separated at birth: a pile of stones etc.

Andrea Chapin's first novel The tutor builds on an imaginary tutoring by William Shakespeare of Katherine de L'Isle, daughter of the Lancashire family who live in a Norman castle. The book is due soon from Riverhead Books. The castle is based on a house in the Hudson Valley that Chapin's family lived in early in the 20th century. It was a castle too and the family left when their fortunes faded with the Great War. Like many large houses, it was a bit of a stylistic hodgepodge. The family even lost track of exactly where it was though they rediscovered it in the 1980s and were able to tour it with the family that lives there now. By the way, Chapin thinks that Benedict Cumberbatch would make a fine architect for the movie she imagines. The architect character is built on real-life Robert Smythson, the Elizabethan architect. This book sounds pretty interesting as does a just-out novel based around Charles Rennie Mackintosh: Mr. Mac and Me, by Esther Freud, daughter of painter Lucian Freud. That book was reviewed in yesterday's New York Times Book Review. The information about Chapin, her book, and the house is from an interview in the Home section of Thursday's New York Times (the picture is from the interview article).

Reading about that hodgepodge reminded me of the imaginary "library with house attached" doodled up for me by one of the art history grad students when I was my first job as an art librarian. Arnie Klukas was an adamant medievalist and Episcopal and shared my interest in all things medieval and architectural, and brutalism and eclecticism. On and on, I love it all so he drew me up a house built around the core of a romanesque chapel and cloister. The newest part of the house is the brutalist garage. This was the 1970s, after all.

name of the day: Château Shatto

Name of the day: Château Shatto. It's a gallery in Los Angeles, on West Pico Boulevard. No, I'm not in Los Angeles; I'm just an armchair (deskchair) traveler (reader) at the reference desk. This picture is from their webpage for the BODY BY BODY, & Odilon Redon Education Pig show in July-September 2014 and is captioned Education Pig, 2014, installation view.

separated at birth: glass walls

The "remuddling" page of Old-house Journal (they've dropped the hyphen but I like it) is often quite dislikeable or obviously incorrect and distasteful. This month:

I know I've been thinking about Fort Worth recently because the upcoming ARLIS/NA conference is there but this remuddle looks like a domestic cousin of the new building of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, designed by Tadao Ando ... without the "trees" and reflecting pool.

http://www.thorntontomasetti.com/projects/fort_worth_modern_art_museum

the artichoke's library

Thomas Hill, the art librarian at Vassar College, has one of the most fascinating feeds on my Facebook newsfeed. He finds intriguing links and posts great pictures. Almost a year ago, in March 2014, he posted something about a show at Special Collections entitled The Architect's Library. I really wanted the catalog and ordered a copy from the Vassar bookstore. It didn't come but I didn't act immediately. When I called the bookstore about the order during the summer, I got a message that they were being remodeled and were closed. Then, when I was in the area between Christmas and New Year's, I stopped on campus hoping to check about my order in person.

Now, the bookstore was closed for the holidays. I finally got my act together today and called the bookstore about my order. They were closed in the summer because they were shifting from being a Barnes & Noble outlet to independence. By now, I wasn't so worried about filling that order as just having the book. Since the Special Collections website indicated that the catalog could be ordered from them, I said to forget that old order and I'd just check in with them. It was my own stupid procrastination that had caused the order to go unfulfilled. So I called Special Collections and they said they'd put one in the mail today.

So what's with the "artichoke" in the post title? It's a tribute to Judith Holliday, the late architecture librarian at Cornell University. She was a consummate bibliographer and she'd refer to the architects as artichokes, mostly the students. She made my Cornell cataloging days happy with her selections, especially those in Italian. And she even taught me how to say Chigi. It's not chee-gey but key-gee. Thanks, Judith.

The print of Horace Walpole's library is from the webpage for the show and the photo is of Old Main at Vassar in the late-afternoon winter sunshine.

learning about sidewalls

We visited the newly reopened Cooper-Hewitt Museum when I was in New York City for a couple days between Christmas and New Year's. I kept seeing the term "sidewalls" and was unfamiliar with the term for what looked to me like wallpaper. Checking the Art & Architecture Thesaurus, I discovered that AAT uses the term "fill papers" for "Wallpapers used to cover the main portions of walls between borders." "Sidewalls" is one of the alternate terms. Who knew? Saying "wallpaper" is just way too ambiguous.

This is an Aesthetic or Japanesque-Style wall paper, ca. 1880, from the Cooper-Hewitt collection.

Cuba and the U.S.

"I candidly confess, that I have ever looked on Cuba as the next interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of States. The control which, with Florida Point, this island would give us over the Gulf of Mexico, and the countries and isthmus bordering on it -- as well as all those whose waters flow into it -- would fill up the measure of our political well-being. Yet, as I am sensible that this can never be obtained, even with her own consent, but by war; and its independence, which is our second interest (and especially its independence of England), can be secured without it, I have no hesitation in abandoning my first wish to future chances, and accepting its independence -- with peace and the friendship of England -- rather than its association, at the expense of war and her enmity."

These are the words of Thomas Jefferson in 1823 during a period of discussion about the idea of the U.S. annexation of Cuba. The quotation, from a letter to President James Madison, is here taken from Cuba: a new history by Richard Gott (Yale University Press, 2004) which I am reading in anticipation of going to Cuba on a College Art-sponsored trip during the Havana Bienal. I am very much looking forward to Cuba being in peaceful association with the United States.

Just a reminder of relative distance between Florida and Cuba and the relationship to the Gulf of Mexico (screen shot from Google Maps)

thinking about a solo Christmas about 20 years ago

My family is supposed to gather for Christmas dinner at my sister Carol's house in Branchport. She and Barb will prepare the meat and the rest of us will fill in around the edges. My sack of potatoes and yams, with a pound of butter, is waiting in the front hallway. Barb had been in the hospital over the weekend but is home now. Jeanette is up there already, helping prepare space and food. Doug called a while ago to see when I was going up and reported that there was some weather concern. Doug and Ian will probably go up today. I don't especially look forward to the idea of being stuck in Alfred while they're all up there but thinking about that has reminded me of a Christmas I did very happily spend alone, probably 1994, when I was living in Texas.

I had been reading about Our Lady of Dallas, a Cistercian abbey on the outskirts of Dallas in Irving. The church was designed by Gary Cunningham, a Dallas architect, and completed in 1992. Built in that wonderful sandstone you see around Texas, I had wanted to see it and figured that I'd just go to Christmas mass and listen to the Cistercians filling that space.

It was lovely. After mass, I went off to visit the Solana corporate park designed in the mid 1980s by Ricardo Legorreta. It was decorated for Christmas.

And then on to Decatur, another of those great county seats with a central square and courthouse. Much has been written about the courthouses of Texas. When coming back from Albuquerque to Fort Worth one time, I did county seat-hopping across western Texas southeast from Amarillo and Canyon. It's mostly flat country, the counties are about equal-sized, and the county seat is often central and on the principal blue highway. The route therefore becomes rather like steps. Anyway, I meandered around the mostly empty Decatur, listening to the piped Christmas music around the central square.

I don't remember feeling the least bit lonely. Being alone does not mean you're lonely, just like being in a crowd doesn't necessarily mean you're feeling cherished.

So I'm not sure how this Christmas will work out if the weather turns crazy (wintry mix being the last choice) but I'm willing to try another solo if necessary.

hoarding or just too much love of objects

Today's mailing from The New Yorker brought me a link to "Too Much Stuff: Are We Becoming a Nation of Hoarders?" by Joan Acocella. She, not surprisingly, talks about the Collyer Brothers and the Beales, Andy Warhol and the "Hoarders" reality TV show, as well as about her mother and the psychiatric studies of hoarding and, sigh, H.D. (hoarding disorder). I do have a lot of stuff in the family house, the house I currently occupy as the fifth generation. It was built by my great-grandfather and his father-in-law. There is stuff here from each and all of those generations. Mine is just the top layer of the archeology.

Still, I had an "I love my books" experience earlier this week. I have decided to go on the College Art Association-sponsored trip to the Havana Bienal in Cuba in May 2015. The agenda includes an event at the National Art Schools. I had bought the Lonely Planet Cuba guide a couple years ago when Moira and I were dreaming about a trip to Cuba. I knew I had bought the Princeton Architectural Press monograph on the Schools and it did, alas, take me a while to find it among the several thousand books I have. (There is a reason for classifying your books, at least informally by topic.) I found it and saw that I'd bought it at Storefront for Art and Architecture in November 2004. I checked my journal and saw that the Storefront exhibition was then so I checked the compilation of the Storefront newsletter and found the newsletter issue that came out concurrently with the show. Clearly, my collection development policy is working, for me.

Images of the National Art Schools, built in the early days of the Cuban Revolution where the country club had been. The Schools appeared on the World Monuments Fund Watch List in 2000 and 2002. They are now protected and being restored.

(photos selected rather randomly from an image search on "national art schools cuba")

Now if I stayed home and sorted things, perhaps I could work my way through some of my stuff and that of other members and generations of my family. But it's more fun to have my books where I can use them and read them. On the other hand, who knows what adventures and trouble I could get into if I just had one suitcase and the clothes on my back.

Calatrava: lakefront or crowded streets?

Last week in NYC, I meandered around the World Trade Center area, mostly to look at the WTC Transportation Hub, designed by Santiago Calatrava and about ten bazillion dollars over budget and as many days behind schedule (not that that's more than a drop in the bucket relative to the costs of destroying Iraq and Afghanistan). It's all jammed up against towers and won't have room to flap its wings.

Just a few months ago, I was in Milwaukee for the VRA annual conference and got to (finally) see the Quadracci Pavilion extension of the Milwaukee Art Museum, designed a dozen years ago by Calatrava. It is perched on the Lake Michigan lakefront.

It doesn't seem to me that there's any contest: such a building as either of these works better as a sculpture in a garden than along a street. Still, an occasional break in the streetfront like the Guggenheim Museum by Frank Lloyd Wright can be refreshing.

nineteen showings

When I was in NYC last week, I went to The Imitation Game

on Thanksgiving evening. It's the new movie about Alan Turing, the mathematician who led the effort to break the Enigma code that the Germans used during World War II. He committed suicide in 1954 after being prosecuted for homosexual acts with a sentence of estrogen treatments. The Queen pardoned him in 2013, almost sixty years after his death. The movie, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, is to be officially released on Christmas but it is already showing in New York. Today's advertisement in the New York Times for the movie at the Angelika Film Center indicates that it would be shown nineteen times today! I guess there is some interest in the story. Robert reminded me that there was 1996 TV movie on Turing entitled Breaking the Code, starring Derek Jacobi.