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The Aerodynamic Lightness of Being

2011-11-23T11:56:00.001-05:00

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, heavier-than-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.)

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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.

Exit Strategy

2011-11-23T11:43:00.001-05:00

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)

Capsule Review: The Heights

2011-11-14T12:44:00.001-05:00

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.

Some Updates

2011-10-11T11:32:00.002-04:00

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 ....

Rocket Talk

2011-09-08T19:02:00.000-04:00

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's The 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’s Der 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 Herman Oberth’s Die 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’s Die 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 Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, 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. Khan-Magomedov, 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’s Gravity’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.

Of Hyphens and Hurricanes

2011-06-02T22:04:00.004-04:00

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 “land-architecture” 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’s Candide, 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’s The 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/cgi-bin/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.

The Harvard Candle

2011-03-06T21:13:00.008-05:00

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. 33 Form(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).

Architecture on Trial

2011-02-25T10:24:00.002-05:00

A colleague of mine is raising funds for a film about Jim Stirling's Leicester 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.)

Utopia For Sale

2011-01-24T23:51:00.013-05:00

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 low-slung, 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-to-ceiling 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.

Symposium Season

2011-01-13T22:58:00.002-05:00

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!

Happy Holidays

2010-12-23T11:57:00.000-05:00

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!

A Sartorial Moment

2010-12-15T11:36:00.009-05:00

"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 roof-supporting 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 form-fitting 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's Age 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 la Charles 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 1928-1936, 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).

Seen and Not Seen

2010-11-04T16:37:00.011-04:00

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.

Advertisement for Blériot PHI-type dynamo, L'Aérophile, 15 October 1910

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 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), 37-62. 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.

Figures of Involvement

2010-10-25T22:12:00.009-04:00

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’s Zen 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 from Buzz 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 full-length 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 140-character 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).

Volume to Space

2010-10-12T16:09:00.015-04:00

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

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's Simon of the Desert (Simón del desierto) (1965), and even, to a certain extent, David Lean's Lawrence 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's Quartet 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 bi-directional 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's Hochhausstadt (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.

Wes Anderson vs. Jacques Tati

2010-10-12T11:25:00.001-04:00

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

Patina, Provenance, Mass Production

2010-10-07T23:41:00.006-04:00

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's Jane 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.

Sonic Youth's customized guitar arsenal, from Objectified (dir. Gary Hustwit, 2009)

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 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.

Not a Whodunit. More a Whydoit

2010-09-06T22:58:00.002-04:00

An architectural mystery, from C.W. Farrier, "Home, Sweet Home of Tomorrow?" Popular Mechanics (Sep., 1932), p.353.

What is this image? What, exactly, are we looking at? Who made it? When was it made? Keeping with the language of the mystery genre, I look to Martin Amis' London Fields as inspiration here. Samson, the main narrator of that novel describes the tale he is about to unfurl as "Not a whodunit. More a whydoit." The same applies to the mystery surrounding the above image. In other words, it is not the "what is it?" that is important, but the "why did it happen?" That is not to say, however, that the "what is it?" is not worth our efforts.

At first glance, we can be fairly comfortable with identifying the above house as modern. Its flat roofs, white (plaster?) surfaces, and large, intersecting volumes suggest a large single-family residence — we could even argue that the house evokes projects by Irving Gill or even anticipate those by Gregory Ain. For example, the house's size and volumetric arrangements suggest something in the order of Gill's Walter L. Dodge House (1914-16). And except for a ground-level protrusion including a garage, bedrooms, and a pool, and despite an intentional lack of detailing or overhangs, Gill's most famous project could bear a striking resemblance to the above house. Again, the interplay of volumes and horizontal glazing on the second floor seems like a distant echo of Ain's Dunsmuir Flats (1937). Notice the large, window glazing with its distinct checkerboard panes. We've seen this before. In fact, Richard Neutra used a similar kind of window in the entrance of his Lovell (Health) House (1927-29).

Irving Gill (1870-1936), Dodge House, West Hollywood, CA, 1914-1916 (demolished)

Richard Neutra (1892-1970), Lovell (Health) House, Los Angeles, CA, 1927-1929

Architectural sleuths with a predilection for historical materials will recall quickly that a model and photographs of Neutra's house appeared in Modern Architecture — International Exhibition, the iconic 1932 show at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York that introduced what would be known as the "International Style in Architecture." One could even say that the above mystery house is an example of this style. Hold on to that thought.

Viewing the image in its proper context reveals additional layers of complexity. Should we zoom out from the above image, we will notice that it is a photograph from the front page of the September 1932 issue of Popular Mechanics. Started in 1902 by Chicago publisher Henry Haven Windsor, Popular Mechanics was a publication aimed at bringing the latest advancements in science and technology to a mass audience. The slugline under the title — "Written So You Can Understand It" — is perhaps the best testament to this point. And so is the title of the lead article. Is this truly the "Home, Sweet Home of Tomorrow?" The question mark is an invitation for Popular Science readers to judge whether this is the case.

Front page to the September 1932 issue of Popular Mechanics

We could also ask the couple who is looking at the model of the house. They are the very image of a marital division of labor. The wife looks happy. The husband appears consumed in thought. The wife smiles while imaging her life inside the house. The husband is figuring out whether the car (a dead ringer for a Walter Dorwin Teague design that would be featured in the October 1932 Popular Mechanics) fits inside the garage. Housekeeper and breadwinner are caught in the act of contemplating architecture. This is all hyperbole, of course. But so is the caption to the image. It reads, "Model in Exhibit of Museum of Modern Art, New York."

Those with a careful eye will note the exact wording of the caption. After all, we are looking at a "Model in Exhibit of Museum of Modern Art," not a "Model in Exhibit at Museum of Modern Art." Considering the year in which this article was published, and judging by the kind of architecture that is being presented here, this would be a reference to MoMA's 1932 Modern Architecture exhibition. Identifying the model as something that was "of" as opposed to "at" MoMA amounts to some hair-splitting, sure. But there is a reason for emphasizing this distinction: this house never appeared at the 1932 MoMA show.

Model of Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye displayed in Hitchcock and Johnson's Modern Architecture - International Exhibition show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1932.

Curators Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock originally intended to write a book detailing the contemporary landscape of architectural modernism. This changed during the summer of 1930, when at the behest of Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the two took a trip to Europe to survey architects and projects to be included in an exhibit about modern architecture. It was during this trip that Johnson and Hitchcock met many of the architects who would eventually end up in their show. And after two years of clashing over content, of hammering out different versions of the show (including earlier iterations which were to include work by Norman Bel Geddes), the result was an exhibition of photographs and architectural models that was as polemical as it was popular.

As demonstrated by the floor plan of the resulting Modern Architecture-International Exhibition at MoMA from 10 February to 23 March 1932, the Popular Mechanics model is nowhere to be seen. It bears mentioning that Johnson and Hitchcock organized their models and photographs according to three general areas. The first, entitled "Modern Architects," featured the work of modernist luminaries such as Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe as well as a coda-like addition focusing on the work of Raymond Hood and Neutra. The second part, "The Extent of Modern Architecture," showed how aspects of architectural modernism were present in the work of European, American, and Asian architects. The third, and most contested part was simply labeled "Housing" and contained photographs and site plans of works selected by Catherine Bauer, Lewis Mumford, and Henry Wright. All of these sections featured models, including: J.J.P. Oud's House at Pinehurst, Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye, Mies' Tugendhat House, Frank Lloyd Wright's House on Mesa, Otto Haesler's Rothenburg Siedlungen, Walter Gropius' Bauhaus, the Bowman Brothers' Lux Apartments, George Howe's and William Lescaze's Chrystie-Forsyth housing, Hood's Tower in the Country, and Neutra's Lovell (Health) House. Again, in addition to a passing, superficial similarity to Neutra's house, different aspects of the Popular Mechanics house echo some of the models in the exhibit. We see, for example, the same kind of overhangs and windows as in Oud's Pinehurst House, as well as the volumetric play defining Oak Lane Country Day School. These, again, are very knee-jerk similarities, but it is important to note these — Popular Mechanics readers could make these very same associations.

And they did. The September 1932 issue of Popular Mechanics was heavily annotated by a very informed reader. (In fact, all issues available on Google Books were annotated by the very same reader.) Note, for example, the extensive penciled marginalia surrounding the image of the "Home, Sweet Home of Tomorrow." Along the gutter, on the left-hand side of the page, a handwritten scribble reads, "Probably designed by A. Lawrence Kocher and Albert Frey ..." (an address label covers the rest).

Reader's caption identifying the "Home, Sweet Home of Tomorrow" as Lawrence Kocher's and Albert Frey's Aluminaire House.

A. Lawrence Kocher and Albert Frey, Harrison (Aluminaire) House, 1930-31: (top) southwest corner; (middle) northwest corner; (bottom) drawing of west elevation (Source: Joseph Rosa, "A. Lawrence Kocher and Albert Frey, The Aluminaire House, 1930-31" Assemblage, No. 11 (Apr., 1990), pp. 58-69.

The reference here is to the very same Kocher and Frey whose Harrison (or Aluminaire) House appeared in the both the Architectural League's 1931 Allied Arts Show and MoMA's 1932 Modern Architecture exhibition. The house, assembled out of found and prefabricated light steel and aluminum elements, was one of the earliest examples of modern architecture to be found on the East Coast. The Aluminaire House also had some serious architectural pedigree. Not only was it considered an exemplar of the "International Style" by Hitchcock and Johnson, but it was designed by Frey, a former employee of Le Corbusier's who from 1928 to 1929, worked on signature projects such as the Villa Savoye at Poissy, the Cité de Refuge, in Paris, and the Centrosoyus in Moscow.

"Cut-Away" drawing of Kocher and Frey's Aluminaire House from the August 1931 issue of Popular Mechanics. Note the reader's annotation at the very top identifying the image as the Aluminaire House.

And how, exactly, did this reader know about Kocher and Frey or the Aluminaire House? It is very likely that this reader once looked at an article the August 1931 issue of Popular Mechanics called "The Home of The Future." And indeed, looking at the Google Books version of the article not only reveals a very detailed (and labeled) drawing of the Aluminaire House, but also shows the very same handwriting as in the September 1932 issue. Here, the reader writes in the same script as before, "designed by A. Lawrence Kocher and Albert Frey, 4 Park End Place, Forest Hills, Long Island, NY" (with an accompanying note referencing the September 1932 issue). The question is, when did the reader look at the August 1931 issue? Judging by the fact that the reader strikes through his or her scribble in the September 1932 issue, we can guess that the author, though familiar with the MoMA exhibition, thought that the "Home, Sweet Home of Tomorrow" was the Aluminaire House. Once he or she looked at the October 1931 issue, he or she realized the mistake and struck through the reference.

This graphological detour still leaves an important question unanswered. What inspired this reader to recall the Aluminaire House? What made him or her say, "Ahh, that looks like Kocher and Frey's Aluminaire House"? Perhaps a visit to the MoMA show informed this opinion. There are, however, two plausible explanations. On the one hand, there is a bit of a formal similarity between the "Home, Sweet Home of Tomorrow" and the Aluminaire House. Here, I am of course talking about the gridded window glazing: it appears both the cutaway drawing from the August 1931 issue and the model in the October 1932 issue. The glazing also appears in roughly the same area of the image (on the left-hand corner of the model). When comparing the two images, it it possible to see how this kind of glazing becomes a dominant feature for both projects, even if both are proportioned differently, and even if the windows are located in different areas relative to the rear façades of each building.

On the other hand, our unidentified reader may have seen the MoMA show in Chicago. In 1932, the Chicago-based Association of Arts and Industries (the precursor the the New Bauhaus as well as the Art Institute of Chicago), an organization whose object was to "stimulate the application of art to the industrial and aesthetic development of the country"[1], sponsored a traveling version of the show. Held at the exhibition gallery of the new Sears, Roebuck store from June 9 to July 9, the traveling version of the Modern Architecture exhibition featured many of the same models and photographs as in the New York version. And indeed, our reader noted near the bottom of the "Home, Sweet Home of Tomorrow" article that the Popular Mechanics mystery model was "shown at Sears Roebuck." This leads to the conclusion that a photograph of the Aluminaire House was shown at Sears, Roebuck during the summer of 1932. But assuming that indeed this building was part of the exhibit, there is always the question of why the reader would think that Kocher's and Frey's house was important. In other words, the Aluminaire House was significant for our reader — so much so that he or she went to a lot of trouble to document its origins and pedigrees in the margins of a popular magazine.

There is always the possibility that we are overstating the importance of Kocher's and Frey's house. It is true that the Aluminaire House was a significant example of modernist architecture. But to impart this interpretation on our reader may be asking too much. Was he or she really aware of current developments in architecture culture? Perhaps. But then again, there is something about the degree to which this reader was informed about specifics that leads us to think that this was no average reader. Why is this so?

It has everything to do with the Popular Mechanics. As it turns out, the August 1931 and October 1932 issues were involved in their own kind of architectural polemic —one that competed with, if not contravened, ideas about architectural modernism present in the MoMA show. "Home, Sweet Home of Tomorrow?" was written by C.W. Farrier, one of the organizers of the 1933-1934 World's Fair in Chicago. Called the "Century of Progress Exposition," the Fair was a showcase for cultural, scientific, technological, and even architectural innovations.

Night views of the Hall of Science, Century of Progress Exposition, Chicago, IL, 1933-34 (Source: Images of Progress: Views from A Century of Progress International Exposition, 1933-1934, A Century of Progress Records, 1927-1952, Special Collections and University Archives Department, University of Illinois at Chicago Library)

In 1928, its Architectural Commission, chaired by Harvey Wiley Corbett, enlisted a group of high-profile designers, including Paul Philippe Cret, John Holabird, Raymond Hood, Daniel Burnham, and Joseph Urban to supervise the planning and architecture for the exhibit. During a meeting with the Board of Trustees, the Commission identified two general strategies regarding the design of the Century of Progress Exposition:

The architecture of the buildings and grounds in 1933 will illustrate in definite form the development of the art of architecture since the great Fair of 1893, not only in America but in the world at large [...] New elements of construction, products of modern invention and science will be the factors of architectural composition. Artificial light, the tremendous progress of which has astonished all designers in recent years, will become an inherent component of the architectural composition. The extraordinary opportunities of the site for the use of the water as an intrinsic element of the composition will be developed to the maximum.[2]

As these statements suggest, the Architectural Commission gravitated towards a more contemporary look for its architecture. Yet the result was more idiosyncratic: a collection of vernacular, evocative, fantastic, and in some instances, modernist and Art Deco buildings arranged according to an asymmetrical master plan. The latter two styles were more prevalent than not, and often anticipated many of the streamlined designs that would be subsequently favored by the likes of Bel Geddes, Teague, and Henry Dreyfuss. The Century of Progress Exposition also featured some of Joseph Urban's last works. As Lenox Lohr stated in his account of the Exposition, Urban was brought in to remedy the architectural consistencies by creating a unified color scheme for the buildings. Lohr recalls,

Mr. Urban's color palette consisted of twenty-three colors, all of the brightest intensity. They were: white; sulphur yellow; chrome yellow; bright orange; dull Persian orange; dull vermillion (almost terra cotta); bright vermillion; blue carmine; tomato bisque pink; brown red; greenish blue; peacock blue; true blue; ultramarine blue; dull dark blue; emerald green; peacock green; turquoise blue; blue gray; black, aluminum, gold and grey. Seldom were more than five of these colors used on any one building, and usually only three or four. Approximately twenty percent of all surface was in white, twenty percent in the blues, twenty percent in the oranges, fifteen percent in the black, and the remaining twenty-five divided among the yellows, reds, grays and greens. Solid colors were designed to emphasize the building block system, for the style of the architecture required firmness of treatment in harmony with the definiteness of its unornamented form.[3]

Resolving architectural inconsistencies by applying a twenty-three color palette may have seemed a little misguided, and certainly Urban thought so. When used to illuminate the many water displays and building surfaces at night, many of the colors failed to achieve the desired effect. And once the Exposition reconvened in the Summer of 1934, Urban introduced a smaller, more consistent and calculated color palette. As visitors walked from the North Entrance to the various exits, they would experience a spectrum of greens, reds, blues, and oranges all accentuated through the use various lenses, flourescences, gels, as well as the occasional projection of shadows on white surfaces to accentuate architectural form. In all, it was a spectacular strategy that relied on light effects and atmospherics in order highlight the Exposition's many corporate sponsors.

Century of Progress organizers also opted for a more "tangible" display of architecture, one that channeled the same kind of energy on atmospherics and effects towards an exhibition of building techniques. This would be the responsibility of the Home Planning Group, a branch of the Home and Industrial Arts Committee dedicated to the design and construction of single-family residences, all using prefabricated components and featuring the latest dishwashers and air conditioners.

Homes shown as part of the Century of Progress Exposition. Clockwise from top right: Brick House, House of Tomorrow, Armco-Ferro-Mayflower House, Stransteel House, Southern Cypress House, Masonite House, Florida Home, Wieboldt-Rostone House, Lumber House (Source: Official Guide Book of the World's Fair of 1934 [Chicago: Cuneo Press, 1934], p. 126)

Robert Smith, Jr. (ARMCO), Frameless Steel House, Cleveland, OH, 1932 (Source: Farrier, "Home, Sweet Home of Tomorrow", p. 354). Note the various annotations indicating the parties involved in the construction of the house.

In his Popular Mechanics piece, however, Farrier emphasized the role that metal would play in the future. The "Home, Sweet Home of Tomorrow would, in his estimation, "be constructed entirely out of metal or of materials new to the building industry ... Its parts will be prefabricated and cut to size at the factory and it will be assembled merely by 'buttoning' together the numbered sections with clips and bolts." He continued,

In the past two years groups have been experimenting with steel homes in one form or another [...] Without a doubt, the frame of the house will be of metal, though not necessarily of steel. It will be rustproof and light in weight, whether it is stainless steel, aluminum or some other metal. The walls will be about three inches thick instead of from twelve to eighteen inches. The outer walls may be of colored enamel material made in sections that clip to the frame. Inner walls will be attached to metal lath and may be of enameled metal, plasterboard, or precast plaster [...] Windows will be more to see out of than to admit light. Illumination will be by neon tubing or ultraviolet tubing emitting therapeutic rays and these will be concealed in walls or ceilings.[4]

To illustrate this "future trend in building," Farrier included an image of a "Metal House" erected in Cleveland. Set against a wooded glen, the house consists of two main cubic volumes, with a covered terrace set atop the larger one of these. Faint vertical lines suggest the existence of metal paneling, as does the graphite color — indications that we are not looking at a house made from ordinary building materials. To get a better sense of what this house is, as well as who made it and why it was constructed, we can again rely on the various annotations made by our reader. And in looking at the top margin, we notice that our reader wrote down the citations for two issues of Popular Mechanics: the May 1932 and April 1933 issues. Indeed, the same image of the same house appears in the May 1932 issue.

Image of Smith's Frameless Steel House from the May 1932 issue of Popular Mechanics.

Here, however, we see the fruits of our reader's endeavor. He or she has not only marked the location of the house ("Built at Solon, Suburb of Cleveland"), but has also identified the house as a "co-op" project by the Insulated Steel Floor and Wall Company and the American Rolling Mill Company (both Ohio-based). The reader also identifies Mills G. Clark as the designer.

Advertisement depicting Smith's and Clark's Armco-Ferro-Mayflower House (Source)

Known by the acronym ARMCO, American Rolling Mill Company sponsored the design and building of a frameless steel and enamel paneling house at the 1933 Century of Progress Exposition. They enlisted the services of Clark and Cleveland architect Robert Smith, Jr. to design the "Armco-Ferro-Mayflower House."[5] Like the house in the May 1932 issue of Popular Mechanics, the Armco-Ferro house evoked a non-metallic look. Porcelain enamel (provided by the Ferro-Enamel Company) was applied to the metal surfaces to create a "softer" look that could also be painted. In fact, the house depicted in the May 1932 Popular Mechanics was the first frameless steel and enamel paneling house. It too was designed by Robert Smith, Jr.[6]

Robert Smith, Jr. (with Mills G. Clark), Armco-Ferro-Mayflower House, 1933 (Source: Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record)

At a first glance, the Armco-Ferro-Mayflower house also seems a modern. Its flat roofs, volumetrics, and unornamented, white surfaces certainly recall several of the projects that introduced this piece. However, it bears some similarities to the "Home, Sweet Home of Tomorrow" from the September 1932 Popular Mechanics that will draw us closer to the "whydoit"and help us understand more of the circumstances leading to this house. The "Home, Sweet Home of Tomorrow" and the Armco-Ferro-Mayflower houses, for example, both rely on symmetrical forms and heavy bases which would place them squarely within a Art Deco tradition. Both houses also have similar kinds of windows. The Armco-Ferro house, however, used casement windows. Judging by the arrangement and location of the windows (note the absence, for example, of strip-glazing), it is quite possible that the "Home, Sweet Home of Tomorrow" may have also used casement windows. We may never know.

Norman Bel Geddes (1893-1958), House No. 3, 1930. Image of project published in Bel Geddes' Horizons (1932)

Bel Geddes' House No. 3 as it appeared in an April 1931 issue of Ladies' Home Journal (Source)

J.J.P. Oud (1890-1963), Model of Johnson House, Pinehurst, NC, 1931 (Source: Canadian Center for Architecture)

Another aspect of the "Home, Sweet Home of Tomorrow" bears mentioning, and that is its title. Popular magazines devoted to contemporary architecture trends almost always evoked the idea of a "home of tomorrow" in order to promote their ideas about domestic living. In addition to the September 1932 issue, the August 1931 issue featuring the Aluminaire house was titled "The Home of The Future" (it too promoted the upcoming Century of Progress Exhibition). And in the 1931 issue of Ladies Home Journal, Norman Bel Geddes introduced his "House of Tomorrow," which was an early rendering of his "House No. 3" (1930) which would appear later in Horizons (1932), his first book. This house, with its asymmetrical plan, terracing, and circular port is certainly similar to J.J.P. Oud's Pinehurst house from the 1932 MoMA Modern Architecture show.

Bel Geddes, interior of House No. 3, from Horizons (1932)

But it is Bel Geddes rendering of the interior that should really capture our attention. Here, we see a sparsely-outfitted studio complete with grand piano foregrounding a set large floor-to-wall windows – a gridded glazing that we have seen before, from Neutra's Lovell (Health) House, to Kocher and Frey's Aluminaire House, to William Lescaze's Roy Spreter Studio (1934), and even the "Home, Sweet Home of Tomorrow." In other words, such use of windows and forms was not just an evocation of the future potential for domestic architecture. It was also a demonstration of how new construction techniques, whether through steel framing or frameless steel, could allow for such embellishments.

View of Modern Architecture - International Exhibition as displayed at Bullocks-Wilshire Department Store, Los Angeles, CA, July 23 - August 30, 1932 (Source: Terence Riley, The International Style: Exhibition 15 and the Museum of Modern Art [New York: Rizzoli, 1992], p. 42)

More importantly, it is an instance of how ideas about architectural modernism were being commercialized and presented to the general public via popular magazines like Popular Mechanics and Ladies Home Journal. Our enterprising Popular Mechanics reader, for example, may have seen Kocher and Frey's Aluminaire House at Sears, Roebuck in 1932. It is worth mentioning that when planning the traveling version of the Modern Architecture show, Hitchcock and Johnson included department stores and showrooms as venues. One of the most well-known photographs of the exhibit, for example, is not from the version shown at MoMA, but rather of the condensed version shown at Bullocks-Wilshire Department Store in Los Angeles from July 23 to August 30, 1932 (the previous installation was at Sears, Roebuck in Chicago). A complicating landscape emerges, one where museums, department stores, international expositions, and non-professional publications like Popular Mechanics and Ladies Home Journal were enlisted in the promotion of architectural modernism.

This is, of course, is well known. But it is the degree of integration between all of these forums and formats that is worth noting. When the MoMA show came to Chicago in 1932, it was not devoted solely to the material that Hitchcock and Johnson curated earlier. Co-sponsored by the Association of Arts and Industries, the show also featured buildings designed for the 1933 Century of Progress Exposition.[7] And for many Chicagoans, the harbinger of architectural modernism was not MoMA, but the various houses at the Century of Progress Exposition. Critic Emily Genauer noted as much in her study of the Paris and New York World's Fairs:

Up to the time of the Chicago exhibit, the consciousness of America's millions had not been appreciably dented by modern decoration. It had been little more than a phrase suggesting possibly the arty ateliers of Paris and New York ... beyond application to one's own normal scheme of living

Then the Fair on the shores of Lake Michigan was opened, and countless Americans visited the row of model houses ... They found modern decoration good. For the country-wide popularity of the new style dates from the time they came upon it accidentally in Chicago, admired its simplicity, its directness, its straight simple lines and chunky forms, and most of all, its patent liveableness.[8]

Here was a different version of architectural modernism. Or, rather, a kind of modernity that did not rely on the universality and general applicability of modern architecture as much as it did depend on architecture's ability to (as Frederic Thompson would put it), "amuse the millions." The very idea that would make architecture the handmaiden of popular culture was architectural modernism itself.

This, however, does not help us at all in identifying the "Home, Sweet Home of Tomorrow" portrayed in the September 1932 issue of Popular Mechanics. What it does do, however, is help explain why the magazine's editors would identify the house as one being shown at MoMA in 1932. The "Home, Sweet of Tomorrow" did bear a striking resemblance to examples of modern and Art Deco architecture, but it was only a resemblance. What was at stake was whether architectural modernism could be deployed to sell more magazines, more houses, and more tickets. That was the case in 1932 as much as it is now.

____________________

Notes

[1] Charles R. Richards, Art in Industry: Being a Report of an Industrial Art Survey Conducted Under the Auspices of the National Society for Vocational Education and the Department of Education of the State of New York (New York, 1922), p. 471.
[2] Architectural Commission of the 1933-1934 World's Fair to the Board of Trustees, 23 May 1928, quoted in Lenox H. Lohr, Fair Management: The Story of a Century of Progress (Chicago: Cuneo Publishing, 1952), p. 62.
[3] Lohr, Fair Management, pp. 75-76.
[4] C.W. Farrier, "Home, Sweet Home of Tomorrow?" Popular Mechanics (Sep., 1932), pp. 354, 128A.
[5] Historic American Building Survey, "ARMCO-FERRO-MAYFLOWER HOUSE: Photographs, Xerographic Copies of Color Transparencies, Written Historical and Descriptive Data, Reduced Copies of Drawings" HABS No. IN-244" (1994), p. 3.
[6] Ibid. As our Popular Mechanics reader noted in the margin, the house from the May 1932 Popular Mechanics may have been built in Euclid, Ohio (not Solon), which would verify that it is indeed Robert Smith's frameless steel enamel house.
[7] Lloyd C. Engelbrecht, "The Association of Arts and Industries: Backgrounds and Origins of the Bauhaus Movement in Chicago", Unpublished Ph.D Dissertation, University of Chicago (1973), p. 122.
[8] Emily Genauer, Modern Interiors Today and Tomorrow: A Critical Analysis of Trends in Contemporary Decoration as Seen at the Paris Exposition of Arts and Techniques and Reflected at the New York World's Fair (New York: Illustrated Editions Company, Inc., 1939), pp. 11-12, quoted in ibid., pp. 166-67. For more on the role of Century of Progress Exhibition vis-a-vis the International Style, see Engelbrecht, "Modernism and Design in Chicago", in Sue Ann Prince, ed. The Old Guard and the Avant Guard: Modernism in Chicago, 1910-1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 119-138

Larger Scales of Norman Bel Geddes

2010-08-24T00:17:00.004-04:00

Model of Tokyo Bay (Source: Michael S. Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989)

The desire to represent real-time data seems quite contemporary, but in fact this practice was borne out of World War II-era architecture and design culture. One characteristic of this practice was the impulse to dramatize physical and environmental data. An image from Michael Sherry’s The Rise of American Air Power (1989) is a useful starting point to demonstrate how this is the case. Here, we see a model of a waterfront and cityscape bordering a flat expanse of water. This flat, "watery" surface extends outward and ends abruptly, revealing a tangle of plywood scaffolding supporting the model. Booms and stage lights overhead suggest that we are looking at a soundstage. It is, in a sense, for this image shows a film crew taking overhead footage of a scale model of Tokyo Bay. But this is done for an entirely different purpose. As Sherry indicates in the image caption, “The Army Air Forces adopted the techniques of Hollywood to simulate reality for crews – one of many wartime efforts to simulate conditions in Japan.” The Tokyo Bay model was “used in the production of training films designed to brief aircrews slated to attack Japanese targets.”[1]

Such combinations of design, theatricality, and war calls immediately to mind the work of the American design polymath Norman Bel Geddes (1893-1958). The 30s were particularly fruitful for Bel Geddes. 1932 saw the publication of Horizons, his well-regarded treatise on the role of industrial design and architecture in the future that featured images and drawings of Bel Geddes's streamlined designs. And later, he designed and directed the "City of the Future" advertisement campaign for Shell Oil from 1936-37, which would eventually become the massively popular Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Though Bel Geddes would not have as many high profile projects during the 1940s, his offices were still busy producing a lot of work for the both private and government clients. Starting in 1942, the editors at Life magazine hired Bel Geddes to produce objects at a different scale than he was accustomed to. Most of his wartime design effort consisted of various models and dioramas depicting everything from cloud patterns to the construction of Egyptian pyramids. Yet his models of American combat operations brought Bel Geddes a different kind of recognition. Published frequently in the pages of Life from 1942 to 1945, Bel Geddes' models were essentially highly-detailed terrain dioramas that brought a antiseptic, highly-stylized and design-conscious version of the war to American readers.

"Coral Sea: Norman Bel Geddes' re-enact naval battle" Life (May 25, 1942) (Source)

Unlike other images and instances of war reportage — such as Margaret Bourke-White's photographs, Ernie Pyle's installments for Scripps Howard, and Bill Mauldin's cartoons — Bel Geddes' models for Life were essentially didactic in nature. The very first installment, with the descriptive title "Coral Sea: Norman Bel Geddes' models re-enact naval battle," was published on May 25, 1942, only weeks after the actual battle took place. It is, in essence, a spread devoted to six photographs of what must have been a massive model. In each of these, tiny ships maneuver in and out of gunfire, leaving plasticine wakes in the sculpted waters. Pieces of cotton fabric are rendered into flak bursts or into exhaust fumes of aircraft falling into the Pacific Ocean. All of the images — taken by Bel Geddes' employees — are supposed to depict the surprise attack on the Japanese fleet in the Coral Sea. The vantage point is therefore almost always that of a bombardier's sitting in the glazed nose of an Army Air Force or Navy aircraft. And in some instances, great care is taken to construct the aircraft windows and framing. With this technique. Bel Geddes provided the reader with an approximated, yet simulated depiction of battle in real-time. The caption to the leading image thus reads, "Jap convoy flees (top) when Jap task force of warships (bottom) is attacked by bombers on Monday, May 4. Scene a few minutes later is on the next page."

Details of models, from "Coral Sea: Norman Bel Geddes' re-enact naval battle" Life (May 25, 1942) (Source)

Although great care is taken in identifying the various ships and airplanes used in the battle, the scene remains geographically ambiguous. A more traditional mercator projection of the area locates the exact "position" of each image. And yet there is still some guesswork involved. The caption to the image of a model of a B-17 Flying Fortress "surprising" a Japanese Navy convoy tells us that the enemy ships were "presumably heading for the Louisiade Islands off the southeastern tip of New Guinea." The article explains that Bel Geddes produced these models because "There has never been a clear and complete photograph of a naval battle." This is why the scale of the models is so small. Great effort is taken to portray as much as possible, to fill each image with as much information as possible about the conflict. This includes environmental details such as the exact position of a flak burst in relation to the surface of the water, and the water itself. Indeed, all images show a maniacal fascination with how ocean waves ripple and break, an overdetermined effort to demonstrate that this battle is occurring in the high seas.

"Geddes Map Shows Where Rommel Hit U.S. Army's Flank," Life (March 1, 1943) (Source)

Other models place a premium on geographical information, oftentimes resorting to more standard cartographical techniques as part of the visual strategy. For the March 1, 1943 issue of Life, Bel Geddes produced a detailed model of the North African coast showing how Field Marshall Erwin Rommel's forces were able to break through the Allied salient. Here, dotted and dashed lines, as well as directional arrows show the relative locations of American, British, and German forces. Islands and cities are labeled, and a north arrow, drawn as if on the surface of the Mediterranean Sea, figures prominently. These are all clues that this is much more than a map. Although the article is titled "Geddes Map Shows Where Rommel Hit U.S. Army's Flank," the text identifies the map as a "relief model of the North African battlefield."

"Allies Advance From East and South to Close a Pincer on Jap Base at Rabaul," Life (October 4, 1943) (Source)

From "How The Russians Took Orel: Models by Norman Bel Geddes Show Red Tactics in Winning Their First Big Summer Victories," Life (August 16, 1943) (Source)

The same kind of conventions apply to two other Bel Geddes models. The first, published on October 4, 1943, is titled "Allies Advance From East and South to Close a Pincer on Jap Base at Rabaul," and displays many of the same techniques as the North Africa model, specifically the use of lines and north arrows. The other, "How The Russians Took Orel: Models by Norman Bel Geddes Show Red Tactics in Winning Their First Big Summer Victories," was published in August 16, 1943 and combines techniques from the Coral Sea and North Africa models. In lieu of ships and planes, tanks and artillery dominate the images of these models. They are also presented sequentially, close-up details of the models reveal the various attacks and counterattacks, as if Bel Geddes were giving a real-time account of the Russian victory. And unlike the North Africa model, here, cartographic information is presented separately — the maps are secondary to the visual spectacles of miniaturized war. Perhaps there is an easy distinction to be made: the North Africa and Rabaul models emphasize strategy, whereas the Coral Sea and Orel models focus on tactics.

From "Sicily Invasion Goes Well," Life (July 26, 1943) (Source)

Bel Geddes' built his models at different scales in order to present varying degrees of combat veracity. His model for "Sicily Invasion Goes Well" (July 26, 1943) is perhaps his most spectacular. Here, Bel Geddes follows the same general presentation strategy as the Coral Sea model, the only difference being that most of the scenes and models are larger-scaled. Battleships, amphibious assault vehicles, and even landing craft appear almost toy-like. Yet trees, rocks, grass are all rendered meticulously, giving this "fake" scene an attenuated reality. It is this overwhelming stasis, this heightened artifice are what give the model a dramatic sense of the island's terrain and environment. The image of the very last model gives us the best sense of this. Titled "Allied Tanks Take and Airfield and It Becomes an Important Air Supply Base," this is the most action-packed of all Bel Geddes' models.

From "Sicily Invasion Goes Well," Life (July 26, 1943) (Source)

A giant monastery dominates the foreground as models of C-47 transports land on the newly-taken airfield. In the background, the chaos and devastation of war seems to have momentarily ended. Except for a large bloom of cloudy smoke in the faraway mountains, there are no plumes to show where artillery bombs and shells have just exploded. Instead, there are just trees and people moving about the various damaged houses and structures. And far off, American ships continue towards the Sicilian coast unopposed. This is much more than a model depicting business-as-usual. This is a map that has come to life.

Top and bottom, models from "Amphibious War: Geddes Models Explain Land-&-Sea Attack," Life (November 16, 1942) (Source)

In some instances, there were no degrees of veracity, but only wholly fictionalized accounts of war. For "Amphibious War: Geddes Models Explain Land-&-Sea Attack" (November 16, 1942), Bel Geddes created a series of scenes to illustrate how an coordinated air, land, and sea attack would commence on a fictional Pacific island. The title image features a superimposed photograph of two Douglas TBD Devastator torpedo bombers "attacking" a model airfield sited high on a bluff overlooking the Pacific. The rest of the images are very upfront in their didacticism: they are supposed to illustrate, via aerial views, the various stages of an amphibious assault. All aspects, from naval bombardment to the very first landings via LST and LCPL; from tank warfare to trench digging — these become part of an orchestrated effort to teach the public the subtle art of tactics. It is Clausewitz for the masses. The image caption to the model of the first landing sums it up best: "The game of war is now played out on the beach."

Celestial navigation trainer, from Robert L. Scott, Jr., "Bombing Tokyo From a Silo" Popular Science, Vol. 144. No. 4 (Apr., 1944) (Source)

The statement is much more than just a tongue-in-cheek description of how the models only approximate war. It also alludes to how the military used models like the Tokyo Bay device and Bel Geddes' "scenes" for more immediate ends. In an article for the April 1944 issue of Popular Science, Flying Tiger veteran (and author of God Is My Co-Pilot) Robert L. Scott wrote of his experiences using a Link Celestial Navigation Trainer. Housed inside a silo-like building, celestial navigation trainers featured the nose-section of a bomber, complete with instrumentation for a pilot, co-pilot, radio operator, and most importantly, a bombardier/navigator. Covered by a hemispheric canopy with constellations painted on the inside surface depicting constellations, these trainers were designed with the sole purpose of instructing aircrews in the intricacies of using sextants and other navigational aids aboard aircraft. And like the Tokyo Bay model that helped introduce this post, celestial navigation trainers also relied on a more "cinematic" form of modeling. Consider Scott's description of how crews use the nose-section inside the trainer. Scott recounts, "the screen, or terrain plate, which received the projected images of any part of the earth's surface. I heard that those scenes appeared as if actually viewed from an airplane at 10,000 ft, but others could be projected with any altitude desired. Images of clouds in any given density could be thrown upon the same screen. Drift from anticipated cross winds, or resultants of head winds or tail winds, could also be introduced."[2] Could celestial navigation be anything more than a multimedia experience?

This is not entirely off the mark. Celestial navigation trainers were a fixture at the Army Air Force School of Advanced Tactics, or AAFSAT, in Orlando, Florida. They were part of a intensified effort to deploy new technologies to organize and train the Army Air Forces in strategy and tactics. As stated in a 1944 report detailing the AAFSAT's achievements,

It is desirable that an army or air force be so organized that information necessary for tactical development be immediately available, that new tactics be rapidly and thoroughly worked out, and that the results be quickly disseminated. However, tactics is such an integral part of every activity in the AAF that the problem cuts across all conventional organizational barriers and constantly defies efforts to isolate the function and assign it to a single authority or organization. There are tactical aspects to training. There are training aspects to every tactic. There are nearly always some materiel problems presented by a newly conceived tactic.[3]

One kind of tactical problem that necessitated its own brand of information organization and presentation was the coordinated air, land, and sea attack. A new kind of trainer was needed, and in 1943, AAFSAT enlisted Norman Bel Geddes to assist in this endeavor.

In February of that year, Bel Geddes contracted with the AAFSAT to develop the "Synthetic Training Device #1." It was to be part of a multimedia environment using maps, sound recordings, and information displays featuring Translux rear-projection technologies and scale models of planes, tanks, and terrains. The trainer was supposed to be the most advanced tactical simulation center ever devised for combat training. It not only was supposed to provide and coordinate an extensive informational environment giving status updates on hundreds of combat operations, but it was also supposed to rely on the physicality of models as part of its information design. Everything was supposed to be housed in a giant operations center. As described in an issue of the Orlando Morning Sentinel, the center was to include "facsimile models of every tank, airplane and naval vessel made in the world, or own, our Allies, and the enemy. There are dozens of sand stables which present almost every type of terrain a plane will move over in every combat zone. There are hundreds of fine scale maps with accurate battle lines."[4] Bel Geddes was also in the process of developing an "animated tactical board" for the project. As described in the Orlando paper,

The board will be 60 feet square and by comparison will cover about 150 square miles in scale. On it will be two complete armies, with cities, local terrain, communication and transportation lines in actual scale. Above it will be the operating air forces of the enemy and the Allies .... As 216 electric motors operate it, the armies and air forces will go into actual combat. Bombs will drop, armies will clash, artillery will roar, planes will shoot down one another ... Inside rooms approximately 200 students of the air and ground forces will work out a simulated battle taken more than likely from a batttle that is in actual combat at the moment. By intricate electrical boards, orders will be given. It is these orders which will determine the outcome of the battle.[5]

And though the design and construction informational displays presented Bel Geddes with what was perhaps the most difficult aspect of the project, most of his discussions with Army Air Force officials concerned the large terrain model that would be at the center of the operations center.

These discussions not only discussed what the terrain model should depict, but how. As for the what, Bel Geddes agreed to build a 1:1200 relief map of Northern Florida that could be altered to represent different geographical areas. The inclusion of model roads, railroads, power transmission lines was also important, as these would be present in any kind of environment that would be "attacked" in the simulator. The objective of each simulation would be to "take" Jacksonville, which could also altered to depict any urban area anywhere. And at a March 31, 1943 meeting in New York, Bel Geddes, his designers, and AAFSAT agreed on the how of the terrain map. The minutes from that meeting reveal how "The culture of the map, should, in the battle zone, represent as closely as possible the battle scenes and encampments in the photographs of terrain of Guadalcanal (Time and Life Pictures of the landing)."[6] It is a comment that is as illuminating as it is revelatory — not only did AAFSAT faculty want Bel Geddes to duplicate some of the terrain models that he was already constructing for Life, but they are referring to a specific model of his: the model of Guadalcanal he produced for a series of articles called "U.S. Fights for the Solomons" (November 9, 1942).

Bel Geddes' model of Guadalcanal, from "U.S. Fights for the Solomons," Life (November 9, 1942) (Source)

Although Bel Geddes only created diagrams and a rough model of "Synthetic Training Device #1," the demand for his relief models found other avenues. For MoMA's popular Airways to Peace exhibit from 1943, for example, he created a terrain model depicting a swath of land extending from the English Channel to Switzerland.[7] MoMA also devoted a show to his "War Maneuver Models" in 1944. Bel Geddes would continue to produce such models up until 1946, eventually using this technique in one of his most architectural projects.

Top and bottom, images from "Future Toledo: Scale Model Gives Citizens A Prophetic Look At The Wonderful City They Could Have in 50 Years," Life (September 17, 1945) (Source)

In February 1945, newspaper empresario Paul Block hired Bel Geddes to build a gigantic scale model of Toledo, Ohio showing how the city would look in the future. A feature in Life shows an aerial photograph of "Future Toledo" with gray shading depicting areas to be cleared and rebuilt. It was, in a sense, Bel Geddes' own Ville Radieuse, a vision of future urbanism that required substantial interventions in order to be realized. But the actual solutions that Bel Geddes presented rang familiar. With multi-tiered expressways and roundabouts, elevated sidewalks, and extensive airport planning, "Future Toledo" was in many ways a rehashing of Bel Geddes' previous work for Shell and for the Futurama exhibition. Then again, this project was something of a completely different order. As the article points out,

One all-important thing the model does not show — how to bring it all about. But with so many of its residents seeing and understanding the benefits of city revision, Toledo is getting a better-than-average start on all the myriad legal and financial troubles which must be cleared away to make the model a reality.[8]

It is a poignant statement, to be sure. The different kinds of visualization and modeling techniques that were a vital part of the war effort are deployed here for a peacetime role. "Future Toledo" is much more than a revisiting of Futurama. It is a terrain model very much in the same vein as those created for Life. And like the proposed "Synthetic Training Device #1," Bel Geddes' last urban vision attempts to duplicate a massive organizational and representational effort. Here, however, the emphasis on tactical and combat simulation is replaced with an emphasis of civic engagement. The reliance on terrain modeling remains.

_______________________

Notes

[1] Michael Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon (New Haven, Yale, 1989), n.p.
[2] Robert L. Scott, Jr., "Bombing From a Silo," Popular Science, Vol. 144. No. 4 (Apr., 1944), p. 58.
[3] Assistant Chief of Air Staff, Intelligence Historical Division, The Development of Tactical Doctrines at AAFSAT and AAFTAC, Army Air Force Historical Studies: No. 13 (Jul., 1944) p. 3, USAF Historical Division, Archives Branch, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama.
[4] John Forney Ruby, "Air Forces School Works Out Battle Tactics Here for Aerial Combat Zones" Orlando Morning Sentinel (12 May 1943), Norman Bel Geddes Theater and Industrial Design Papers 1873-1964, Job 487, Box 34, Job Diary — Meeting Minutes, Correspondence, Feb.-Dec. 1943, Harry Ransom Center for the Humanities, University of Texas at Austin.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Minutes of Meeting between Norman Bel Geddes, AAFSAT Faculty, 31 March 1943, Norman Bel Geddes Theater and Industrial Design Papers 1873-1964, Job 487, Box 34, Job Diary — Meeting Minutes, Correspondence, Feb.-Dec. 1943, Harry Ransom Center for the Humanities, University of Texas at Austin.

[7] MoMA to Norman Bel Geddes, 13 July 1943, REG, Exh. # 236. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.

[8] "Future Toledo: Scale Model Gives Citizens A Prophetic Look At The Wonderful City They Could Have in 50 Years," Life (September 17, 1945), p. 87.

A User's Guide to Architectural Histories and Fictions

2010-08-16T21:07:00.002-04:00

Digram showing application of central place theory to qualitative relationships among cities in a region. From Walter Christaller (1893-1969), Die zentralen Orte in Süddeutschland (Jena: Fischer, 1933) (Source)

Hi all. I am in the process of finishing a dissertation chapter and traveling with my family. And with limited email access, I have not been able to dedicate as much time as I'd like to this is a456. In any event, I encourage you to visit my revamped tumblr site, where I am continuing to post links and images. It now has an archive and "random post" function — all which will make the site much more interesting to visit.

But on to bigger news. I have submitted a panel proposal to SXSW Interactive 2011 (I was a panelist in 2008). It's called A User's Guide to Architectural Histories and Fictions, and if you go to the conference website and peruse its many panels, you'll see this description:

The future is here, but you may have already missed it. Don't worry! Thanks to a crack team of architecture critics, historians, writers, and curators, you can catch up on what passed you by. Watch and listen as panelists present on a variety of themes related to the history and future of architecture and urbanism. Whereas a historian may show urban plots in early 20th century cities, a critic may give you a tour of a future exhibit showing architecture trends, circa 2020. Or look here: there’s that writer talking about building technology from 3,000 years ago! Did you know that the Egyptian Pyramids had air-conditioning systems? Exciting! “A User's Guide to Architectural Histories and Fictions” is not just a panel that will showcase the thinking of a generation of young architectural writers. Each panelist will present material that is entertaining and speculative. They will cover a wide range of topics, including green technologies, airplanes-and-ships-as-architecture, fake manifestoes, fictional histories, real fictions, urban spacesuits, people movers, jet-pack rentals, liquid architectures, vegetative structures, pneumatic pods, and many, many other things—all of which concern the very buildings and cities we inhabit. It is up to the audience to determine whether what is being described did actually happen. And in some cases, the panel may not even know. And that’s where the fun begins.

I suppose that there are some readers out there who have no inkling as to how the panel selection process for SXSW works. It's quite simple: visitors to the website have until August 27 to give my panel suggestion a thumbs up, and if everything works out, I should know by September whether I make the first cut. So, if you are interested in seeing more architecture programming at SXSW, vote for my panel. If you are interested in seeing even more interesting, thought-provoking material, vote for my panel.

If my panel makes the cut (and my fingers are indeed crossed that it does), I will reveal who will be joining me in Austin in March 2011. I am sure that you will recognize many of the participants. Let me just say right now that I have some heavy hitters on deck.

SXSW is a big, big deal. So go out and vote!

Not Serendipity City

2010-07-16T22:52:00.010-04:00

Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), Project for Two Libraries at Campus Universitaire de Jussieu, Maquette (1992)

The desire for serendipitous urban encounters is a desire for moments, though fleeting, that lead to new discoveries, experiences, or feelings. Such moments may be intensely personal, as in the case of a person meeting a life partner while en route to a particular destination. But there is an element of calculation and foresight as well. You have to work to make that serendipitous moment occur. At least that's what author Nassim Nicolas Taleb tells us in his latest book, The Black Swan. "Work hard," he tells us, "But not in grunt work, but in chasing ... opportunities and maximizing exposure to them. This makes for living in big cities invaluable because you increase the odds of serendipitous encounters." Urban serendipity—if that is truly the term to be used—is a fanciful concept to be sure. But it is also unabashedly romantic. When viewed in this way, serendipity becomes an antidote to the sense of alienation or ennui one may feel while walking in a large city. Imagine some early twentieth century version of Taleb (or Adam Gopnik) encountering a Simmel or Benjamin on the street. And after hearing plaintive or mournful tales of malaise from our resident urban sociologist and mystical Marxist, our Weimar or Second/Third Empire urban booster would probably say something like, "You know what your problem is? You're not meeting enough people! Go out there and be seen."

Not so fast. This is all in jest, sure, but it prefaces a worthwhile observation. It's not that serendipity is not possible. We are all, to a certain extent, witnesses to and products of random everyday occurrences. Trouble starts once serendipity becomes an objective or a desirable outcome. And this is because at the very moment that such an objective and desire becomes manifest, serendipity falls by the wayside. Serendipity becomes nugatory, wholly subservient to a kind of environmental conditioning. Now, the term "environmental conditioning" is sure to set off some alarms in those who find concepts such as environmental determinism so anathema. But it points to another observation, one that it as the heart of this post. It is this: architects have been the worst offenders in creating misguided attempts at serendipity. Architects have been known to adhere to a strange belief that serendipity can be guided and induced. Even worse is their idea that serendipity necessitates a kind of formal and/or typological response. This is because serendipity can be rationalized.

Blame the program. In 1958, architecture historian John Summerson defined "program" as "a description of the spatial dimensions, spatial relationships, and other physical conditions required for the convenient performance of specific functions."[1] And though Summerson's claim that program was a "source of unity" gives the term some kind of historical weight and suggests a plethora of earlier examples, program (along with its equally misaligned sidekicks, event and diagram) took on a new legitimizing function in the 1990s. Like other terms from the era (cf. globalization, flow), program became more of a term of art than anything else, a strategy that sought to (literally) capture the contemporary condition via highly articulated and yet increasingly vague architectural gestures. And in one specific instance, it was a strategy that had an tactical aspect as well. The short-term solution was to elide any difference between the architectural and the urban scale. Serendipity would become the very agent of this elision.

OMA, Campus Universitaire de Jussieu, Maquette (1992)

No project better encapsulates the aspirations of architectural program vis-à-vis the potential for serendipitous encounters like OMA's 1992 study for two libraries at the Campus Universitaire de Jussieu. Originally designed in the early 1960s by Édouard Albert, the Jussieu Campus was an attempt to accommodate the incoming flux of college-aged, post-World War II baby boomers by creating a new, centralized campus in the Fifth Arrondissement. It was a kind of extreme, neo-Hilberseimerian scheme, an ensemble of rectangular slabs, arranged perpendicularly, forming a gridded network on the banks of the Seine. The project was eventually abandoned and left uncompleted and would not reach any kind of apotheosis until the appearance of OMA's winning entry. The OMA scheme is, in one sense, a completion of Albert's plan. But it also introduced a different kind of architectural gesture, one that sought to introduce to "architecturalize" urban elements.

Those familiar with OMA's output will immediately recall the Jussieu project's signature contribution: a program expressed via a single floor plate weaving through the building's various levels and combining the two libraries into a single formal gesture—the humanities library spirals upward from the science library like a meandering ferroconcrete ribbon. Although it certainly anticipates many of the folded surfaces that would be de rigeur during the late 1990s and early 2000s, OMA's library at Jussieu is extremely convincing in its execution. One could very well imagine him or herself entering the library at grade, and slowly making their way up, via the gently sloping, sinewy trajectory, to the upper floors. It is a marvel of sectional complexity rivaling even Yale's ~~Paul Rudolph Hall~~ Art and Architecture Building or Hans Scharoun's Berliner Philharmonie. And when considering the latter alongside the Staatsbibliothek and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, we begin to notice that the kind of urban ensemble envisioned by Scharoun and Mies must not have been far from Koolhaas' mind. Yet as the maquettes and drawings make very clear, it is a radical break from that precedent. This is because here, the urban ensemble has been consumed by architecture. OMA's library becomes a kind of architectural vortex, sucking and gathering in urban strollers into its coriolis-inflected whirlwind of a plan.

Koolhaas admits as much. In the postscript to his widely-influential S, M, L, XL (1995), which is devoted solely to the Jussieu project, Koolhaas describes how the libraries take in their visitors, a reimagining of the Constructivist social condenser as purveyor of media and urbanity:

To reassert its credibility, we imagine its surface a pliable, a social magic carpet; we fold it to generate density, then from a "stacking" of platforms; minimal enclosure makes it a building—the culmination of the Jussieu network.

These surfaces—a vertical, intensified landscape—are then "urbanized": the specific elements of the libraries are reimplanted in the new public realm like buildings in a city ... The visitor becomes a Baudelairean flâneur, inspecting and being seduced by a world of books and information—by the urban scenario.[2]

The language is convincing and seductive, but more importantly, there is a sense that this is an architectural response in the most general sense. This folding of programs via a ribboned surface is not only applicable to library competitions. The only salient condition is the existence of a building within an urban context. This sense of infinite (or limitless) applicability makes architecture as a kind of global commodity. Koolhaas, again typically ahead of the argument (or at least clothing himself in the garb of a potential critic's jab), recognizes architecture's commodification as a kind of empowerment. Consider, for example, this exchange from 1997 between the late Masao Miyoshi and Koolhaas regarding the "flimsiness" of Jakarta and other Asian cities:

MM: What do you make of this trend toward buildings built not for permanence but just for a short time?

RK: I am very bad in trends. I understand almost nothing of the future, only of the present. I always resisted science fiction and found it deadly boring to read. But basically, I think that there will probably be a drastic separation between certain buildings that will become more permanent and others that are not going to be around for more than ten or fifteen or twenty years.

MM: Isn't that, again, part of the global economy business-that is, that buildings shouldn't last? Of course, the function of a building changes so fast ...

RK: Twenty years of involvement in architecture has made me very cynical about that: any program can exist in any building. So if churches are no longer necessary, you can also house offices in churches.

MM: Has it happened?

RK: Yes, in Europe it happens all the time. They divide churches and create lofts. It also happens in New York. So that is another kind of paradoxical undermining of the argument in architecture that one floor can only support one program. It's complete garbage.[3]

The statement seems like a post-hoc rationalization for projects like the Jussieu libraries. The language of mixed programming is right there along with grandiloquent observations about the state of contemporary urbanism. But more than anything, it is a lightly-veiled appraisal of architecture's importance in the global scene. There is the sense that architecture can do anything.

Like the architecture that it is supposed to enable, the word "serendipity" has made countless global crossings. The word has been uttered in various ports of call in faraway destinations, been inscribed in notes, letters, and manuscripts. Paintings, engravings, sketches exist, all depicting serendipitous moments. The word has been keyed, punched, and even typed into computers, and emailed into a kind of ætherized dataspace only to arrive in your inbox seconds later. Like the architecture that it is supposed to enable, the word "serendipity" carries unbridled agency. Any moment, as long as it is unplanned, and as long as it yields some kind of pleasurable result, is serendipitous.

Yet the word has its own history, and it begins with a fictionalized account of Serendip, the Arabic name for what is now known as Sri Lanka. The word traveled into the West via a tale written in 1557 by the Venetian printer and bookmaker Michele Tramezzino, who based it on Armeno Cristoforo's Peregrinaggio di Tre Giovani, Figliuoli del re di Serendippo. Tramezzino's text was a prose translation of Amir Khursro's Hasht-Bihisht ("Eight Paradises"), composed in 1302. Centuries later, in 1754, the word "serendipity" came into the English language in a letter written by Horace Walpole. Walpole writes, In the letter, he makes reference to the "silly fairy tale" called The Three Princes of Serendip. He relates a specific episode in the story about the Princes' "discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of." Walpole ends by imploring his reader, "Now do you understand serendipity?"

But before we stray too far afield from the point of this post, recall that Walpole was also an architect. The author of The Castle of Otranto (1764)—otherwise known as the first Gothic novel—also designed the sprawling revivalist estate at Strawberry Hill. But it seems that this story also has a serendipitous aftereffect of sorts. In 1818, the English critic and printer reviewed a collection of Walpole's letters to Horace Mann. And in discussing The Castle of Otranto, Croker observed:

He [Walpole] will probably be for ages remembered as the creator of a new style of domestic architecture …. Great discoveries are sometimes made from small circumstances, and the repair of a little citizen's box at the corner of two high roads revealed to Walpole the great secret of the combined beauty, convenience and grandeur which a revival of our old English architecture was capable of producing.[4]

Serendipity, as it turns out, had architectural origins. Yet does not architecture, a discipline that thrives on methodical arrangement of spaces, the careful attention to details, and understanding of the laws of physics, deny the very idea of serendipity? How can something that exerts as much requisite energy, planning and foresight as the design and construction of a building exemplify what Walpole would call "accidental sagacity"?

One wonders, then, if serendipity is one of those words that has been maligned or misunderstood when deployed in an architectural context? Another example that comes to mind, of course, is ludic. The term entered architecture discourse via Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga's well-known Homo Ludens (1938), a book that analyzes and conceptualizes how, when, and where play occurs. The last part of the this equation is, of course, the one most relevant to architecture and urbanism, and it is no surprise that many historians dealing with Situationist International often call attention to Huizinga's influence on Guy Debord. Through a curious twist of logic, one that eviscerates Situationism from its embrace of transcendent Marxism, situationist space is ludic space. And yet such observations ignore an important aspect of Huizinga's Homo Ludens when considered in an urban context: that play is not the opposite of planning, but that it is a kind of planning. Architecture historian Andrew Shanken makes this connection explicit:

More than a symbolic activity or form, planning has meaning unto itself ... [P]lanning is seen as an irreducible activity, something akin to what Huizinga called play. Huizinga stripped play of the cultural layers that obfuscated what he considered its "primordial quality," something essential lying "in a deep layer of our mental being." He saw play as an "inferior" reality, a "stepping out of 'real' life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own." Below the layers of metaphor and quite separate from the practical considerations of technique, planning is an activity people engage for its own sake, because it brings a form of pleasure. Planning fills the anxious void between present and future, the wonder of time's slow melt, with joy. For instance, in as much as utopia has been seen as a critique of the present, it is not a form of play-planning, as well, lending a raw humor to the precariousness of human consciousness: knowing that there is a future and not knowing its nature. Planning, like play, institutes an order. The space and time of play and the rules of conduct—what Huizinga called the playground—are marked off ahead of time.[5]

Equally important is Shanken's own observation about play as a kind of subterfuge with spatial ramifications. In his study of play and its relation to suburban sprawl (a study which looks to, of all things, the hit MTV show Jackass), Shanken observes how the term "inner suburb" calls attention to "a cultural geography of abandonment and savage play" that intends to "convey an activity in which social boundaries are tested and set."[6] Here too Huizinga becomes the point of reference. "Huizinga argued for an understanding of play as an amoral social function through which people negotiate ever-changing limits of behavior and culture."[7] Here, then, are indications that play is kind of very highly-organized activity. Play is as calculating as it is reactive. It is a term that suggests an oppositie to serendipity. Play is not accidental. Play is structured, orchestrated, and rehearsed. It is anything but improvisatory.

The careful, staged accidents and manipulations that Shanken sees in MTV's Jackass reminds us of one of the greatest, most sublime artistic statements regarding urban "serendipity." For Flirt (1994), American director Hal Hartley created a cinematic exercise that played with and tested the very limits of serendipity. The film has a seemingly simple tripartite structure: three episodes, each depicting a series of circumstances and encounters in a different city (New York, Berlin, and Tokyo). Each episode features the exact same dialogue, and only slightly varied circumstances. And in some circumstances, there are some truly serendipitous results. A male character utters dialogue in New York; the same words could be coming from a female character in Berlin. And as the film begins to end with its Tokyo set pieces, Flirt starts to become very aware of itself. Film historian Tom Gunning describes the effect in his introduction to Hartley's screenplay:

By the time we get to Tokyo, the rules have changed. The game is still going on, many of the pieces seem familiar, but new configurations take place. What is seen and what is spoken get rearranged, and as the invisible becomes tangible, the word takes on flesh. Hartley lets us in on this by staging a prologue of sorts, in which we see not only gestures but the director's hand as well the process of rehearsal and preparation within the world of professional performers. They players are introduced from the start as part of a grand design as we see them positioned and instructed. The incidents in Tokyo become more public, glimpsed by panicked passersby, even investigated by the police. This is a story with little privacy and with a constant awareness of being witnessed, through a doorway or around a corner.[8]

Echoing Walter Ruttmann's idea of a city symphony, here, the medium of film transforms urban serendipity into a kind of scripted, structured event. But more than anything else, serendipity presupposes a kind of self-consciousness. Stay with Flirt towards the end and watch carefully. Yes, that's Hal Hartley starring in his own film. Yes, those are film cans. And yes, in those cans are footage taken in New York and Berlin.

FADE OUT

(END REEL)

________________________

Notes

[1] John Summerson, "The Case for a Modern Theory of Architecture," reprinted in Joan Ockman, ed. Architecture Culture: 1943-1968, A Documentary Anthology (New York: Rizzoli, 1996), p. 223.

[2] Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, S,M,L,XL (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995), pp. 1310-1312, 1316-1317, 1323-1325.

[3] Rem Koolhaas and Mayao Miyoshi, "XL in Asia: A Dialogue between Rem Koolhaas and Mayao Miyashi", boundary 2, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Summer, 1997), p.5
[4] J.W. Croker, The Quarterly Review (1843), pp. 516-522, quoted in Robert King Merton and Elinor G. Barber, The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity: A Study in Sociological Semantics and the Sociology of Science (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 32.
[5] Andrew Shanken, "From Total War to Total Living: American Architecture and the Culture of Planning, 1939-194x", Unpublished Ph.D Dissertation, Princeton University (1999), p. 29.
[6] Shanken, "The Sublime 'Jackass': Transgression and Play in the Inner Suburbs," Places Vol. 19, No. 3 (2007), p. 54.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Tom Gunning, "Thrice Upon a Time: Flirting With a Film by Hal Hartley" in Hal Hartley, Flirt (Screenplay) (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), p. ix.