Memoirs of a Loosh

Moving

2009-10-16T22:37:00.000-05:00

Just a note...

I'm merging all the old content of this old blog, Memoirs of a Loosh, into my new blog, Chicago Textures, located at http://chicagotextures.blogspot.com . Posts will be deleted off this blog as they reappear there. I plan on updating and improving them as I go. Please come visit me there!!

House of Clay

2006-12-29T20:49:00.000-06:00

I've returned to Oklahoma for Christmas, and elected to use the time to look at some great architecture. Oklahoma? Architecture? you may ask. Well, yes, the state doesn't have much to brag about...but we do have Bruce Goff. He created a house just 15 miles from here in Sapulpa, OK. Well, not exactly him. It was as true a partnership between the architect and a creative genius client as ever I have seen.

I got very lucky as the owners of this, the Frank house, were home, had the house open, and more than happy to show it off. But...I didn't get pictures (I don't carry my camera everywhere, and I felt extremely lucky to be there anyway), so I shamelessly stole the pictures on this post from the site that popped up on Google Images. So, you'll have to take my words for it.

The house was built between 1955-57 from Mr. Frank, National Small Businessman of the Year 1972 and a pillar of the Oklahoma business community. He ran Frankoma Pottery, which was a Sapulpa institution, and taught kids the craft from inside his house. The house is now maintained and inhabited by his daughters, who are awesome awesome people and I thank them so much for letting me see the place. It is true, it has seen better years, but for its age, it is well-kept, and, more importantly, they know the treasure they hold.

As you might expect, a great potter's house should be made of clay. Since Mr. Frank developed all his own glazes, they were used throughout the house on tiles and to glaze the bricks of the walls (note the blue-green tint of the exterior bricks). Most of the south elevation of the house is solid glass, with a glass door at its center. Glued onto that glass is 2500+ handmade ceramic tiles. Four of them make a repeating pattern.

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The floor plan of the house is a semi-circle situated about a drive cut into a hill. The windows of the living and bedrooms face north, down possibly one of the steepest hills in Oklahoma. An above-ground pool built upon a 10-foot wall of glazed bricks overlooks the hill. The hill is also beautifully terraced, all done by hand by Mr. Frank.

The front door, 1000 pounds yet light and easy to open, looks into the capeted living room. At its center is a fireplace with a chimney built into a skylight, much like an indian tepee, tall, of course, in order to make it draw well, though it never did perfectly. On one side of the living room are three bedrooms, each fitted with a wall that can open to the living room. The kitchen, also, is completely open. In essence, the house could be completely opened up - even the closets.

Bruce Goff made the point that closets and bathrooms clutter up a lot of space in the floor plan of a house. Therefore, he broke them off the main spine of the house, in a sense "outside" of the house. They are in the glazed brick columns on either side of the entrance you can see in the picture above. Each bathroom is glazed in a different color. The shower even has a skylight above it. Unbeknownst to bathers, these columns actually house huge planters on top, once home to yuccas.

Mr. Frank loved the house, as his daughters do now, and he worked within it. However, it's hard to imagine how, since it was never built with a pottery studio. That and a covered garage has been added, showing that all great architecture is adaptable, making the home a continued home of much artmaking.

And it shows. The place is filled with decades of art and travel souvenirs that fit together. Between the bedrooms are beams, built for the display of ceramics.

Unity Temple...Part 2

2006-11-25T22:15:00.000-06:00

And...some pictures of the gathering hall.

Also snapped some pictures of the exterior before heading quickly back to the L to get away from the big bad ugly suburbs :-).

Unity Temple

2006-09-04T12:25:00.000-05:00

Back in August, before leaving for my trip to Oklahoma, I sidled over to Oak Park to take a tour of Unity Temple. We had a HORRIBLE tour guide, definitely the worst I've ever met. She talked for 45 minutes about nothing, and then quit halfway through the tour, complaining of pains or something. But...I did get some nice pictures.

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^the-Sanctuary

Our "guide" went so far as to claim that Unity Temple was the "first modernist building in the world." Somehow It isn't thar, however, it is fairly modern for its time. Built in 1905 on an extremely modest budget on a narrow lot in the middle of Oak Park (as close to proto-Chicago in scale and construction as a suburb can get), it was constructed of concrete. Being a product of its time, however, the concrete is ornamented on the exterior columns of the building.

Frank Lloyd Wright was, of course, the architect. He was a member of the congregation at the unitarian church at the time, hence him getting the commission. This was one of his earliest reinforced concrete buildings. However, in typical Wright style, it has generous amounts of art glass. The nature-like greens, yellows, grays echo of his prairie style work.

More pictures later.

Urbanity

2006-07-21T23:26:00.000-05:00

I believe the word "brownfield" applies here. This building is the 4th architecture building, as of this fall. Designed in 1955 by Mies van der Rohe, it has seen better days.

A couple other interesting photos from today:

I love the contrast between the third-world look of this Chicago alleyway and the Sears Tower in the background:

Urbanity at its finest. A preschool with a playground on the roof.

Treasure Hunt

2006-07-13T21:06:00.000-05:00

The campus of IIT hasn't changed much in 35 years. It does now as it has since the 70s, have more space that it needs and so there's been no need to reclaim/re-explore old domains. As enrollment grows now, this is just starting to happen. The result? The school has become an amazingly good packrat. Nothing has been thrown out since the 60s, it seems. Except for Eames chairs (found in the dumpster during the renovation of Wishnick), of course.

On to the story:

While looking through the archives from 1928-1980 of the campus newspaper, the TechNews (then called the Technology News) I found this:

The article is dated from 1963. Apparently an alum donated a carillon (bells) to the university in 1950. Originally they were installed in the old Student Union, which we know now as Armour Mission, which was demolished in 1960 to make space for Galvin Library. The carillon chimed every hour and played the alma mater at 9am, noon, and 5pm. In typical IIT fashion, this being a tech school and also home of the inventor of magnetic tape, the carillon was electronic. It could use real chimes, keyboard, or play from a tape deck.

As another article dated in spring of 1963 states, the students loved the bells and asked that they be saved from the Student Union demolition and reinstalled somewhere else on campus. As this article states, they were, in November of 1963, installed in the basement of MC Building (now known as Perlstein Hall, named in the later 60s after a trustee). It speaks of plans to build a glass room around the carillon so that it could be admired by students.

The next we hear of it is 1978. The TechNews publishes an article (I can't find it online, but the university archivist showed it to me) that briefly states that the carillon was fixed, after stopping working in 1973. ...And that's the last we hear of it, from official sources, anyway.

So, I got curious. This being IIT, it had been entirely possible that the school threw it out at some point when it was feeling overly careless about its past. However, that would have required someone to lift the thing (which looks heavy) out of the basement, which seems against its whole packrat-like nature. So, I had high hopes.

So, I headed down to where it was supposed to be, near the southwest stairwell of Perlstein. The first time I went, back in May, I found nothing, and came back disappointed. This time, this Tuesday, however, I found this:

THE CARILLON IS THE GIFT OF
C. DONALD DALLAS
ALUMNUS AND TRUSTEE
OF
ILLINOIS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
IN MEM. OF HIS FRIEND AND CLASSMATE
CONRAD SIEPP
ARMOUR ACADEMY 1902

NINETEEN HUNDRED FIFTY

Well, the plaque was still there. However, from reading the 1978 article, I was convinced the carillon was on the landing of the stairwell, in what is now numbered as room 133. It was locked, so I had to enlist the help of the facilities department and eventually a somewhat mean-acting woman in the President's Office who is also building coordinator of Perlstein. She didn't have the keys but we ended up going down there to see what we could find anyway. So, we checked the unlocked rooms first.

This is what we saw upon entering room 034:

And there it was. Sitting in a dingy but very much used area of the building. According to a woman we talked to that discovered us looking at it down there, who came to IIT in 1975, it worked for only a few years after she came. Apparently, the professors in Wishnick (the speakers for it were mounted on the roof there) got annoyed with it so they shut it off.

Nowadays, I could see the students loving something like this. It would make this old urban campus feel more like a traditional university, yet it being electronic is totally IIT's style. However, the logistics of getting this thing working again are probably insurmountable. If you can see in the photographs, the tape deck uses a type of tape no longer widely available. Also, Wishnick is being renovated and so the speakers atop the roof were probably thrown away in the process. Not to mention the bureaucracy that would be involved in such an undertaking.

But, it's still very much here, seemingly untouched for the past 25 years. Cool, don't you think?

There's a lot more where that came from.