Connections

What does Llewellyn Park, New Jersey have to do with Bix Beiderbecke, the jazz trumpeter?   They are connected, if only through my web meandering yesterday. Maybe everything is connected at some level but I thought I might share with you the path of my meanderings as an example of what you can learn along the way.

I was looking at a book that is a chronology of automobile events. In the chapter on pre-automobile events, I found this entry:

1856
Alexander Jackson Davis designs Llewellyn Park, New Jersey, the first suburban subdivision in the United States. Planned in the romantic style with curving, non-gridiron streets.

That got me curious about both Llewellyn Park and Alexander Jackson Davis, which sent me off to Wikipedia. Today, Llewellyn Park is home to perhaps a few hundred extremely wealthy individuals. From the beginning, the community was planned to provide beautiful mountainside vistas to the residents. Estates varied in size from a couple of acres to ten acres, all nestled within the woods and highly-planned landscaping for a suburban Eden. The development was the brainchild of Llewellyn Solomon Haskell, a prominent New York City businessman who asked the architect, Alexander Jackson Pope to design his new suburban community. When it was built, Llewellyn Park was as close to downtown Manhattan as was Central Park. Thomas Edison built his palatial estate, Glenmont, in Llewellyn Park.

Glenmont, Edison's Estate

U.S Customs House, New York City

Not to belabor Llewellyn, I started to look at what else Alexander Jackson Davis had designed. Davis was one of the preeminent architects of the first half of the 19th century. He was famous for both his Greek Revival designs (like the New York Custom's House) and his Italianate homes.  One of those homes was the Blandwood Mansion in Greensboro, North Carolina - within an hour of my home. The Blandwood Mansion was the home of Governor John Motley Morehead. The home was originally constructed in 1795 but Morehead had the house redesigned by Davis in 1844 in the Italianate style. Davis had never been to Italy but the pictures he saw inspired him to design many grand homes in the style. Blandwood was the furthest south of all of Davis's designs.

Blandwood Mansion

Governor Morehead's family lived in the mansion until around 1900. in 1907, Blandwood was sold to Col. William H. Osborne to be the location of the North Carolina franchise of the Keeley Institute.  The Keeley Institute was based in Dwight, Illinois.

The Keeley Institute was probably the first U.S. institution to treat alcohol and drug addiction as a disease, rather than a moral failing. The founders of the Institute were Leslie E. Keeley, a doctor in Dwight, John R. Oughton, a local druggist, and a Fargo, N.D. merchant named Curtis Judd. The treatment they devised was an injectable concoction that they termed "bi-chlorides of gold".

The first Keeley Institute was opened in Dwight, Ill in 1879 with the slogan, "Drunkenness is a disease and I can cure it." The treatment which consisted of four injections a day plus other remedies plus rest became known as the "Keeley Cure". The Cure turned out to be a huge moneymaker for Dr. Keeley and his compatriots. They built a complex of buildings consisting of offices, laboratories, and a hotel to house their patients. By sheer coincidence, I had come across  a Detroit Photographic Company image of the Keeley office building a while back in Dwight - a magnificent Richardsonian structure with an enormous portal - taken sometime before 1902 when the building complex burned in a fire.

Keeley Institute Office circa 1902

The buildings were rebuilt and the facade of the office building was reused - albeit in a heavily modified design. The Keeley Institute itself stayed in operation until 1965. The treatments were controversial as to their effectiveness but at least they treated alcoholism as a disease. The Institute was sort of the Betty Ford Center of its day. Many thousands of people passed through its portals including many celebrities.

Bix Beiderbecke

And finally, this brings us to Bix Beiderbecke, the young jazz trumpeter of the 1920s who played in Paul Whitman's Orchestra. Beiderbecke was never healthy but seemingly he was bent on self destruction through drug and alcohol abuse. In 1929, when he was only in his mid-20s, he went to Dwight to the Keeley Institute to dry out. He was there a month and seemed in good shape when he left. But the Depression left him without much work in his native Midwest and he returned to New York City with all of its temptations. He died of his alcohol addiction in 1931 at the age of 28 .

And so that is how Llewellyn Park is connected to Bix Beiderbecke. It is a connection built on links between seemingly-unrelated subjects. Yet, the world is connected through just such random links. I love the internet but I sometimes hate it when I get off on one of these tangents. Nonetheless, I learned a lot for just one day.  May you be so blessed (or cursed).

Technology and the City: For Better and For Worse

Roosevelt Center
Greenbelt, MD

The city was created by technology. Technology has also made the city a poorer place to live. This cycle of creation and degradation has gone on since people started building their mud and straw huts close together. The by-products of cohabitation, whether sewage or air pollution or even epidemic diseases, has been the price one paid for living close to markets or places of work.

This pattern was reinforced for me by a film I happened upon entitled simply The City. The  film is a documentary created for the 1939 New York World's Fair City of Tomorrow which was part of the Futurama exhibit.  The film was the brainchild of Catherine Bauer Wurster who was the leading member of a small group of idealists known as "The Housers" who were committed to improving housing for low-income families. The New York architect, Robert D. Kohn, shared her interest in low-income housing and commissioned the documentary.

The film focused much of its attention on the planned community of Greenbelt, Maryland which was constructed under Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal as a model community. The idea was to build an ideal community near Washington, D.C. to relieve a severe housing shortage in the area of the Capital which existed at that time.  Two other cities were also planned and built - Greendale, Wisconsin (near Milwaukee) and Greenhills, Ohio (near Cincinnati).

The film was originally written by FDR's filmmaker, Pare Lorentz, but was re-scripted by the noted architectural critic and advocate of planned suburban communities, Lewis Mumford. Interestingly, the documentary's music was the first commissioned film score for composer Aaron Copeland and had largely been forgotten until this film was rediscovered in the archives a few years ago.

When I watched the film (which is available on YouTube in four parts), I was struck by how many of the problems we face today were already there in 1938: traffic congestion, over-crowding, air pollution, and terrible housing for low-income people. The model city of Greenbelt, MD looks like a little utopia compared to the squalor of the mill towns and the congestion of New York City. In many ways, however, the future longed for in the film has come to pass. Many of us live in nicely laid out suburban communities with good roads, schools, housing, and shopping. Yet many of the problems are still with us or have even grown worse over time. Despite our advancing technology, the city remains challenged to perpetually come up with new - mostly technical - solutions.

Quite coincidentally, the latest special issue of Scientific American is about the future of cities.  Must be something in the air about cities lately. I keep coming across all these connections. In any event, the 1939 documentary is linked below. If you want a better view, click through to the YouTube site and watch the video.

Even Subways Can Be Beautiful

I came across a couple of items recently that make me realize that even the mundane can be beautiful.  The first is a photo from the Library of Congress's Detroit Photographic Company archives showing a 28th Street subway station in New York City when it was being newly constructed in 1904.  The tile work in the domed ceiling and the woodwork in the ticket booth are beautiful.

28th Street Station, New York City Subway, 1904
Click on photo to enlarge

The second was a more recent video made by Sarah Klein and Tom Mason, two filmmakers at Redglass. They describe the film as a visual poem of the experience of emerging from the subway into a new environment above.  This film was taken   in New York City and is set to music by Erik Satie.


Sub City New York from sarah klein on Vimeo.

[Thanks to BrainPickings for the video link].

Shorpy: Crowd-Sourced History

New Amsterdam Theater, New York City,
circa 1905, from www.shorpy.com
http://www.shorpy.com/node/9430

A couple of days ago, I had the pleasure of coming across the website Shorpy.com.  I'll let you read on the site where the name came from.  The webmaster (Dave - not Shorpy) has restored hundreds of old photos from the Library of Congress, particularly the Detroit Publishing Company collections.

The Detroit Publishing Company's major business was photochromic post cards.  These were colorized versions of black-and-white images that were produced before color film became commercially viable.  Post cards became the rage in the early years of the 20th century because Congress had passed the Private Mailing Card Act in 1898 which allowed post cards to be mailed for a penny (as compared to the standard rate of two cents for letters).  The post card collecting frenzy lasted through World War I but had run its course by the early '20s.  The Detroit Publishing Company declared bankruptcy in 1924 and was liquidated in 1932.  The good news was that through the generous donations of the Edison Institute and the Colorado Historical Society, tens of thousands of the company's original 8x10 glass-plate negatives ended up at the Library of Congress where they have been digitized and put online.

Dave (aka, Shorpy) spends hours cleaning up the scanned high-resolution, glass plate negatives using Photoshop and publishes the "hi-def" images on his website for your viewing pleasure.  And indeed, it is a pleasure. The clarity of these restored images is breathtaking.  It is hard to overstate the impact of the clarity of the photographs.  If you are so inclined, you can even purchase prints of your favorite images from the website.

Like everyone who comes to this website, the first thing that caught my attention was the clarity and size of the images.  But the website - in a stroke of "social networking" genius - allows viewers to post comments about the images.  As you might expect, quite a few comments simply express appreciation.  But more than a few offer great followup detail on the images, identifying buildings, automobiles, clothing styles, business history, and personal details.  The site essentially crowd-sources history.  The fact that viewers take the trouble to go out and find these details is itself quite amazing.

Shorpy is, of course, not the only website that allows crowd-sourced history.  The Internet Archives is another great place to see and comment on old films, books, and images.  Google Books lets users post reviews of out-of-print volumes. These sites (and others) seem to me to be a new way to teach history in a very interactive format. Think of what might happen if kids were given assignments to link to these images and research and post additional details.  The Library of Congress itself is missing out on a significant opportunity by not providing a place for comments as Shorpy and others have done.

This all works, of course, where there is something visual to share (even if that visual material is original text).  Photography was invented just before the Civil War hence photo archives of older events are just not possible.  But there are thousands of high-quality engravings in old books accessible through Google Books and the other websites and many old documents still exist and could be easily scanned.  The web offers a truly unique opportunity to mine our collective knowledge base and invites the all-important aspect of deeper engagement by sharing.

My hat is off to Shorpy.  What a great way to build and share enthusiasm for the past.

Post script:  The images from the Detroit Publishing Company are free for use at the Library of Congress website.  The LOC's original high-resolution scanned images are often faded and have blemishes and hence need the kind of treatment that Shorpy provides to achieve the same visual impact.

The Century of Progress: Chicago, 1933

A couple of days ago, I was looking for something on my bookshelves when I got waylaid by a couple of books I had inherited from my Dad when he passed away a couple of years ago.  The first book was entitled, "The Official Pictures of A Century of Progress Exposition, Chicago 1933."  The book was the glossy souvenir book offered at the Exposition for those "take home" memories.  The second, a book of the same title, was a series of watercolor paintings of scenes from the Exposition.

My father visited the Exposition when he was eleven-years old - and he never forgot it.  The Century of Progress was a marvelous display of the latest in technology and architecture.  Just 40 years earlier, Chicago had hosted the World's Columbian Exposition, the so-called White City.  The 1933 Exposition was deliberately designed to be the opposite of the White City.  The architecture of the buildings was entirely modern rather than classical.  The buildings were painted in vibrant colors rather than a monochrome white, engendering the name "The Rainbow City".  The Exposition intended to look forward, not back. The motto of the fair, "Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms", was intended to be uplifting, even if today it carries more Orwellian connotations.

Despite the efforts to differentiate it, the 1933 Century of Progress had a lot in common with its earlier predecessor. Both expositions were held in the middle of a severe economic depression.  Both attempted to put on a brave face and look past the tough times.  Both were mostly compendiums of artifacts displaying what mankind had created. Both featured a major ride to awe the visitors (the Ferris Wheel in 1893 and the Sky Ride in 1933).  Both were built on the Lake Michigan shoreline and featured a Midway for amusement to complement the educational displays.  Most of all, both were proud proclamations by the City of Chicago showing that it was the leading industrial city in America.

Given that only 40 years had elapsed between the two expositions, many people could certainly have attended both.  But the differences between those two fairs were astounding. In 1893, automobiles were only in their earliest infancy.  By 1933, some of the largest pavilions were built by GM, Ford, and Chrysler.  In 1893, electricity had barely begun to be available in most homes and businesses.  By 1933, it was becoming ubiquitous.  The list goes on to include airplanes, radio, talking motion pictures, and the first experiments in television. There were clearly more technology changes in the 40 years between 1893 and 1933 than there were in the next 40 years from 1933 to 1973.

When I look at the photos of both of these past expositions, I lament how little of them remains.  Like the White City, the Rainbow City of 1933 - 1934 was quickly torn down after The Century of Progress Exposition was finished. Maybe that is as it should be.  Having visited Epcot at Disney World many times over the years, the excitement of the exhibitions begins to fade with repetition. I would guess that much of what was created for the 1933 Exposition was eventually destroyed.  That's a pity given the number of museum-quality displays and diorama that were built for the Exposition.

In 1933, the World's Fair was called The Century of Progress. In 2010, the World's Fair in Shanghai is called Expo 2010 - but it could easily be called The Century of Progress.  So far, every year marks a century of advancement. Given our current world problems, let's hope it stays that way.

Images:

First two are photos of my book jackets.
Second two from Wikipedia

Further Exploration:

Internet Archive film: Wings of a Century (1933). This is a 13 minute silent film but gives a good feeling for the Exposition.
University of Illinois at Chicago Photo Archive. About 1400 still shots taken at the Expostion.

Building a Castle the Old Fashion Way: By Hand

How would you go about building a 13th Century castle even if you had a complete set of  plans?  Now, how would you do it if you had to leave all your modern technology back in the construction yard and use only the tools and techniques that were available to craftsmen of that period?  I'm not sure I would have been up to the task - even with modern equipment.  I know I would not take on the task without modern tools.  But two groups on two continents are doing just that.

The first project (and the parent for the second) is called Guédelon.  Back in the late 90s, a woman in this region southwest of Paris got the idea that she could kill two birds with one stone. (Is that a 13th Century expression or maybe it's Shakespeare?)  The idea was to put local people to work rather than having to depend on the spotty support for the region coming from the French government.  The other was to solve a historical puzzle:  How were these incredible structures built?

You might think that no one would invest in such a foolhardy idea... but you would be wrong. In fact, Maryline Martin, the French woman (who worked for a time at Pier 1)  sold her idea to local businessman, Michel Guyot, who helped find the money to buy land and begin the process of building a castle from scratch.  The project now employs 67 people and has an annual budget of $3.25 million.  The plan was to have the project become at least partially self-funding through tourist admissions.  The castle now has over 300,000 visitors a year.

I love this idea.  What a win-win.  The New York Times had an article last Sunday by Steven Erlanger in which he described some of the technology used for the construction:

The walls are now high enough that stones are raised using a pulley system driven by a man walking in a large wooden wheel, like a hamster on a treadmill.  Plans call for a new wheel soon in which two men can walk.

The castle will be under construction for 15 or 20 more years.  Visitors can talk to the stone masons, carpenters, and other craftsmen employed on the project.  (Speaking French would help the dialogue, of course).

If a trip to France seems out of reach at the moment, there is still hope.  The Guédelon founders decided to do it again... in Arkansas!  A second medieval castle is underway about 60 miles south of Branson, MO, just over the Arkansas state line.  The NY Times had an article on that project as well in Sunday's Travel section.  So far, the working name for this new castle is the Ozark Medieval Fortress. It too caters to visitors and is a great place for a historical and family-fun visit.  Don't worry, the construction won't be done any time soon. Completion is scheduled for around 2030.  You can speak with the craftsmen here as well.  I think they speak English.

Still, the French project just has to be more authentic.  I mean, you can go down the road just a piece and visit the real deal - a thousand-year old castle named Saint Fargeau.

But as grand as that chateau is to see, it is not under construction.  Guédelon serves a very useful purpose, not only for lovers of all things medieval, but also for real historians of technology and architecture who still don't know all the techniques used to build these old castles.

I'm sure you can get a nice glass of wine in the Visitor's Cafe (at least at the one in France).

Catalan Vaults: An Old Technology Gone Green

Image via Wikipedia

Vaulted ceilings have been with us for millennia. The Sumerians and Egyptians were building vaulted ceilings more than five thousand years ago. Vaulting continued to develop over the course of architectural history and now dozens of vault forms exist.  Some time ago, I wrote a couple of different posts (here and here) about one of the most famous of the domes built in the early Renaissance, Brunelleschi's Duomo in Florence.  This dome has fascinated architects for centuries, not only for its size and beauty, but because it was built without "centering", the temporary scaffolding usually used to hold the weight of an arch or dome while the structure is under construction.

I love architecture and architectural technology.  Who hasn't been left standing in awe seeing a 12th Century Gothic cathedral or looking at a Roman aqueduct?   So I was pleased to see that the August issue of Smithsonian Magazine has an article on the Catalan Vault. The article highlights MIT professor, John Ochsendorf's design of the  Mapungunbwe National Park Interpretive Center in South Africa (pictured below).

Oschendorf designed the building to be made of locally-produced materials that don't depend on concrete. Hence, the project significantly reduced the energy consumption that would have otherwise been used to make concrete for the building. The building was honored as the World Building of the Year for 2009 at the World Architectural Festival held in Barcelona. 

How strong is a Catalan Vault?  Check out this miniature demo version that Ochendorf built at MIT.

The bricks are only an inch thick and held together by Plaster of Paris mortar.  It took a weekend to build this model.  And like Brunelleshi's Duomo, these vaults need no centering to build them.  Pretty cool.

Benjamin Henry Latrobe

PBS broadcast a program last night about Benjamin Henry Latrobe, America's first architect.  Check your local listings to see if it is going to be rebroadcast in your area.  It is worth watching.

Latrobe was not only America's first architect but in many ways, one of the most influential.  Latrobe designed the central part of the Capitol Building in Washington, DC after an earlier design by amateur architect William Thornton proved to be an unbuildable disaster.  Latrobe designed and built the waterworks in Philadelphia, the Baltimore Basilica, the Decatur House in Washington, the Washington Navy Yard, the Bank of Pennsylvania, both porticos on the White House, and numerous private homes.  He brought neoclassical architecture to the United States when he emigrated here from England in 1795.  Latrobe was in the process of designing a new waterworks for New Orleans when he contracted yellow fever and died there in 1820.

Given these impressive accomplishments, you might think that Latrobe would have been wealthy.  In fact, he went through multiple bankruptcies (the first in England which is probably why he emigrated) and he died a virtual pauper and was buried in an unmarked grave.  Latrobe seems to have been a technical genius and a business catastrophe.  In his defense, many of his business problems were because his clients (including the U.S. government) stiffed him.  But the pattern repeated itself often enough that it makes you wonder about his skills to advance his own endeavors.  Thomas Jefferson was a champion of Latrobe, perhaps because they were kindred spirits in their love of architecture. But even Jefferson let Latrobe take the fall when Congress complained that the marble columns in the House chamber were too expensive.  The columns were there at Jefferson's suggestion and Jefferson never owned up to them.

That Latrobe really was an accomplished architect can best be seen in the Baltimore Basilica.  The Archbishop, John Carroll hired Latrobe and defended Latrobe's designs again and again against naysayers.  The result was one of the most beautiful buildings in America.

Maybe the lesson of Latrobe's life is the necessity of strong champions to support a technical genius.  How different Washington, DC might look if Latrobe's vision had not been undermined, not only by rivals and short-sighted individuals, but by his own inability to promote his ideas.

Interchangeability

I am reading Nature's Metropolis by William Cronon (Norton, 1991).  The central thesis of the book is that cities like Chicago are shaped by their outlying economies of farming, lumbering, and livestock and, in turn, the cities shape those outlying economies.  It is a symbiotic relationship in which a city is not possible without the country around it or vice versa.  But the book also brought up a related topic which intrigues me: interchangeability.  We live in a world where interchangeability is so deeply ingrained in our culture that we don't even think about it.  Need an oil change?  Any service station will have a filter that fits your engine.  Need to replace a light bulb?  Every bulb is designed to fit a standard socket.  What amazes us now are things that are not interchangeable.  These are almost by definition hand-crafted and very expensive.

You might say that interchangeability dates all the way back to Johannes Gutenberg and his invention of moveable type.  Any letter could, after all, be put in any position along a line of type.  But the extension of that idea to other devices dates back more to 18th century France.  A French artillery officer with the wonderful name of Lieutenant General Jean Baptiste Vaquette de Gribeauval came up with the idea of standardizing all of the parts in the French Army's canon inventory.  His ideas were not fully implemented, but another Frenchman, Honore Blanc, actually began mass-producing muskets from interchangeable parts in 1790.  Thomas Jefferson met Blanc while Jefferson was the United States Ambassador to the French Court.  He communicated the idea back to the War Department because it would allow the production of a large quantity of weapons without having to have a large number of skilled gunsmiths.  America just didn't have that many skilled craftsmen to meet the demand for a large order.

About this same time, Eli Whitney (yes, the same Eli Whitney of cotton gin fame) started to get interested in making rifles for the U.S. Government.  It seemed a more lucrative business than the cotton gin which had more or less been stolen from him by patent pirates.  Whitney came to Congress with a load of parts which he claimed were made identically and assembled rifles by randomly selecting parts from different barrels.  The Congress was duly impressed and placed an order which Whitney took eight years to complete.  The trouble was, Whitney's so-called interchangeable parts had all been carefully filed by skilled craftsmen to make them fit together but they were not truly produced to interchangeable tolerances.  Others got into the game and the first truly interchangeable device built in America was a clock made by Eli Terry in 1816 from mass-produced wooden parts.  There were others who rightfully deserve the credit for the first firearm made from interchangeable metal parts including John Hall and Simeon North.

But my thoughts when reading Cronon's book were not about guns.  Interchangeability in the world of Chicago came in two other major forms.  The first was making wheat interchangeable.  In the early days of farming, every farmer sent his grain to market in sacks and those sacks were transported all the way from the Midwestern prairies via Chicago to New York or other eastern destinations without ever leaving their burlap.  A farmer could have gone to the final destination and gotten his exact wheat back if he had wanted to do so.  The revolution that was invented in Chicago was interchangeable wheat that was based on grading all wheat to certain standards.  Now, wheat from different farmers could be mixed together at a grain elevator without compromising the value of the grain.  Number 1 Winter Wheat was supposedly the same no matter what farm produced it.  Grain could now be shipped in bulk much more quickly and efficiently by automated equipment like grain elevators and automated loading and unloading equipment.  It was no longer necessary to haul each sack of grain on and off intermediate modes of transportation (such as wagons, railroad cars, and ships).  This seemingly small change not only made the physical processes work better but it gave rise to the commodity markets of the Chicago Board of Trade.  It really was revolutionary.  The volume of business skyrocketed.

A second example that came out of the book was standardized lumber dimensions.  With the advent of lumber cut to dimensions such as 2 inches by 4 inches or 2 inches by 8 inches, building could now be put together almost like Erector Sets in what became known as balloon-frame construction (because the frame was so light compared to older post-and-beam construction).  Standardization brings efficiency and efficiency brings economy.  We could never afford all the modern conveniences that make up our world were it not for this pervasive idea of interchangeability.  It is everywhere, not just machines.  As long as something functions within a certain defined set of parameters, it can be substituted for something else that fits the same parameter space.  If two things are not interchangeable, you know there is at least one parameter (which might even be an esthetic one) which is not the same.

Interchangeability was the power that allowed Gutenberg to revolutionize printing.  Interchangeability remains one of the most powerful ideas in our modern world.

Women in the White City

I was researching a story when I came across a fascinating entry related to the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. The Exposition was held in Chicago to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of America. This is one of those events that I wish I had been around to see in person. I would have gladly joined the 28 million other visitors who came to the Exposition during its six-month run from May to October of 1893. The Exposition was a World's Fair that was meant to celebrate the achievements of mankind since the days of Columbus. It was called The White City because of the white marble-like facade of its so-called Great Buildings. At over 600 acres, the Exposition was larger than Disney World's Magic Kingdom, Hollywood Studios, and Epcot combined.


The Great Buildings were designed by a Who's Who of the best male architects in America. All of the buildings, that is, but one. Everything about the Women's Building was left to the Board of Lady Managers who planned, built, and selected all of the exhibitions. Because there were so few women architects at the time, the Board held a competition to identify a woman architect to design the building.

Sophia Hayden (later Bennett), the first female architect to graduate from MIT (in 1890), won the honor. She was 23 years old at the time. She designed a graceful Italian Renaissance villa which was very reminiscent of her thesis project at MIT.

When she won the award in 1891, she was employed as a drawing teacher in the Boston schools because no architectural firm would hire a woman. She was paid approximately a thousand dollars for her design, one tenth the fee paid to male architects.

Her design was hailed for its fine lines but it was also assailed as being obviously the work of a woman. Despite her success with the Women's Building, she retired from architecture following the Exposition as she still could not find suitable employment. She married and lived a quiet life in Massachusetts, dying in 1953.



The Women's Building was instrumental in advancing women's rights on many fronts including women's suffrage. All of the exhibits were deliberately designed by the Board to be non-competitive, although women did compete with men working in their fields in other buildings at the Exposition. The Women's Building was filled with examples of women's work in every field imaginable, selected from submissions from all over the globe. It was certainly the most graphic example up until that time of women capably matching every aspect of the achievements of their male counterparts.

I wonder what might have become of Sophia Hayden had she been recognized as she surely deserved? Times are somewhat better today for women but there is still much more room for women to gain equality with men.

Postscript: The Women's Building, like virtually all of the buildings at the Exposition, was torn down shortly after closing day. The only building to remain in its original location is the Palace of Fine Arts which is now the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry.

Can You Teach Innovation?

[Picture: Thomas Telford's Pontcysyllte Aqueduct from Wikipedia]

I follow a number of blogs and newsfeeds about innovation. Most of these stories lament that if business was only more innovative we would be out of the economic woods. I just saw such a lecture given by Tim Brown of IDEO to MIT's Sloan School of Business that makes the case for "design innovation". It's an interesting talk but I have my doubts it is the answer. Bookstore shelves creak under the load of business titles on the subject of innovation. Roundtables and blue-ribbon panels on innovation are convened at national conferences. The audience is busily planning new ways to come up with the next spontaneous innovation.

Somehow, the whole concept of "teaching innovation" by recipe seems unlikely to produce much real change. It seems too much in the realm of theory and not enough in the reality of practice. I thought about how I learn something new. Reading tops my list if I want background information. For a specific skill, structured lessons followed by repetitive practice usually work well. Music lessons come to mind. Being a music student is the simplest form of apprenticeship, which also works well for learning more complex skills such as auto mechanics or brain surgery. Almost all complex skills demand an apprenticeship. Is this true for innovators? Do you learn how to innovate by being an Apprentice Innovator? I think so.

I know innovation when I see it... and so do most people. So you want to learn how to innovate? Find someone to work for who is really skilled at it. Do your job but watch the innovator closely. Being under the wing of an expert innovator can help you learn how to deal with challenging problems. They can help you learn how to build the sponsorship that is critical to getting around the bureaucratic roadblocks that are always present. And perhaps most importantly, they can challenge you to stretch beyond your self-imposed limits to reach what you really are capable of doing.

The innovators of history were talented, thick-skinned, and they had a knack for developing sponsors, They had a burning desire to make their marks. Often, they would start in one field where they learned by trial-and-error in a small arena and then moved on to the field where they made their name. Most were hands-on from a very young age, learning the fundamentals of their craft whether technical or business. Formal education played a smaller part in their ultimate success than did energy and tenacity. The people we think of as today's icons of innovation (Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Larry Page to name but a few) fit the description perfectly.

Here's an historical example I just came across. Thomas Telford (1757 - 1834) was one of the most innovative civil engineers in the history of Great Britain. He was a great civil engineer before they even had schools for civil engineers. Telford was a Scot raised in a very poor family. At 14, he was apprenticed (hands on) to a stonemason in Edinburgh. He was good at it. When he was 25 (notice he spent nine years learning his basic craft), he moved to London to seek his fortune. He gradually moved from being a stonemason to being responsible for the specifications, and the overall control for his projects. He was gradually moving from stonemason to being an on-the-job-trained architect. When Telford was 30, he met Sir William Pulteney, a member of aristocracy and a Member of Parliament. Pulteney recognized Telford's talent and became his sponsor, opening the door for Telford to take on increasingly more responsible projects for local governments. Because of that sponsorship, Telford started work on the Ellesmere Canal at age 35. Even at this stage, Telford was under the tutelage of a more senior and experienced civil engineer named William Jessop. Jessop taught Telford all he knew about canal building and supported Telford's innovative design concepts. Telford built a thousand foot long canal aqueduct 126 feet above the Dee River valley. The Pontcysylte (the spelling is Welsh) Aqueduct is still operational today, two hundred years after it was built. Telford had previously built a more modest aqueduct using similar design principles so he was confident that his larger design would work. Telford went on to a long and very successful career of building roads, canals, and bridges throughout the British Isles. When he died, he was buried in Westminster Abbey.

[The photo is of the Menai Suspension Bridge built by Telford in 1826. The bridge still carries automobile traffic.]



My point here is that Telford succeeded because he had developed a natural talent, he was ambitious, and he had a series of mentors and sponsors who opened doors for him. As far as I know, he didn't read books or go to conferences on how to innovate. The few books that were available to him talked about the designs that had been done before, even back to antiquity. More importantly, he could go see real bridges and canals to learn from what others had done.

Maybe the conferences and business books can work and I am just a curmudgeon. But I feel more hopeful when I see hands-on apprenticeship programs where real-world problems are being tackled. Start-up ventures and new product programs teach in ways no amount of reading can replace. Sometimes these ventures fail but this can be the greatest learning experience of all. A good mentor or sponsor is there to make sure you take what you learned and 'get back on the bike'. In the end, the great innovators would not be bounded by the limitations of their current situations. They were willing to head out on their own when it was the best way they could pursue their dreams.

We live in very different times than did Thomas Telford. I am not suggesting that everybody ditch their current company and try to start a new venture. Not that many people in Telford's day left the security of their situations. But enough did to make the difference. Telford was not reckless or arrogant. He got where he did through a series of incremental, hands-on steps. And the result is still some of the most innovative engineering of his day...and even ours.

[Bonus: If you want to see how Telford actually built the aqueduct, check out this terrific 3D computer animation of it here.]

Michigan Central Station

UPDATE, March 6, 2010:  The New York Times today has another article with some beautiful photographs of the station.  Debate continues about the fate of this historic building which is slated for the wrecking ball if no one comes up with an alternate use. I found it interesting that the station has over 15,000 fans on some Facebook pages. I hope it survives.

I literally stumbled upon (via Stumble) some achingly beautiful photography by Kevin Bauman. The image below is one of his photos of the Michigan Central Railroad station in downtown Detroit. You can see others at the Behance Network and it is well worth a visit.



The images made me curious about this grand old railroad station. Wikipedia has a nice write-up on it here. The station was built in 1913 by the same architectural firms that built Grand Central Terminal in New York City. The main waiting area was designed to replicate a Roman bath house with grand ceilings and walls of marble. It was built some distance from the (then) Detroit downtown to encourage building out to meet the station. Two things happened to defeat those plans. First, the station was built for an era when passengers came and left the station by trolley and interurban electric cars. The station had very limited parking for automobiles. Second, Detroit expanded northward and not towards the station, leaving it marooned in the less trafficked part of the city.

Railroad passenger trains are virtually gone now except in the Northeast Corridor. The last Amtrak train left the Michigan Central Station on January 6, 1988 and the building was closed that same afternoon. During the 1990's, the station was heavily vandalized and was gutted by thieves looking for materials to sell. It is now owned by the same company that owns Detroit's Ambassador Bridge. Virtually every plan to restore the station has fallen through and just within the last month, the Detroit City Council asked for emergency funds of $3.6 million, not to preserve the building but to tear the old station down (even though it was placed on the National Historic Building registry in 1975). A gentleman in Detroit sued the city to block the demolition of the building and that is where things stand at the moment.

I can't help but think of the contrast between the fate of this beautiful old station and the busy and prosperous Grand Central Station. The comparison is as stark as the comparison between Detroit and New York City. Detroit was built by the automobile. Ford's town. General Motors and Chrysler, too. With all the terrible automotive news of late, a betting person probably wouldn't put much money on the revival of the auto industry...or Detroit.

Another interesting look at the station just before it started to go downhill can be seen on this YouTube video taken in 1987. It gives you some idea of how beautiful the station was even late in its active life.



Time passes and technology changes. The architecture that served that technology passes with it. Still, there is beauty in the past and perhaps a way will yet be found to save the old station. We can hope.

George M. Pullman: Force for Progress or Corporate Despot?

And the sons of Pullman porters, and the sons of engineers,
Ride their fathers' magic carpet made of steel...
- Steve Goodman

He was buried at night in a reinforced crypt with tons of concrete poured on top of his casket to protect it from desecration by those who hated him. He was the American idyll, the self-made man. In his life, he changed the way people traveled, he built his vision of a planned community, and he was the center of one of the most bitter labor struggles of his era. His name was George Mortimer Pullman.

Pullman’s name has become eponymous with three things: railroad sleeping-cars, the village he created to house his factory workers outside of Chicago, and the bitter labor strike of 1894.

George Pullman was born in western New York in1831. He left school when he was 14 and worked for a time in his brother’s cabinet-making business. He was an ambitious kid with a natural talent for business. While still in New York, his father, a builder, had contracted to move local buildings that were in the way of a project to widen the Erie Canal. When his father died unexpectedly, George took over the contracts and successfully completed the work. He took those building-moving skills with him to Chicago. The young city was built on a low-lying swamp. Entire blocks needed to be raised to afford better drainage and sewer function and Pullman was one of the men who was contracted to raise the buildings and streets. While on an early train trip, he experienced the primitive conditions on early railroad cars which had only rough bunks for sleeping. In his own discomfort, he saw opportunity. He began building a better sleeping-car but the Civil War interrupted his early plans as all available manufacturing resources were turned to the war effort.


Pullman went to the Colorado gold fields during the Civil War. After raising capital in a dozen business ventures related to the mining industry, Pullman returned to Chicago and began building the most luxurious sleeping-cars of his day. His cars cost four times what a normal passenger-car cost. They made long, grueling railroad trips not only tolerable but comfortable. Pullman slowly signed up one railroad after another to put his sleeping-cars in their passenger trains. But unlike other car manufacturers, Pullman never sold his cars to the railroads, he leased them and managed them directly. He was the first to hire special sleeping car porters to make up the beds at night. These Pullman Porters were almost always black men from the south. While he paid them lower wages than he would have had to pay to whites, his wages were much better than most blacks could earn in other occupations. By leasing the cars, he insured not only the quality of the service (and hence repeat customers) but he also was able to move his cars between railroads to balance changes in seasonal demand.


In the early 1880’s with his business needing new and enlarged manufacturing facilities, Pullman decided to build a huge new factory complex outside of Chicago. To optimize the output of his workers, he envisioned an ideal community with everything that his workers would need. It would also be free of the vices found in other cities. He worked with a young architect, Solon Spencer Beman, and a landscape architect, Nathan F. Barrett, to design his planned community. It was named, naturally enough, Pullman, Illinois. Pullman never considered anything more than a prudent business investment. It was expected to return a profit and increase the productivity of his workers. While the town looked wonderful and visitors marveled at the architecture, the workers themselves grew to hate it. They had no say in the administration of their town, the rents were high, and any discussions of organizing labor was severely repressed.

The Panic of 1893 was brought on by speculation and overbuilding of railroads. As railroads failed, a recession set in and orders for Pullman cars plummeted. In 1894, Pullman laid off two-thirds of his workforce and cut the salaries of the remainder by 25 percent. He didn’t, however, reduce his rents or the costs of food and other necessities in the town of Pullman. When his employees appealed to him to either cut the rents or reinstate their wages, he refused to negotiate. Many of his workers were getting paychecks, after withholding for rent, of only a few pennies to feed their families.

Eugene V. Debs had been organizing the American Railway Union to bring together the less-skilled workers of the nation’s railroads (the skilled workers formed brotherhoods which did not participate in the subsequent strike actions). The ARU organized the Pullman workers and George Pullman immediately closed his doors and laid off even those workers who did not join the union. Pullman was repeatedly asked to go to arbitration to settle the strike but he steadfastly refused. The strike eventually disrupted the U.S. Mail service which was primarily carried by train. Because the ARU had members nation-wide and because Chicago was the major rail hub, the strike started to impact rail service across the country. The disruption of the mail gave President Grover Cleveland an excuse to send in Federal troops to break the strike. A dozen strikers were killed in the battles that followed and millions of dollars were lost in damages to buildings and property. But the strike was broken, as was the union. Debs was arrested, convicted and spent six months in prison.

George Pullman became one of the most hated faces of the Gilded Age. He died three years later in 1897 of a heart attack. It was the residual hostility from the Pullman Strike that resulted in his burial at night to protect his body from desecration.

The deep unrest between labor and capital was not resolved by the Pullman Strike. It seems to me that the story essentially repeated itself with Henry Ford who first raised his workers up with the five dollar day and then tried to ultimately deny them a decent living which lead to the violent River Rouge Strikes of 1937. But at least one good thing came out of the Pullman Strikes and other labor unrest of that period. Labor Day was created as a national holiday in June of 1894 both to commemorate the working class of the country and to dampen the hostilities between labor and capital.

George Pullman was an entrepreneur, a visionary thinker, and a social experimenter. Pullman was not, however, someone who could see that it was in his best interest and the interest of his company to arbitrate his differences with his workforce. His intractable position cost many people, himself included, dearly.

Post Script: Following his death, the courts forced the Pullman Company to divest itself of its real estate holdings, and the town of Pullman was annexed into the city of Chicago. You can still visit the neighborhoods today. See this link on Flickr.

Forever New

I've been reading quite a bit lately about ancient history. I just finished a very interesting summary entitled, The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome, by Susan Wise Bauer. This was a whirlwind tour in a little less than 800 pages beginning (literally) with the The Flood and ending with the decline of the Roman Empire. It gave me new insight into the idea that power in ancient days was obtained almost universally by the sword. In fact, the king/pharoh/emperor was more often than not murdered by his son/wife/uncle/general in order to take the throne by force. Having read this (very readable) work, it would be easy to take the view that our shared history was simply one of war and violence. But that would be to miss the point of the simultaneous great achievements in art, literature, architecture, and natural philosophy (science) that also emerged from those distant times.

We remain fascinated with the past. We continually go back to dig into almost every aspect of those distant days. For example, I became interested in the Pyramids as a result of reading Bauer's book. The Great Pyramid of King Khufu at Giza is probably the most carefully studied and measured building in human history. The scale and precision of its stone construction boggles the mind. It was built 4500 years ago without the aid of modern tools or instruments and yet it is probably more precisely constructed than ANY modern building.

The accuracy of the pyramid's workmanship is such that the four sides of the base have a mean error of only 58 mm in length, and 1 minute in angle from a perfect square. The base is horizontal and flat to within 15 mm. The sides of the square are closely aligned to the four cardinal compass points to within 3 minutes of arc and is based not on magnetic north, but true north. (from Wikipedia)

It remained the tallest man-made structure in the world for 4000 years until the Lincoln Cathedral in England exceeded its height in 1311. There wasn't a taller building in America until 1885 when the Washington Monument was completed. It is humbling, to say the least.


Another example: The Parthenon in Athens. Built in the Fifth Century, BC it became one of the most architecturally-emulated buildings in the world. The level of craftsmanship is simply exceptional. The Greeks had learned how to compensate for the apparent curvature in large structures built with many parallel lines by slightly curving the columns and structural platforms to deceive the eye into seeing the lines as parallel (known technically as entasis). Nova and the Smithsonian Magazine jointly produced a very interesting program on the efforts to restore this structure. The Parthenon is the model for buildings throughout the western world including our own Supreme Court Building. There is even a complete full-scale replica of the Parthenon in Memphis, TN.

A final example: the Old Penn Station in New York. Built in 1910 (and sadly demolished in 1964), Penn Station took as its inspiration the Baths of Caracalla in Rome. The exterior was modeled after the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. The architects saw in the structures of antiquity an eloquence in design that millennia have not been able to improve.

The great structures of the past speak to us still. There is something that resonates in their proportions, their symmetry, and their scale that we have only rarely been able to improve upon. The past remains "forever new".

Eiffel's Towers

When you stand under the web of steel that arches high over your head, you have to tilt back so far that you almost lose your balance. The scale is nothing if not monumental. It stands 1,047 feet tall. It took 50 engineers and designers 5300 blueprints to specify the structure known as the Eiffel Tower.

Today is the birthday of Gustave Eiffel who was born December 15, 1832 in Dijon, France. Who isn't familiar with the iconic Eiffel Tower? It has over-shadowed Paris since it was built in 1889. I can remember the first time I visited the tower. It was amazing! It never looked that large in pictures. I felt somehow humbled by its presence.

Gustave Eiffel didn't set out to become a structural engineer. While he did attend a technical college in Paris (École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures), he graduated not as an engineer but with a degree in chemistry. Life often rudely derails the best plans and young Gustave could not find a job as a chemist and took an entry level job managing part of a railroad bridge building project. He was good enough at his work that his supervisor gave him more and more responsibility building other bridges. Eiffel eventually set up a project management consulting company for structural engineering projects. The Eiffel Tower was an example of his work as contractor working in collaboration with Maurice Koechlin and Emile Nouguier, structural engineers, and Stephen Sauvestre, architect. The tower has long-since surpassed its original intended life of 20 years. The Tower now hosts over six and a half million visitors a year.

But this was not the first tower with which Eiffel was involved. When Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi sculpted the Statue of Liberty as a gift from France to the United States for the U.S. Centennial celebration, a scaffold of steel was needed to support the plates of Lady Liberty. Eiffel was contracted to design and build the pylon. The unique structure allows the 200,000 pounds of copper plates to move independently in order to reduce stresses on the overall Statue. So Eiffel has both his famous Tower in Paris and a less visible but equally technically impressive structure standing in New York Harbor.

Ironically, I have been to Paris to stand beneath (and ascend) the Eiffel Tower but I have never been to the Statue of Liberty in my own country. But regardless of my failing to make the journey, my hat is off to Gustave Eiffel. Few get a chance to create something that persists in the collective consciousness so strongly as the gracefully rising web of steel of his grand Parisian Tower. And while you can't see it as easily, his work supports that equally iconic statue that personifies America.

[Images from Wikipedia]

Brunelleschi's Dome

A few months ago, I wrote a piece about domes and mentioned Brunelleschi's Dome as one example. At the time, I had been reading Ross King's book by the same title as this entry. But the book left me wanting a cleared picture of how the dome was built. What was clear was how he didn't build it: with centering scaffolding. The space enclosed by the dome was just too big to use wooden supports (as was conventionally done to build smaller arches and domes).

This remained something of an abstract curiosity for me until a few weeks ago when I was back in Florence. Once again, I was confronted...overwhelmed really...by the shear size of this magnificent structure. Most everyone has seen pictures of the Duomo but until you are in it's presence you don't have a good idea of the scale of this structure. And it was all built without a scaffold.

Since getting home, I have been doing some more digging about how Brunelleschi actually built his masterpiece. Almost 600 years later, architects and structural engineers still do not know for sure how he did it and they still get into strong arguments about one theory or another. One Florentine architect, Massimo Ricci has spent 30 years trying to figure this out and thinks he has the answer: Brunelleschi built the dome with an interlocking set of herring-bone patterned bricks that would keep the bricks in place while the mortar dried, even on the steeply sloped surface as the dome rose. Ricci is even building a smaller model of the dome (without scaffolding) in a park in Florence to prove his point.

Frankly, I like the idea that the best minds today with all of the tools at their disposal cannot figure out how a goldsmith in 1420 built the dome without leaving any plans or instructions for future generations to ponder. We have a tendency to think of anyone in the past as "disadvantaged" and perhaps a little less capable than we are ourselves. Brunelleschi punctures that balloon and leaves us feeling a little more humble. I also like the fact that Brunelleschi did not feel the need to leave any plans or writings about what he did. To him, the Dome itself was all the record that was needed. When I stand in the square looking at his accomplishment, I have to agree.

Domes on My Mind

I feel like I am in some sort of convergence around the topic of domes. Perhaps it is the thinning hair on the top of my head. I am always surprised when I stand in front of one of those three-way mirrors you find in stores to see that there is an embarrassing thinning going on just out of sight. The old saw, "out of sight, out of mind" never seemed more fitting.


But back to more real domes. This last weekend marked the 100th anniversary of the laying of the cornerstone of the Cathedral of St. Paul (Minnesota). The dome is 96 ft in diameter and 175 feet high. The architect for the cathedral was Emmanual Masqueray who was the chief architect for the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, MO. The Archbishop of the Immaculate Conception Parish of the Catholic Church in Minneapolis and St. Paul, John Ireland, had met Masqueray at the World's Fair and invited him to Minnesota to design not one but two large churches in the Twin Cities...at the same time. St. Paul was to have a cathedral and Minneapolis was to have a pro-cathedral to be named the Basilica of St. Mary. The Cathedral of St. Paul (pictured here) is a beautiful building perched on a hill in view of yet another domed building, the Minnesota State Capital (pictured here). Both of these St. Paul domes provide an impressive skyline that would be the envy of most cities.





Coincidental with this anniversary, I have been reading Ross King's fascinating book, Brunelleschi's Dome. The book describes the way in which Brunelleschi built the dome of the Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence. This was no trivial matter. In fact, when the dome was conceived in the mid-1300s the architect Neri di Fioravanti had no idea how to actually build the dome and left it in the hands of God to provide someone who could do it when the time came. That time was 1418 when Fillipo Brunelleschi won a competition to build the dome. The catch was that Fillipo was very secretive and did not disclose exactly how he planned to carry it off. What he did do was build a 12 foot high model of the dome that showed some of the points of construction. This, along with some accolades from other work he had done convinced the judges to give the commission to Brunelleschi. Just to hedge their bets, however, they also appointed the other leading entrant, Loerenzo Ghiberti, as the co-leader on the project (even though Lorenzo had no idea how to build such a structure).

Brunelleschi took his inspiration from the Pantheon in Rome. Built in 128 AD, the Pantheon still remains as the largest unreinforced solid concrete dome in the world (43. 4 meter in diameter, or 142.4 feet).
Brunelleschi took many design ideas from the Pantheon but the Duomo's dome was to be built from bricks and stone, not concrete (duomo is a generic Italian term for cathedral. It derives from the Latim "domo" meaning house). Brunelleschi conceived and built massive hoists and construction frameworks that allowed the structure to be built without any scaffolding connected to the ground. This was an unprecedented achievement. The dome (42 - 45 meters in diameter (137.8 - 147.6 feet) for it is octagonal, not round) was completed in 1436 and has withstood numerous earthquakes over the years without ever developing a crack. The structural engineering is nothing short of remarkable.

I would say that my hat's off to the designers of these great domes...except I keep my hat on as much as possible to shore up my own do(0)med vanity.

Pictures of Duomo, Pantheon, and Minnesota State Capital from Wikipedia