preferred) not through fetishized ‘finds’ (like those collected and admired by antiquarians), but through the spatial logic of geography.”[3] Yet it must be pointed out that the very things that Crawford looked at through his aerial cameras were remains of buildings. Almost all of the plates from Wessex From the Air and Air-Photography for Archaeologists show evidence of ancient foundations and walls—evidence of architecture. It is an interesting notion, for before Crawford became famous for his promotion of aerial photography techniques for field archaeology, he would gain some amount of fame among preservationist circles for his remark, “[T]he surface of England … is a palimpsest, a document that has been written on and erased over and over again.”[4] The very skeleton key needed to uncover and decode the layers of this palimpsest, to peer x-ray-like at the ancient structures on the ground, summoning them from their peaty graves, was the aerial photograph. Taken from vertical or oblique angles, Crawford’s aerial photographs operated as a way of organizing visual information beyond their sensory characteristics into a system of categorized knowledge. He arranged his images into three general categories—"shadow-sites,""crop-marks" and "soil sites"—each describing the light and topography in which a particular archaeological feature was found. As method, however, Crawford’s aerial archaeology became a kind of aerial physiognomy of the land—an endoscopy of landscape. As a method to document what reviewer “visible and hidden face of England” through the examination of its surfaces, Crawford believed that aerial archaeology allowed one to gain some understanding about England’s history—and by inference— character.[5]

Screen captures from Harun Farocki, Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges: (Second and Third from Top) Albrecht Meydenbauer's treatise on photogrammetry; (Fourth and Fifth from Top) Marc Garanger's Femmes Algeriennes 1968 To further articulate the physiognomic nature of aerial photography, consider these moments from Harun Farocki’s 1988 film, Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges (Images of the World and the Inscription of War). As the female narrator reads a carefully constructed rumination on the creation of images and the waging of war, Farocki shows images of texts and handbooks dealing with photogrammetry and physiognomy. He begins long sequences intercutting German architect Albrecht Meydenbauer’s photographs of building façades and French Army Photographer Marc Garanger’s portraits of unveiled Algerian women. In these texts, each reading of faces has a different, yet specific purpose. Whereas Meydenbauer used photographs of buildings' faces—façades—to generate scaled architectural drawings, Garanger’s took his photographs in 1960 to create identification cards for Algerian citizens. In each instance, then, the photograph has an ostensibly utilitarian rote. But as Farocki jump cuts between images of heimat buildings and faces of Algerian women, his investment in history becomes clearer—and more controversial. The narrator remarks how Meydenbauer’s catalogue of building façades, Das photographische Aufnehmen zu wissenschaftlichen Zwecken, insbesondere das Messbild-Verfahren (1890) anticipated a historical preservationist movement resulting in the creation of the Prussian Monumental Archives. As for Garanger’s photos showing faces which, like Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s Minnesota Man, equate facial wrinkles with a kind of landscape, Farocki reminds viewers how “when one looks into the face of an intimate, one also brings in something of the shared past.”[6] This reference to the capturing and representing of the past in a photograph is necessary to an understanding of composition of history. In other words, the photogrammetry of Prussian building façades and the inventory of Algerian faces both captured the effects of change over time.

Screen Captures from Farocki's Bilder der Welt: (Top) Luftbild-Lesebuch; (Middle) Aerial view of a restaurant; (Bottom) Aerial view of a farm house Farocki also recognized that capturing such change over time presented its own problems. It is not long before Farocki trains his camera on books dealing with aerial photography and military reconnaissance to demonstrate this point. In one instance, he shows excerpts from a book called Luftbild-Lesebuch. Published in 1937 by Hansa Luftbild, an imprint of the German airline Deutsche Luft Hansa A.G., this book was number 13 in a series dealing with aerial photography. Vertical views of a hay harvest, farm house, tables and chairs in a restaurant, and laundry hanging on a line are all touted as examples of a “new world picture.”[7] As further evidence of this view, Farocki also shows photographs of carpets. The narrator reads, “This is how a carpet must look to a cat. The pattern of the carpet is woven for people standing upright, for the view from above.”[8]

(Top) Luftbild und Vorgeschichte—Luftbild und Luftbildmessung Nr 16 (Hansa Luftbild 1938); (Bottom) Crawford’s “Cat’s Eye View”, from “Luftbildaufnahmen von archäologischen Bodendenkmälern in England” in Luftbild und Vorgeschichte (1938) These images come from Crawford’s 1938 essay, “Luftbildaufnahmen von archäologischen Bodendenkmälern in England” (“Examples of Aerial Photographs of Earthen Monuments in England”). Published in a text called Luftbild und Vorgeschichte (1938) (Volume 16 in the same series as LuftbildLesebuch) the essay features two images illustrating of what Crawford calls the “Cat’s Eye View." The first, a carpet seen from the point of view of a cat (“Wie eine Katze aus ihrer Augenhöhe ein Teppichmuster sieht”) shows a blurry suggestion of a carpet pattern.[9] The second, showing the point of view from above, comparable to an aerial view (“Dasselbe Muster, wie es der Mensch von seiner Ausgehöhe sieht”), shows a distinct carpet pattern.[10] These two images stand for something beyond the proposition that such patterns are more difficult to discern from the ground than from the air. In one way, these images call attention to the ways in which the aerial view is either too generalizing or too nominalistic. Showing a carpet pattern from the air recalls Moholy-Nagy’s observation that an aerial, or “airplane” view revealed “large-scale relationships.”[11] This point of view seemed to defy his conceptualization of the aerial view as a “space compressor,” an extension of vision that collapsed the distance air and ground. The separation between the ground view and aerial view are thus of vital importance—it is only from the air that a viewing subject can see something as clearly and unobtrusively. A pattern viewed from the air therefore reveals something of the same magnitude as the close reading of an aerial photograph. This distinction between the ability to discern general patterns from the air and the inability to do so from the ground suggests that, under some circumstances, vision is unreliable. This speaks to the vital difference between the methodologies and sensibilities of vision—in other words, the organization and categorization of visual knowledge becomes a way to address problems in seeing. Farocki’s film uses Meydenbauer’s text to address this point. The narrator thus reads Meydenbauer’s words, suggesting that with the images of building façades, “one does not see everything, but one sees many things better than on the spot.”[12] Farocki affirms this “capacity to see better" when he shows pages from Baron Elard von Loewenstern’s 1938 text, Tarnung und Täuschung (Camouflage and Deception), a manual detailing the various uses of wartime camouflage.[13] Recalling the relation between physiognomy and aerial photography, the narrator reads from von Loewenstern’s book, suggesting how recognizing camouflaged patterns from the air is, in essence, seeing the “face of the Earth … masked by beard, glasses and wig."[14]

(Top) AEF Interpretation, Plate 42, Photo 2, After 1918, Aerial Expeditionary Force with Edward Steichen, Silver print, National Air and Space Museum, Aerial Expeditionary Force Photography Collection; (Bottom) Alphonse Bertillon, Tableau synoptic des traits physionomiques: pour servir a l'étude du "portrait parlé" (1909) Some more ruminations on the relationship between aerial vision and physiognomy are in order. For his discussion of “The Airplane Eye,” art historian Christoph Asendorf made an important connection between Edward Steichen’s aerial photoreconnaissance methods from 1918 and Alphonse Bertillon’s anthropometrics. For Steichen, aerial photography of enemy positions created problems of interpretation. He required pilots to fly at equal altitudes, making multiples passes over a target below so that “through the standardization of the recording process, the terrain could be provided independent of the subjective view....”[15] Asendorf equated this procedure with Bertillon’s system of identifying criminal traits according to facial features: an example of the “technique of the objectification of visual information.”[16] Asendorf called the taking of photographs via “The Airplane Eye” as “Landscape Bertillonage." And yet, this comparison is somewhat incomplete, for aerial photoreconnaissance offered something that the Bertillon method could not. Asendorf concluded by observing how aerial photoreconnaissance provided not a single image “but an uninterrupted sequence, the systematic capture of the landscape in the categories of space and time.”[17] It is this notion of a systematic capture that would become the most important aspect of Crawford’s brand of aerial archaeology. His photographs of ancient settlements half-buried in the English appear as evolving objects, complements to the time-worn epidermis of Moholy-Nagy's Minnesota Man, or as well as Farocki's revelations of Meydenbauer's and Garanger's works. All of these share a common trait, as they become methods for capturing the character of the landscape below, for constructing a literal, historical point of view. _________________________ Notes

[1] Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2005 [1938]), 40-41. Moholy-Nagy, Von Material zu Architektur (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2001 [1929]), 41. [2] O.G.S. Crawford, Air-Photography for Archaeologists (London: H.M.S.O, 1929), 3. [3] Kitty Hauser, Shadow Sites: Photography, Archaeology and the British Landscape, 1927-1955 (London: Oxford University Press, 2007), 15. Hauser labels Crawford’s work as a quintessentially English melding of modernist experiment with a deeply historical sensibility, citing John Piper’s paintings of Romanesque carvings from 1936, John Betjeman’s poetry, Herbert Read’s art criticism, and Nikolaus Pevsner’s lectures on the “Englishness of English Art” as examples. Yet this sensibility is evidence of what she calls “the archaeological imagination,” the “perceiving of a past which is literally under our feet” that “represents a powerful counter-impulse to this culture of interchangeable surfaces covering over all traces of history” and that calls home “a historical dimension to which the contemporary world seems so indifferent.” Hauser, Shadow Sites, 2-7. [4] Ibid., 64. [5] See the review of Hauser, Bloody Old Britain: O.G.S. Crawford and the Archaeology of Modern Life (London: Granta Books, 2008), in Tom Fort, “Mapping Britain’s Archaeology,” The Telegraph (1 June 2008), available at < http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/non_fictionreviews/3553439/Mapping-Britains-archaeology.html> (accessed 14 October 2015). [6] Harun Farocki, Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges (1988). [7] Ibid. [8] Ibid. [9] O.G.S. Crawford, “Luftbildaufnahmen von archäologischen Bodendenkmälern in England”, in Luftbild und Vorgeschichte (Berlin: Hansa Luftbild G.m.b.H., 1938), 16-17. [10] Ibid. [11] Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision, 38. [12] Farocki, Bilder der Welt. [13] Ibid. [14] Ibid. [15] Christoph Asendorf, Super Constellation: Flugzeug und Raumrevolution (New York: Springer Verlag, 1997), 37. (“So konnte durch Standardisierung der Aufnahmeverfahren das Terrain unabhängig vom subjektiven Blick auf bestimmte Dinge him befragbar wiedergegeben werden.”) [16] Ibid., 38. (“eine Technik der Objektivierung visueller Informationen.”) [17] Ibid. (“Wesentlich bei militärischen Luftaufnahmen ist weniger das einzelne Bild, sondern die ununterbrochene Bildfolge, das systematische Erfassen der Landschaft in den Kategorien von Raum und Zeit.”)

10/07/10--20:41: Patina, Provenance, Mass Production

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Sticker sheet and 'zine included with Fender's Sonic Youth-model guitars (Source) Is there an industrial, mass-produced object that resists change the way that an electric guitar or bass does? Electric guitars and basses have withstood changes in consumption patterns, company ownership, construction techniques, and even fashion trends while maintaining their basic aesthetic, material composition, and to some extent, signature sound since their introduction into the American marketplace sometime after the Second World War. Together they comprise a family of very provocative industrial objects. This is because unlike airplanes, speedboats, sneakers, tennis racquets, jeans, and a host of other industrial objects, electric guitars and basses just keep on staying the same the more things change. A guitar or bass made by companies like Fender, Gibson, Rickenbacker and others has followed the same basic design for over half a decade. They all feature similar bodies, pickup configurations, tuning peg arrangements, bridge locations, and electronics. All are made of a dense wood like maple or alder, and all have rosewood or maple fingerboards. Some may have glossy or painted finishes. Fretwire is usually made out of a softer alloy. Inlays are made of mother-of-pearl or some other synthetic plastic. And there are even more expensive variants, each guitar or bass crafted from more expensive or exotic woods. These are not as widespread as the entry-level, mass-produced bass or guitar. And this leads to an important point: that there are more of these baseline Stratocaster, Telecaster, Precision or Jazz Bass guitars than, say, the $4200 bass that is manufactured to look (and sound) just like the bass that Jaco Pastorius played on all those Weather Report albums. And like any other industrial product, an electric bass or guitar sells better if played by a famous musician. This is the case even if the instrument is an inexpensive, entry-level variant. Is it possible that Ernie Ball, Inc. sold more instruments after thousands of aspiring bass players saw Flea play a Stingray bass on MTV? Of course it is. This is not to say, however, that such objects do not have any cult value, or that they are not somehow fetishized by music freaks everywhere. Far from it. In fact, no object demonstrates the value of patina like an electric guitar or bass. Patina equals more sku's.

Fender's Sonic Youth custom guitars (Source) This is precisely the point made recently in the excellent things magazine, where it was observed that "Signature guitars were once the preserve of conventional rock gods, but the inevitable spread of alt culture into the mainstream has created a market for slightly more eccentric instruments, ironically productionised versions of objects that were once customised by their owners to be unique." Images of some very expensive equipment—specifically from Fender's "Artist" line of instruments—were included to make this point: Sonic Youth members Lee Ranaldo's and Thurston Moore's Fender Jazzmasters and Kurt Cobain's"Jag-stang" (comprised of parts from Fender Mustang and Jaguar guitars). These instruments no doubt sounded a certain way, but it is more than likely that they are prized for the way that they looked. And in some instances, as demonstrated by the Jaco Pastorius "relic" bass, such instruments are crafted to look worn or beaten. It certainly presents an interesting conundrum, as these objects prove that in some instances, mass production techniques are not necessarily used to produce new, sparkling products, but rather to create and sell products that already look and seem old. It is as if issues of provenance are sidestepped by virtue of the fact that such guitars and basses can be made quickly, cheaply, and sold at a higher per-unit price. It's not that Thurston Moore owned this particular Jazzmaster. The fact that Fender can make something that looks like something Moore, Ranaldo or Cobain played is good enough. By purchasing such instruments, one also buys a ready-made narrative about a guitar or bass. These are instruments that are manufactured according to the musician's specifications, often duplicating the way pickups are wired or how switches are bored and located. And as pointed out in things magazine, the Ranaldo Jazzmaster "comes with a custom sticker sheet and a full-color, 24 page ‘zine that contains photos, set lists, tuning charts, illustrations, tech info and extensive interviews." One could, given the right amplifier, ostensibly duplicate a specific sound from a Sonic Youth set in the 1990s. In other words, Fender is not only marketing their own version of provenance and patina: they are also selling you history. The ability of an object to elicit an emotional response in a user is the Holy Grail of industrial design. At least that is what many of the interviewees in Gary Hustwit's well-received film Objectified (2009) say in front of the camera. Design luminaries such as Dieter Rams, Karim Rashid, Paola Antonelli, and others all spend valuable camera time describing how the ability to create an emotional response is secondary to the ability to produce and sell more units. An object is fleeting, but the narrative that it can create is not. And as IDEO'sJane Fulton Suri says in the film, the ability to create such stories is a result of the users' own creativity and restlessness. Adding crushed Dixie cups to a bicycle's rear tire fenders to prevent our backs from getting wet while riding on slick streets; leveling a lopsided table with a matchbook cover to make sure our dinner does not wobble while we are trying to eat: these are practices borne out of our dissatisfaction with the things that we buy and own. These are the very things that are difficult to capture in the design and manufacturing of a consumer object.

Soon after Suri's celebration of users' ability to create new narratives and uses for a product, Hustwit shows us a montage of customized industrial objects. And towards the end of this sequence, we see, in order: a closeup of an Sonic Youth's customized guitar arsenal, from Objectified (dir. Gary Hustwit, 2009) electric guitar bridge held together with epoxy and a rusty screw; a bunch of dirtied pieces of tape bearing the names of chords and tunings on the body of an electric guitar; and finally, other electric guitars sitting in a tour rack in a recording studio or in a concert venue's green room. It would be very hard indeed for even the most casual observer to note that we are not just looking at a group of Fender Jazzmasters and Jaguars. Notice the words "Sonic Youth" stenciled in the background. These are Thurston Moore's and Lee Ranaldo's guitars.

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