Category: Architecture and Building

Visionary Architecture and a Prankish Illustration, 1913

JF Ptak Science Books (Post 118 from June 2008, expanded)

[I made a post on this subject at the very outset of this blog,m three years ago–I’ve returned to it this morning to expand and revise it some…]

This image has two things going for it, one obvious, the other not (and just about hidden, until you see it, then you can’t help not seeing it all of the time). It comes from an unusual, somewhat pretty/bizarre visionary work privately printed in Paris in 1913. The lead author, Hendrik Christian Andersen, along with Ernest M. Hebrard (and his brother, Jean Hebrard, who we saw in an earlier post), collaborated on a project (ungainly) called Creation of a World Centre of Communication¹, a deeply complex, very detailed, and just plain weird offering for building a sprawling extraterritorial city dedicated to “oneness”, a thing that struggles to be heard over its own insistent shouting. The drawings and plans were lush and lovely, with a lot of thought in their execution but actually very little into how everything might actually be pulled together into some sort of working whole. As the first reviewers of this book demonstrated, simply because something is very big and heavy–as in the case of this huge book–it doesn’t give the work any necessary intellectual weight.²

And so it goes. I imagine that if the beautiful Etienne Boullee thought in terms of cities rather than in single structures, he might’ve produced just the same sort of gorgeous, unconnected thing. After all, just because you draw a plan with a lot of buildings almost touching each other doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve drawn a visionary city.

This is one of 22 large images (in real life this print, a heliogravure, measures about 28 inches tall) showing different structures from an art center to a fountain of life. This is the “Tower of Progress”—I don’t know what sort of progress as there’s really nothing to go by, except for the big 100’-tall clock, so at the very least it is a celebration of the progression of time, which needs no monument outside of the trillions and trillions of trillions (or centillions, or 10³⁰³?) of bones it has distributed around the planet over the millennia. But for Hebrard it formed the locus of the “a fountain of overflowing knowledge to be fed by the whole world of human endeavour in art, science, religion, commerce, industry, and law; and in turn to diffuse throughout the whole of humanity as though it were one grand, divine body conceived by God, the vital requirements which would renew its strength, protect its rights, and enable it to attain greater heights through a concentration of world effort.” Whew. The Tower is really dedicated to progress in learning, and the distribution of information, which stands at the center of this place; the authors believed that the only way that the world would survive the “present war” (WWI) would be through education–I think that the world has so far proved them wrong.

I figure that the tower was to be about 1,500 feet tall (scaling it by the 2mm tall figures scampering around in the image)—a giant tower perched on top of a rotunda placed on top of a table-like something, looking terrifically fake, but lustrous.

The prize though in this portrayal of the “Tower of Progress” is a little smudge-like thing to the middle-left of the tower. Under magnification, we see that it is a man, with a bowler and an umbrella, hurtling down, falling from somewhere way on high in the tower. It is of course a very unexpected feature of this visionary architectural rendering, a hidden joke (perhaps?). These sorts of additions—the work of a disgruntled/drunk/humorous engraver—pop up from time to time in the history of printing. Perhaps the most famous intentional example of this graffiti is found in the earliest copies of the first edition of Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer, where a male character is featured with
a very large, very lumpy, very noticeable, erection; a proof reader spotted the embarrassment, and the plate was reworked to rid the character of the Natural Function. I’d guess offhand that this was the case with the Hebrard heliogravure, even though there is a second figure in the tower pointing at the figure hurtling past, implying a little more thought in making this a more cohesive joke.

Notes:

1. An interesting review of this work appeared in Town Planning Review for 1914, here.

2. “This volume is 1 foot broad, 1 foot 6 inches long, and it weighs 10 lbs. It is obvious, then, that if it has a corresponding spiritual gravity it cannot be treated with too much deference…”–source

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Architecture of Insanity

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1474

I was browsing an 1878 issue of The Scientific American, looking for an article on torpedoes, when I came across this stunning architectural plan of the Morristown (New Jersey) State Asylum for the Insane–I recognized its design as something I had seen before, several times, at least. This design required a lot of land and a lot of bricks–the building was a few stories high and laid out far and wide, built to accommodate 2,000 patients. The design was intended to allow patients comfortable living space, room for privacy as need be, exercise area and plenty of open yards around the structure for sun and fresh air. Of course building like this were quickly filled and filled some more, requiring the space for rehabilitation to be used for stockpiling other patients until more appropriate situations arose, which they mostly seemed not to.

And so I went looking around the web for other examples of mental/insane asylums, places constructed for the good of the society and partially to aid people who were suffering from some sort of yet-to-be-defined mental illness. From what I have found so far, there is a definite them to a good many of them, resembling in some fair manner the Morristown design (above).

(An interesting and lush/ruinous photo essay on Morristown can be found here.)

I suppose that in some ways these architectural plans are maps, outlines to an elusive wellness; given the (generally) small staffs, the abilities of the time to diagnosis mental illnesses, the limited capacities for treatment, and general overcrowding, that the “wellness” part of the desired ends of these plans/maps was almost entirely allegorical. I suspect that if for some reason you found yourself in an extended stay in a place like this and weren’t insane, then you would be after a while.

The Glasgow Lunatic Asylum, designed by the architect William Stark (1770 – 1814):

[From: Thompson, John D. & Grace Goldin. The Hospital. A Social and Architectural History. Yale University Press, New Haven and London. 1975.]

Maryland State Hospital for the Insane (here)–in this plan, the further away you get from the main entrance, the more deeply “disturbed’ the patients. It must have been a long walk from the “violent” ward to freedom.

Cane Hill, the Third Surrey County Pauper Lunatic Asylum, built 1882 (details here)

Claybury Lunatic Asylum, Woodford, Essex:

The Byron House, constructed 1915, at the Ipswich Lunatic Asylum (Byron house was to become the infamous Karrala House.)

Buffalo lunatic asylum, a spectacular structure designed by H.H. Richardson, with grounds and landscaping by none other than Frederiick Law Olmstead and Charles Vaux The image above (and below) are the Kansas State Lunatic Asylum constructed 1880. Information on these two institutions and the man who brought them about is located at the Kirkbride Buildings blog, here.

Northern Michigan Asylum for the Insane, built by Gordon W. Lloyd in 1888:

Seacliff Lunatic Asylum, New Zealand:

HArrisburg (PA) State Lunatic Asylum, the first to be built according to the Kirkbride Plan:

Eastern Asylum for the Insane, Pontiac, Michigan, constructed 1882:

Norfolk, England, Lunatic Asylum, 1814

Eastern Kentucky Asylum for the Insane:

Norristown Hospital for the Insane:

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Really, Really Big Plans: Filling in the East River and Parts of NYC Bay, 1911-1916

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1470

Last week I wrote a post on Herman Soergel’s plan for extending the landmass of the countries around the Mediterranean Sea by damming the straits of Gibraltar, lowering the sea and irrigating the Sahara–an original, interesting but not very good idea, filled with briney cultivation and racial politics. In the past on this blog I’ve written about other city plans–and in particular, for New York City–that have involved floating Manhattan into the harbor, or filling up large chunks of the Narrows, or floating the city on an enormous anti-gravity platform, and so on. Some of those plans were real, some science fiction, and some were plainly beyond both. The plan presented above is another monster, but at least this one could work, if not for the doing of it, and the expense. And the will.

But the bottom line, according to the engineer doing the thinking on this project, Kennard Thomson, would supposedly net the city a cool billion dollars after everything was said and done, and that would be 1916 dollars–that was equal to about 5% of the American GDP (!) in 1916, which would be about $400 billion in terms of 2010 GDP. I’m not sure how Thomson came up with this very big/very round number, though it must have been done for effect–I can just imagine him standing before a smokey room filled with civil engineers talking about his massive plan for enlarging NYC and throwing out the billion-dollar figure, watching the cigars glow red in exhaled disbelief.

Thomson did know what he was talking about–he was a busy (and “leading” according to the NYT) Manhattan civil engineer of stature, working on the Canal Barge and being the principal engineer for the Municipal and Singer buildings, for example–and his project seems to be well within the scope of possibility. Their sensical aspects however are, well, questionable.

Here’s the story–around 1911, while examining proposals to repair and extend New York’s wharves, Thomson came upon the idea–a magnificent, fabulous idea–of adding new wharves by adding new lands to the city. In short, the overall plan was to fill in the East River (!!) and reclaim the new land for city living, dam Hell Gate, construct a New East River (from Flushing to Jamaica Bay), extend the tip of Manhattan Island from the Battery to within a quarter-mile of Staten Island (!), create a new 40-square-mile island between Sandy Hook and Staten Island, extend the Jersey shoreline, add two new Manhattan-sized appendages to the east shore of Staten Island, and more. All of this would be connected by various new bridges and roads and tunnels, as well as a 6-track elevated railway that would circumnavigate the city. The purpose of all of this would be to add 100 miles of new docks, an enormous amount (“50 square miles of reclaimed land”) of new land and the capacity for NYC to house 20+ million people, all of which would be worth a billion dollars.

Thomson really meant “really” in the title for the proposal. There have been reclamation projects undertaken in New York Bay since then of course, and I think that virtually all of what Thomson talked about could be done. I think it would be a very interesting project for a class of some sort to undertake an estimation of what such a thing would cost today (and I would guess to duplicate the idea in real terms now would take up a sizable chunk of the GDP). Maybe all of this will make sense at some more future point.

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Seeing into the Vast Future, 21 Years Hence: Futurama, 1939

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1461

The 1939 World’s Fair in NYC famously exhibited a spherical attraction that exhibited a semi-robotic display of what the future would be like–a future that was only 21 years away, in 1960. There would be an enormous amount of weight on the shoulders of 1960, given what the World’s Fair had to say about it in 1939. Few things were very right, and many of course were necessarily wrong–but that must be the case when looking into the short-ended future with a monstrous amount of anticipation. That–and since this was a feel-good celebration–nobody was talking about the world war that had already started.

One thing is for sure–the pavilion’s creator, General Motors, did foresee that highways and automobiles will be in high demand up there in the tomorrowland of 1960. The display was designed by the fantastic Norman bel Geddes, who actually expanded on his superhighway theme in the next year with his book Magic Motorways (which can be read here). Anyway people were very excited by the whole affair–waiting in line for a few hours, winding their way through the pavilion to take their seats in a circular gallery overlooking a vast and complex assemblage of miniature societal models, the seating arena rotated to give the viewers views of the entire display. More than 26 million people saw the display over a six month period.

26 million is a big number. Futurama drew as many people in six months as the three New York City baseball teams (the Yankees, Giants and Dodgers) brought in for almost the entire decade. It is also equal to all of the deaths suffered by the Soviet Union during WWII.

I guess this was as good a vision as any–or at least it didn’t seem to involve very much planning outside the new automatic automobile nervous system that would leech into the life-blood of the country. Other planned visions of the future do not look quite so good. For example, Le Corbuser’s demolition of central Paris to make way for his Soviet apartment block reconstruction in his Voisin Plan (1925):

Again, this is not a wholesale look into the future, just the resurfacing of one of the world’s greatest cities.

A man with a little bigger vision, Frank Lloyd Wright, saw a heavier future in his Broadacre CIty:

I’m not sure how these domed cities worked. B. Fuller had an idea like this for central Manhattan that I wrote about earlier in this blog, but his idea escaped me too.

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A Monumental and Fantastically Bad Idea: Draining the Mediterranean

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1460

“Simply the thing I am shall make me live.”–from Jorge Luis Borges, “Shakespeare’s Memory”

It would be a Purgatory, or worse, to suddenly wake up one morning with another person’s memory–worse yet than to have wished it, only to find that you didn’t want it at all. This evidently works out with memories high and low, though it is tempting to want to wish to see what the inspiration looked like for one idea located in a particular memory. Or maybe not. But I am curious about when and here the author of the pamphlet above got his idea, and what it looked like to him–did he hear or see or smell something that prompted the inspiration for this reverse-monumental jolt, something that may well be one of the worst engineering ideas of the 20th century? [This pamphlet is available for purchase at our blog bookstore, here.]

It is interesting to pursue a loose thought like this to its not-necessarily logical end. Such is the case with the self-styled Paneuropic ideas of Hermann Soergel (1885-1952), the author of the above. Soergel was a Bauhaus architect and author of a number of works on design and far more ethereal, floating-castle ideas. His most spectacular contribution—incubated in the mid-1920’s and still clinging by its fingertips as an idea among some current thinkers—was to put a dam across the straights of Gibraltar. The dam would generate electricity of course, but most importantly to Soergel, it would also empty an enormous amount of water (lowering the sea by 200 metres) from the Mediterranean leaving vast new expanses of land to be developed and colonized over generations into the future. The water of course would have to go somewhere, and that somewhere was the Sahara Desert, somehow in its wake creating farmable and productive lands. Soergel was creating a certain, very wide, fantastical future of uncertain monumental prospects.

A “brief outline” of the idea was published in this four-language pamphlet, Lowering the Mediterranean Irrigating the Sahara (Panropa Project), which was published by J.M. Gebhardt in Leipzig in the very bumpy year of 1929. (The Weimar years in Germany were already into deep bumpiness; the rest of the world would follow suit in October of that year.) To be fair, Soergel didn’t plan on emptying the entire Mediterranean, just a bunch of it–at least enough to be able to rename it.

[Here’s a map of the new Mediterranean, or the Mediterranean that would be made to go away. As you can see at this point Sicily and Italy become enormous, and the Greek Islands are combined to form one large land mass–this last bit alone is enough to form total and complete reisstance to this idea. Also at this stage perhaps 150 or so miles of new lands have been reclaimed from the sea all along its former borders–more so in Turkey. There is no mention as yet of any new islands that are formed in the sea water’s wake.] As it turns out Soergel thought that this plan would add at least 660,000 KM² to the base of the surrounding countries of the Mediterranean, or roughly the equivalent of the combined land masses of Italy and Germany. Having the sea pulled back from hundreds if not thousands of seaside towns and cities would no doubt be a “problem”, for them; but that doesn’t matter to Soergel, as they were inferior thoughts to the grand idea of emerging a new continent. Great bog (and a good simulation with a powerful computing capacity) only know how the changes in the Mediterranean would affect the climate–well, that in combination with the thousands of new square miles of inland sea and canals in the previous Sahara desert. There are of course many other problems.

The master plan at work was that the world would be divided into three economic spheres in the future, all beginning with the letter “A”: American, Asia, and the new land to be created by Soergel, “Atlantropa”, which was the former Europe expanded into the new dry beds of the Mediterranean and North Africa. And also of course Egypt, which would be covered with “thousands” of canals and become semi-submerged by the new borders of the meandering sea. This would be the way for Europa to compete with the rest of the world in the future.

[I should point out that the image above comes from the Illustrierte Zeitung (Leipzig) for August 1931, and is a drawing by an artist named “AS. Christ” depicting a cross section of one of the bridge/dams of Soergel’s Panropa’s ideas.]

Perhaps it is actually three steps to get from the idea of damming up the straits of Gibraltar to the osmosis of Shakespeare’s memories into someone else’s brain—a squinting acquiescence of the middle touch being the brilliant Jorge Luis Borges. You see it was in the Argentine master’s last published story, “Shakespeare’s Memory”, that we meet Herr Soergel (as Hermann Sorgel) again. But so far as I can remember Soergel exists only as a fictional character, with no reference to his real-life self. In this wonderful story, Soergel inherits the memories of William Shakespeare—these bits come to him slowly but surely, until they start to conflict with his own memory, and things get difficult. The man with Shakespeare’s memories winds up phoning strangers on the telephone, giving them away at random, until Soergel is left with his own mind again. Superior as Bill’s memories were, they still weren’t Hermann’s, who wanted his own life back in the end.

And so from the titanic, pan-europic technodream of Bauhausian Hermann Soergel to the dead brains and living memories of William Shakespeare, all through the fingers of the beautiful Jorge Luis Borges.

I’m sorry to report that at the end of it all, near the end of the pamphlet, Soergel releases his opinion on the political importance of his project. And yes, his aim was to form an alliance between the new PanAmerica (of the “three Americas” with the new Pan-European African Union to thwart “the yellow peril” which “arises from the racial antipathy of India, China and Japan. Soergel writes that “the fate of occidental civilization…will be settled on the Mediterranean”.

After it is all said and done, perhaps the best reiew of the work by Soergel is provided by the graphic designer who put the Big Red X on the cover of his work. It fits.

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Remaking Chicago, 1945–a Map of the Future

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1435

Earlier today a post appeared here on re-envisioning the “one city” megalopolis of San Diego–Los Angeles–San Francisco by hoisting 2-acre neighborhoods into the sky to support some 5 million people or so. Bruce Biossat, a writer for the Chicago Daily News, also had an ambitious plan for the city of Chicago, though in the face of putting thousands of acres of neighborhoods (with years) into massive highrises, Mr. Boissat’s plan–while massive–is not nearly so as the L.A. scheme.

For reasons I cannot determine, this small pamphlet¹ (available at our blog bookstore) seems to be nowhere–no mention on the web, nothing in city planning databases, nothing in WorldCat (an actually nothing at all in this massive database about Mr. Biossat). It was a massive undertaking, part of a project of the Chicago Plan Commission, and sought to relieve “blighted” areas from the city by replacing them with new housing and neighborhood design. This was part of a larger construction scheme nationwide:

“The goal most mentioned as the desired postwar level of home construction is 1,000,000 units a year. Both major labor organizations call for higher objectives, with the A.F.L. demanding 1,500,000 and the C.I.O urging 1,750,000 annually.”

That is a lot of building, and I have no doubt that the ALF/CIO would’ve been behind a spending/earning opportunity like this 100%. I’m not sure where all of this money was coming from, though I guess there would’ve been enough workers to handle the job.

In any event, the plan was massive, as we can see in the map above–perhaps the designers/developers felt the end of the war coming, the return of millions of soldiers, and an opportunity to make some major changes in the development of the future of Chicago.

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Strange Things in the Sky Department: the Suburbs

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1434

A continuing thread on this blog (this post is a good example) has surfaced unusual thing that have been found floating in the sky in prints, photographs and ideas: there have been “extra Earths”, holes leading to heaven, massive stone tetrahedra, swimming pools, hangars, airports, downloaded aliens from extra moons, flying Woolworth buildings, and much else (not limited to 19th century balloon-hoisted horses, here). Today’s unusual thing to be found in the sky is the suburbs.

The Romanian architect Harlan Georgesco came up with an idea to prevent suburban sprawl from making one city out of the land from San Diego to San Francsico–put the suburbs in the sky. The story is in the wonderful Unbuilt America by Sky and Stone under the subheading “Relocation of Los Angeles”, where they quote Mr. Georgesco saying that the sprawl of a plan to develop 300×300 foot “horizontal plots” in a larger scheme of an endless horizon of such housing could be made into “vertical tracts”.

The vertical tracts of 300×300 feet (90,000 square feet or about two acres) oe chunks thereof would be suspended via “steel in tension” (giving the Golden Gate Bridge as an example of this system) in a structure 640 feet tall, which is labeled as a “medium high rise”). (I should point out that the WTC was 208′ square.)

Mr. Georgesco’s proposal called for a total reorganization of dwelling life in California–he was thinking of housing 5 million people in this way. The little squares on his map (below) shows the emplacement of colonies like this vertical city.

It seems to me that as a futurist the architect’s plans contained an abundantly fatal flaw in assuming the construction of suburban houses on a platform 600′ tall. To be concerned with waste by stacking cul de sacs one on top of one another seems to miss the point, some.

Notes:

I would be curious to know about Mr. Georgesco’s life in Romania during the 1939-1945 period. He certainly became successful and accomplished, though the period in Romania was–lightly put–complicated. Starting out the war as a neutral, Romania moved quickly to be an ally of the Nazis, participating in Barbarosa, and over the next 3 years lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers, and civilians. And of course there was a participation in the Holocaust. By 1944 the King of Romania was able to lead a revolt and Romania joined the war on the Allied side, declaring war on Germany. They were almost immediately overtaken by the Soviets, who would stay for quite a long time. When the Soviets arrived, they basically “took” the Romanian army (of 130,000 men or so) back to the Soviet Union–the vast majority never to return. Mr. Georgesco left in ’47.

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Bad Ideas Department: Restructuring the City and the “Terminal Box”, Neopolis, 1938

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1421

The unnamed author of The New City, an American Plan of Social and Economic Reorganization (1938), makes a hard-edged plea for the formation of a new American society—and by “new” the author really means it, advocating a different economics, social structure and even the physical development of new cities and abandonment of the old physical and philosophical structures. (The rare original of this deterministic futuristic publication is located at our blog bookstore.)

Sprinkled among the Swiftian notions of rightness, quixotic lancings of social ills and a general bombardment of the structure of society are some interesting and isolated points:
“America is the supreme user of the machine…ravishing the irreplaceable wealth of one of the earth’s richest continents, tearing down forests, looting the treasures of coal and draining the reservoirs of oil and natural gas, by methods scandalously wasteful.”

This leads the author to the Depression, “a decade of demonstration of the profit system’s inability to deliver to the people the needs of life, a painful heartbreaking demonstration”.

It is the profit-deliverers, not the machines or people, who are to blame. One way of addressing the distribution system, was, unfortunately, Russia—“a form if society set up to overcome this impasse of the capitalistic system of production and distribution”. Of course the Russians–the Soviets–were just in the middle of their enforced starvation/gulag/brutalization period under Josef Stalin, the gigantic negative parts of which were still in general not known to the great unwashed.

The unnamed author dips lightly into Socialism, and then into Fascism and Nazism, though the only thing he/she really has to say about the later two is that “their answer [to economic woe] was in the seizure or control of the means of production by the state”, their own brutal means skipping off unnoticed into a pinkish glow, though the loss of personal freedom is “disdained”.

The New City is actually a new world order, a new governmental form to take advantage of technological advancements leading to “nationalized urbanization” The first city in this new order is Neopolis, and this pamphlet was a call to those who would stand as its citizens. (There’s actually a sort of application form, though all it really is a bill-of-sale for ordering more copies of the New City pamphlet.)

Even though the pamphlet is easily obtained, membership, the possibility of being a Neopolitan, is something entirely different. The difference is actually exceptional, perhaps the most extraordinary thing about this whole misguided idea. “Membership is to be carefully controlled at all times” we read. . “It is not desired to build up a huge and unwieldy membership of poorly-assimilated elements….interesting educational instruction…with tests to determine the fitness of the member for loyal, cooperative activity, leading, necessarily, to the elimination of those who may be found undesirable”.
That’s some pretty muscular, steroidal stuff, particularly after such a glancing blow against the Soviets and Nazis.

Since this is just an “abridgment” of a soon-to-be-written 250-page explanation of the concept, the complex and concentric organization of society is left mainly to the drawing of its plan, the physical layout of the city based upon this ideal.

The Seattle-based author never did quite make it past page 29, never did name themselves, and never provided a concrete place where all of this heady stuff was being think out. It is a sort of pretty design in a creepy/queasy way, there on the front cover, but that’s about as far as it goes. If anyone actually did send any money to this quack thinker, it wound up in a nicely metaphorical place: at “Terminal Box 3463”.

This may be the very best idea to come out of touching this pamphlet—a place where people can send correspondence regarding Bad and/or Dead or Dying Ideas: “Terminal Box ______”. I guess that box number would be pretty high by now.

(Uncle Joe, before he killed the children, and dozens of millions of others.)

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The Problematic and Unspeakably Brief Beauty of Linoleum: Italy, 1933

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1418

In my imaginary History of Lines there is a chapter or two for humans-in-line(s). In the history of the world, the fourth and fifth decades of the twentieth century—the 1930’s and ‘40’s—were big ones for human lines. Big does not imply good, because as we all know lots of humans lined up for all manner of unspeakable nastiness during this time and well more than 100 million didn’t make it out alive (considering all of the wars, purges, revolutions and stupidity).

The lines here are a little more benign, though with shriveled overtones of corrected respect.

Oppressive obedience in a well-designed environment is still like dressing your ear-infected 14-year-old St. Bernard/Jack Russell (?!) mixed breed in baby booties—its just not right, and these images attest to this simpy comparison. All of these photographs come from a delightful manufacturer’s catalog for linoleum products (Il Linoleim nelle Costruzioni Scolastiche), which was printed in Milano in 1933.(The original is available at our blog bookstore.)

I’ll undoubtedly write a post on this stylistic beauty later on, but suffice to say for right now that it really is a lovely thing. If only we could forget the Mussolini part. Now I’m no fan, necessarily, of linoleum, but if I had to live on a linoleum island far removed from civilization and I had to choose a design for my world, I would choose the designs from this catalog, without hesitation. They’re spare, well-proportioned, beautifully design utilitarian designs; they are also very shiny and cold with a dispirited order, but so it goes. The catalog seems to speak for its times, the inspired design bowing to the weighty needs of the flatulent state.

Even though the people (mainly child people) are in very structured environments, they still look as though they really don’t believe in whatever it was was happening–of course the y were at school, or in an academic environment, or hospital, or something (as the titlf of the work states). There is something just wrong in the child-straight lines and seemless expanse of linoleum, something that looks as though details have been left out, that there is a ground-in sameness to everything, that the indifference to difference is so to make the children of a sort of sameness. Ihope that they did okay–most would be around 80 or 85 by now, if they survived.

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The Discovery of the “Obvious”–Joseph Lister and J.N.L. Durand and their Major Discoveries

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1400

Sometimes things that we take for granted—the “of course” kinds of things that were seemingly always here because they’re just, well, so obvious—that one needs to take a step back to appreciate their discovery, or invention, and to mind the fact that someone did have to actually bring these things to some sort of birth.

These two (seeing and touching) would make great entries in our fictional encyclopedia–who was the first person to see (“ah, it was Nem Teff in 8211 BCE, in an area very close to the teeming slum of today’s Bagdahd; he of course was a disciple of the Shenta-kra philosopher Boot Strap, who only four generations earlier came up with the idea of “touching”. What people did to get around before Mr. Strap invented touching and before people could see is a matter for wide conjecture“–Pastor Steng “No Stink” Pallor, writing in the volume “I” of The Great Encyclopedia of Unknown, Non-Existent and Ficticious Things, published in New York City by Phantom Touch Press, 1972.)

But we’re dealing with new applications of sight and touch here, although by and large these applications had a huge impact on the rest of civilization on their own merits.

Take for example the lovely Jean Nicolas Louis Durand. He was a radical rationalist, an advanced thinker in the field of architecture and one of the most influential instructors and writers on architectural history and theory of first half of the nineteenth century. Durand also had his wild side, as well, but that took place when he was in his carefree (read: “adventurous”) thirties—this period of enormous and unusually creative work in architectural design also took place during the French Revolution, which was a bad time to be thinking this stuff up, let alone building it. (Some of the other French visionary architects of this time nearly lost their heads because of their non-revolutionary creativeness, but that’s another story.)

(This is Boullee’s design of the megamonumental library for the king, 1784)

Durand came about this intuition naturally and also because he was a draftsman for the great Etienne Boullee, who we mentioned a few posts ago. (Durand would he execute a series of drawings entitled Rudimenta Operis Magni et Disciplinae, which are probably a pictorial representation of Boullée’s theories.)

What Durand introduced however that was so revolutionary and so much his own was this—he was the very first architect to publish a work of comparative architecture in which all of the buildings were drawn on the same scale.

That means that previous works—all previous works—of comparative architecture compared one piece of architecture to another on different scales. That would seem to be a truly bad idea, given the nature of the comparative beast and all, but there you have it. I really have no explanation for why this was the case, or why it took until Durand’s Recueil et parallele des edifices en tout genre…(1832) to make it so in the fourth century of the publication of works on architecture, but it did.

Another example of what would seem to be sublimely obvious was the innovation of a Scottish surgeon in 1867 . People today I think intuit his surname from exposure to television commercials for a certain mouthwash, but this would be like knowing the importance of Isaac Newton from those figgy cookies—and that just isn’t right. Joseph Lister (1827-1912) figured out—through exposure to ideas by Ignaz Semmelweiss and Louis Pasteur, among others—that the infections in wounds that caused so many surgical deaths was not caused by the miasma in the air, but by something entirely different.

In his article in The Lancet of 21 September 1867 (and in his subsequent publication in book form later that year called Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Surgery he explained what he thought was the cause—microorganisms that traveled (at least) from the surgeon’s hands onto the wound, and not by something floating around in the air. He began treating wounds with a solution of carbolic acid (which had been used previously to remove the stinking stench from sewerage), and saw immediate results in the prevention of infection and gangrene. His next big step was to have surgeons wash their hands with the solution and wear gloves during surgery—because, up until then, surgeons went from dinner to intestines without the necessary benefit of having clean hands or wearing gloves. This seeming minor change in surgical procedure resulted, I think, in saving more lives than any other procedure ever invented. And it was mainly, really, from washing your hands before putting them into someone else’s body.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Architecture and Building — Medicine, History of — Social History