Agora Photo Archive

I have returned from a productive summer field season and a rather neglected blog. One of my summer goals included closer looks in Greek archival collections: The American School of Classical Studies at Athens, the Gennadeion, The British School in Athens, and the Corinth Excavation Archives. James Herbst (Corinth Excavations Architect and Drawings Archivists) helped me conceptualize a project involving the 19th-century houses that American archaeologists tore down in the '30s at the Athenian Agora. As an urban excavation, the Athenian Agora had to purchase a number of properties in order to excavate below them. This necessary demolition has not been received positively by contemporary Athenians. Interestingly enough, those houses were carefully documented before demolition. In a paradoxical twist, the architectural and photographic record of the demolished houses constitute the best preserved record of pre-Modernist Athens. Inevitably, these houses would have been demolished by developers in the 1960s and 1970s and replaced with multi-story apartment blocks. In contrast to the developers, the archaeologists documented their deconstruction in painstaking detail.

Like Corinth's, the Athenian Agora's archives have been digitized and available to the public, see http://agathe.gr. They are a great new resource for historians of photography and urbanism. Browsing through the photos, one notices glimpses of daily life. I cannot help to think of Roland Barthes "punctum" conceived soon after his mother's death, see, Camera Lucida (1980). My mother was raised in this neighborhood and  could easily be one of the children shown in the photos. Above, you see daily life in Areopagou Street photographed in 1937  [Image 1997.19.0002]. Beyond their obvious architectural information, these photos capture wonderful historical issues ranging from identity to politics. One of my favorite photos below, shows a family that has poked its heads to see the American photographer capture their home before demolition. On the right corner of the wall, a prominent stencil shows the hammer-and-sickle and the message "Vote Communist." A whole thesis could be written on this image. Masonry, closed shutters, political affiliation, the four women and the invisible photographer engage in a moment of indecision. [Image 1997.19.0146]

To see more photos of houses, see here.

Broken Masculinities

Broken doll. Broken masculinities. The recession haunts Lancaster's urban edge where impromptu possibilities intersect with hyped scenarios. A child's doll, super hero, urban warrior with ancient Greek meander inscribed on his skin, while hip-hop pants fall fashionably below the boxer shorts line. Decapitated posturing, hopefully no violence.

Location: 40°03'09.56"N, 76°18'43.43"W
Collection: May 1, 2012

Lancaster Screw: World as Studio

Edge city, where working class quarters ca. 1930 met linoleum headquarters of the world. The linoleum factory has all but left. Corporate headquarters converted to condos with employment services remaining in an office on the first floor. Multiple blocks of parking now serving the unemployed and impromptu activities. Illicit auto repair operations rise behind rented garages, not unusual considering that this spot was also the city's automobile service core with car dealerships still evident. At this parking lot, I picked up a beautiful screw with a tinted yellow handle.

"Today any location in the world is your studio" boasts LOWEL, the company that produced the screw. Once mounting some portable lighting equipment, my screw testifies to an ephemeral transformation of night into day that grows on the liminal spaces of the postindustrial landscape.


Location: 40°03'07.26"N, 76°18'44.94"W
Collection: April 18, 2012

Kick Out the Jams Coincidence

I have figured out the meaning of the 45 RPM Spider fragment deposited on Sonic's grave, or at least, I have added another subtext. As it turns out, Rhino Records released an exclusive 45 RPM vinyl (only 6,800 copies) of MC5's "Kick Out the Jams" coupled by Afrika Bambaataa's cover of the song. See details here. Strangely enough, the release of this record occurred on the same day of my visit, April 21, celebrating Record Store Day. The vinyl's promotional literature and cover includes the iconic Spider. Hence it's entirely conceivable that the Spider fragment was deposited by an MC5 fan to celebrate the re-issue of this song. Just a hypothesis

Broken Spider

The small offering over Sonic's grave is known as the Spider. It was designed by Thomas Hutchison for RCA in the 1960s. It served as a converter for 45 RPM records, a format invented by RCA in 1949 to replace the cumbersome 78 RPM. Most fittingly, the Spider deposited in Sonic's grave is broken. The original triskelion has lost one of its legs making the object's secret biography even more perplexing. Pervasive in the listening habits of North Americans, the Spider has become iconic of the era of singles. Actually, I didn't appreciate the magnitude of this iconography until I opened today's Intelligencer Journal/Lancaster New Era on p. A12 and saw Walt Handelsman's tribute to Dick Clark, who died last week. Handelsman is a Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist. The original tribute was published in Newsday (Apr. 19, 2012).

Like the Spider at Elmwood Cemetery, Handelsman Spider is also funerary in nature. The Spider here becomes iconic of Dick Clark's era of American Bandstand that was syndicated on ABC from 1957 to 1987. Interestingly enough for my readers of Punk Archaeology, American Bandstand began in Philadelphia and was recorded in the studios of WFIL on 46th and Market. Designed in 1947, the original building still stands in all its modern glory with a huge satellite antenna on its roof.

Sonic's MC5 appears at the very til end of the Dick Clarke era. It's rock n' roll at its best but contains the seeds of the demise of rock n' roll's mainstream. Thus, in its truncated form, Sonic's offering becomes difficult to recognize, a fragment that allows entry into melancholy while also asserting a reflexive imbalance. If the Spider is the generational litmus test for 1960s rock n' roll Top 40s mainstream, one must wonder what may have been the pilgrim's intentions by depositing a 45 Spider on Sonic's grave. MC5 was clearly shut out of American Bandstand. Their first album (Kick Out the Jams) was released in 1969 as an LP not a 45. The original record was pulled from the stores because it had the word "Motherfucker" on the album cover. Detroit's major department store refused to sell the record and Elektra dropped the MC5 from their contract as a result.

Sonic Archaeology

Last weekend, I was in Detroit for the annual meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians, organizing the panel "From Idea to Building: Ancient and Medieval Architectural Process." Another priority in my Detroit visit was to follow up some ideas on the Punk Archaeology project. I wanted to investigate the topographies of memory related to Fred "Sonic" Smith, founder of MC5, godfather of punk and late husband of Patti Smith. Visiting sites of memory is appropriate to Smith and her recent exhibit Camera Solo at the Wadsworth Athenaeum (and soon moving to Detroit). I have already blogged about Smith, Whitman and archaeology here.

Fred Smith died in 1994 from a heart attack at the age of 45. Patti Smith writes about the devastation of this event in her memoir Just Kids and discusses in the documentary Dream of Life. Sonic was buried at Elmwood Cemetery in Detroit, and I wanted to visit the unique funerary monument that marks his grave. It comprises two vertical rock slabs inscribed with "Sonic" and "Frederick D. Smith. Musician XX Century." The monoliths are small and disappear among the grand nineteenth-century monuments. But they are powerful in their sublime physicality. 

As I began to sketch for myself the elements of the monument, I detected a scatter of offerings on the ground. Clearly, I was not the first pilgrim at Sonic's tomb. Trying not to disturb the surface, I located six objects: five coins and one blue plastic object, which seemed so familiar but which I couldn't immediately identify. I placed an image on Facebook with a question and my colleague, the philosopher David Merli, immediately identified it as a 45rpm converter. There is much to say about the site of Sonic's tomb. For the time being, I'll post these few documents, including the sketch of the finds.

Dream Lancaster

143 N. Water St., Lancaster, Pa.

Concrete Byzantium

In 1908, Henry C. Mercer wrote an essay “Where Concrete Stands for Concrete,” in Cement Age 6 (1908) pp. 9-20. Published in an engineering journal, the essay has been forgotten by scholarship. I would argue that it must be included in the anthologies of modern architectural theory. The essay tackles the perennial conflict between modern material (concrete) and medieval crafts (ceramic tiles). Rather than covering up the concrete with plaster or paneling, Mercer argues that the concrete should remain exposed. To hide concrete’s imperfections behind a false layer of false perfection was not only dishonest, but a lost aesthetic opportunity. By theorizing the aesthetic qualities of concrete, Mercer becomes a forefather of Brutalism, which blossomed half a century later. Rather than hiding the concrete, Mercer thought that it could be elevated into a nobler material if decorated by the similarly earthy medium of ceramic tiles. He recommended covering no more than 10% of the surface area with colored tiles. The essay is illustrated with an application of this strategy in a Philadelphia club house. Mercer’s idea was soon fulfilled in his Fonthill construction.

Equally important in Mercer’s solution to concrete is the choice of historical tiles that would complement the new form, namely Byzantine decorative patterns. These abstract Byzantine borders are placed on the critical edges of the interior space, such as capitals for the concrete piers, fireplaces, and are complemented by Gothic borders. My sketch is based on Fig. III “Column of Byzantine pattern in original plastered concrete supporting heavy ceiling.” I love the casualness by which an iron skillet is hung on the pier. Mercer replicated this arrangement in the Saloon of his house, whose electrical illumination I discussed in the earlier posting "Illuminating Byzantium". Here, too, an electrical light bulb adorns the exterior and tightens the conceptual depth of the installation.

In addition to its pioneering significance on the theories of form and function, Mercer emerges as an interesting spokesman for a Byzantinism radically different from the Byzantium that figures in Louis Comfort Tiffany work. This other and more famous figure of the American Arts-and-Crafts also experimented with the visual qualities of Byzantine surface and the optical effects of glass and mosaic. For Tiffany, however, Byzantium was not a 10% application, but a complete cover-up of every visible surface. If Mercer's Byzantium is about conflict and dialectic, Tiffany's Byzantium is about surface and illusion. If Mercer's Byzantium is haptic and embodied, Tiffany's Byzantium is optic and disembodied.

Tiffany's concrete column (ca. 1905) is exactly contemporary to Mercer's. Rather than exposing the cement, Tiffany covered it up with favrile-glass mosaic and topped it with a plaster capital. The column now resides at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, but it used to stand in the Tiffany Studios showroom at Madison Avenue and 47th Street.

Hence another distinction between Mercer and Tiffany is one of exposure, or between Bucks County, Pennsylvania and Madison Avenue, New York. Mercer never reached the commercial success and visibility of Tiffany's.

Illuminating Byzantium

Henry C. Mercer is a central figure in the development of the American Arts & Crafts movement. He is doubly important as an archaeologist. He excavated native American sites, directed the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology, and began a field of vernacular tool studies. His life highlights the intimate connection between the epistemologies of archaeology and the arts as they were defined by Charles Norton, whose arts curriculum informed Mercer's rebellion.

Mercer is best known for his revival of Pennsylvania German pottery traditions at the Moravian Tile Works in Doylestown. What is less known are his researches in Byzantine pottery. In the tradition of John Ruskin (via Norton), Byzantium was instrumental in the conception of the new aesthetics of handicraft, labor ethics, and the attention to process over product.

Last week, F&M art history majors, minors, and faculty visited Mercer’s architectural masterpiece, his concrete house Fonthill (1908-12). One of the many things that struck my attention during this visit is the incorporation of electrical illumination within the architecture. This is particularly evident in the Saloon room. The octagonal concrete piers are hollow. Electrical wiring travels through the cavity and then folds out at the height of the capital. The wiring then drips down the exterior of the column. Fastened to the concrete, the wiring concludes with a bare light bulb that illuminates the room about 7 ft above ground level. My sketch above tries to illustrate the arrangement.

The tiles, which are more Byzantine than Pennsylvania German in effect, are thus illuminated by modernity’s amenities. The simplicity of the electrical wiring that travels through the interior cavity and emerges out of the pier capitals is profound. As the piers are concrete masonry, the bare light bulb rests directly on the pier. It is easy to miss this architectural detail. For me, it exemplifies modernity’s illuminated Byzantium, where the rich aesthetic surfaces of glazed pottery reflects the shimmer of bare incandescent light bulbs. The nakedness of the light and the bareness of the concrete are surreal in their simplicity and their tactile emanations.

Peschke in the Philadelphia Inquirer

The rediscovery of Georg von Peschke has been magical. The Philadelphia Inquirer has called my show "excellent and enterprising." I couldn't be prouder. Now that we've put Peschke back on the map, I hope that other scholars will join in the profound questions that Peschke raises: transnational bohemia. the archaeology of Greek life, Byzantium and the vernacular, the interface of positivism with fantasy, etc. Artemis Leontis (University of Michigan) started the discussion last week in her lecture, "Greek Dress and the Embodied Archaeology of Eva Palmer Sikelianos."

Acrocorinth 1920s

The Peschke show has forced me to revisit some canonical images of Greek landscapes and I have revisited one of the most important photographic publications on Greece, the Wasmuth volume on Greece, Hans Holdt and Hugo von Hoffmanstahl, Griechenland: Baukunst, Landschaft, Volksleben (Berlin, 1923). This volume constitutes a landmark in the history of visualizing Greece within the German tradition. The subtitle tickled me a bit because it corresponds closely to the thematic divisions that I have given to Peschke's ouevre in the show: Buildings, Landscapes, Folk Life.

Thrilled to find a copy of Griechenland in F&M's library, I sought out photographic analogs for Peschke's placement in the landscape. We know that Peschke used photography in his archaeological and artistic work, and must have been cognizant of the German photographic tradition of a decade earlier. I discovered, for instance, that Acrocorinth (1932) was painted at the same location as Griechenland, pl. 68. In designing the exhibit at F&M, I had placed this photo in proximity to the painting. Holdt's photo and Peschke's paintings, moreover, have proven to be invaluable documents in the on-going archaeological survey of Acrocorinth. I was thrilled that a bunch of archaeologists that were attending Masons at Work: Architecture and Construction in the Premodern World last weekend made it to the show at Bryn Mawr and will be able to use Peschke's paintings to reconstruct missing walls. Stay tuned for more on this topic.

Students Blog

A public blog has been an integral part of how I teach my history of architecture at Lancaster. Rather than submitting material on paper, students post a weekly progress report on their research. I have found this to be successful in two ways. The public nature of the blog means that the local community can take part in the conversation. On numerous occasions, experts from the community have engaged with the students. In one case, we discovered a previously unknown architect and private archival collections. The second reason why a blog works better than a paper is that students are able to share their primary sources and their insights. Knowing that the whole world is watching also raises the bar of accountability.

My seminar this semester is on The Master Builders of Lancaster. All the students have been researching a relatively unknown Lancaster architect C. Emlen Urban. Our class blog is here. For the first time in my teaching career, I have converted a student to blogging. John Hausladen, a senior at F&M, has just begun Artistry and Architecture where he posts his drawings of Victorian houses. I share with you John's drawing of the The Stiegerwalt House (1894-1896) by Urban at the top of this posting

Peschke Opening

The Peschke opening at Bryn Mawr was pretty amazing. I will look back at this evening as a landmark in my academic life. Thanks to all the wonderful lenders and museum staff that helped me put Peschke on the art-historical map. The festivities began with my lecture, "Georg von Peschke: The Archaeology of Greek Life."

With Tracey Cullen, editor of Hesperia. In 2007, Tracey insisted that I track down the Peschke estate in order get copyright permission to use a Peschke reproduction. This lead to my discovery of the Peschke family in California and the beginning of a wonderful relationship.

With Brian Wallace, the new Curator and Academic Liaison for Art and Artifact Collections at Bryn Mawr College. Brian began his new job in January and inherited the project in process. He shepherded its completion victoriously. I'm proud that this was his first show at Bryn Mawr.

Pamela Sinkler-Todd (daughter of Homer Thompson and Dorothy Burr Thompson) with Marianna Monaco (daughter of Georg von Peshcke).

Of course, none of this would have been possible without the support of this lady, Celina Gray
The genius of Steve Tucker, exhibitions designer. Steve has done extraordinary projects at Bryn Mawr, the Rosenbach Library, the Philadelphia Library Company, etc.

Peschke at Bryn Mawr College

COLORS OF GREECE:
THE ART & ARCHAEOLOGY OF GEORG VON PESCHKE

Click here for virtual exhibit and here for program information. Events:

Georg von Peschke: The Archaeology of Greek Life
Kostis Kourelis
Assistant Professor of Art History, Franklin & Marshall College
Exhibition Opening and Lecture
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
4:30 pm
Carpenter Library 21

Dr. Kourelis, the curator of the exhibition on Peschke, will speak about Peschke's work both as a painter and as an archaeological illustrator in Greece in the 1930s. A reception will follow the lecture.

Greek Dress and the Embodied Archaeology of Eva Palmer Sikelianos
Artemis Leontis
Associate Professor of Modern Greek, University of Michigan
Lecture
Thursday, April 5, 2012
4:30 pm
Carpenter Library 21

In conjunction with the exhibition Colors of Greece, Dr. Leontis, a scholar of modern Greece and Greek diaspora culture, will give a lecture on the subject of her current book, Eva Palmer Sikelianos (1874-1952), BMC class of 1900, and on Palmer's groundbreaking work as a creator of Greek dress for theatrical performances, including the famous reenactments of Delphic Festivals in 1927 and 1930. A reception will follow the lecture.

The Dog at the Mill: Courtenay

My colleague Dorothy Merritts sent me a fascinating response to last posting The Dog at the Mill. I quote here: "I checked your blog and am intrigued. In fact, I did a search on dog and mill, carving, and the name of the artist (Courtenay) who carved the mantel at the Powell house, and you will be amazed at what I found: http://www.chipstone.org/publications/1996AF/Randall/1996RandallIndex.html. This particular website indicates that there are links among Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac, Aesop's fable "The Dog and the Meat", mills, millers, iron forges, Stiegel, and more. The iron forges, incidentally, also built dams to use water power to run bellows, turn various things, etc. All iron forges have dams and led to the industrialization of waterways, even though the use of water power had a different outcome than, say, a flour or fulling mill. Regardless though, a stream was dammed and a pond formed that could trap sediment, burying original wetlands, and later leading to deeply incised powerful streams where meadows once were the habitat of bog turtles and sedges." Thank you Dorothy

The image above is clearly the same as the one at the Powel House. It's provenance is amazingly enough from Lancaster County. "Front plate of a ten-plate stove, marked “h. w. stiegel/ 1769/elizabeth furnace,” Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, ca. 1769. (Courtesy, Hershey Museum, Hershey, Pennsylvania.) Courtenay undoubtedly carved the pattern in Philadelphia."

The Dog at the Mill: Powel House and the Environment

Dorothy Merritts and Robert Walter, my colleagues at the Department of Earth and Environment, have been doing some amazing research on the aggressive manipulation of the natural environment in 18th and 19th century Pennsylvania. They have been studying the proliferation of mills through the country-side and the radical alteration of streams.

The Powel House is one of the most historical interiors of Philadelphia. It is important both for its historical value but also for its contribution to the development of the preservation movement in the 1920s. One room, for example, formed the core of the Metropolitan Museum's American Wing when it opened in 1924.

The parlor from the second floor of the Powel House was installed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Room 287) by Fiske Kimbal, a preservation pioneer. Fittingly, the room is right next door to the installation of a Pennsylvania German kitchen that belonged to a prosperous miller from Milbach, in Lebanon County (Room 285). Looking at the Powel House's Baroque decoration, I noticed a wonderful detail at the center of the parlor's mantelpiece. It shows a pastoral scene with a dog drinking from a stream beyond a water mill. With Merritts/Walter's geological research in mind, I realized that this was more than an idyllic scene, but rather a testament of bold environmental interventions. This is an image of aggressive exploitation.

Dorothy Merritts was the recipient of the 2010 annual Dewey award for Outstanding Scholarship. She was honored at Common Hour, where she presented her work on the geology of 18th-century mills (see lecture here). Merritts has also produced a great array of undergraduate papers, a regular presence in F&M's student research fairs.

Islamic Philadelphia: Hood Cemetery

Restoring old plaster involves those magic plaster washers that only Kilian's at Chestnut Hill carries. Loaded with plaster washers and heavy bags of plaster dust, I decided to take the long way home, and drive the entire length of Germantown Avenue, one of my favorite American streets (where you can see the discordant clash between the 18th and 21st centuries).

At 4909 Germantown Ave. I came across a monument that I had never seen before, the gate for the Hood Cemetery. It was designed by William L. Johnston in 1849-50. Although Baroque in every other respect, it features a horse-shoe arch of clear Islamic origins. Thus, I have found another specimen for my collection of Islamic Philadelphia (see here). And as far as I can tell, this is the earliest example of this genre and predates the other examples by two decades. This early instance suggests that an Orientalist iconography first entered Philadelphia via funerary architecture. Browsing through the Fine Arts Library at Penn, I also discovered a 1968 dissertation that deals with Islamic influences in American architecture: Gerald S. Bernstein, “In Pursuit of the Exotic: Islamic Forms in Nineteenth-Century American Architecture,” University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D. dissertation (Philadelphia, 1968)

Here is my ongoing list of Islamic Philadelphia monuments:

William Johnston, Hood Cemetery Gate, Germantown (1850)
Vorhees Mausoleum, Laurel Hill Cemetery (1861)
Benson Mausoleum, Laurel Hill Cemetery (1868)
Frank Furness, Gibson House (1870)
Frank Furness, Rodeph Shalom Synagogue (1871)
Herman Schwarzmann, Horticultural Hall (1876)
Wilson Brothers, Joseph T. Potts House (1876)

The image above is from the official HABS survey of the monument. The photo was taken by Jack Boucher, ca. 1973.

Gérôme: Portal of the Green Mosque

Philadelphia Museum of Art
Room 159, Notes

Jean-Léon Gérôme
Portal of the Green Mosque
(Sentinel at the Sultan's Tomb)
c. 1870

Crossing of unusually long firearm with sword representing the two domains of the Ottoman empire (tradition and modernity). Placement of sentinel along right opening creates a suggestion of human support for the architectural extravagance. But the attached column is broken at the right jamb, missing its capital, which we see on the other jamb, where column shaft is gone but capital still survives. The molding on the lower right runs perpendicular to the white tunic of the sentinel, reminding us of the organic origins of classical decoration. The sentinel is engulfed in blackness of half-opened door -- death of the sultan -- behind him. The black sucks his white profile like a black hole. Sentinel becomes a figure that guards and negotiates between the living and the dead. The alert black dog of Hades contrasts with the sleeping white dog in the street.

Green Mosque (Yesil Cami), Bursa, 1420. See here for images of restored portal.

Brady Tomb: Old Cathedral Cemetery

On my way back from laying out the Peschke show at Bryn Mawr College, I stopped at the Old Cathedral Cemetery, next to Our Mother of Sorrows church on 48th & Lancaster Ave. There's a monument there that matches a type I referred to as "Steeple Cross Grave Monuments" (Dec. 14, 2011). The tomb belongs to Owen Brady (+1891) and his wife Mary (+1887). On the right side of the monument, two additional family members are marked, John I. Brady (+1907) and his wife Mary (+1906).

This tomb is much much larger than the other two at Laurel Hill and Woodland. The columns are a red granite and the cross is engraved with a cross, an inscription "Dux Lux Rex Pax" and a crown. The base of the monument contains a small identifies its maker as "Billings & Co., Phila." This little detail should offer some insights on the dissemination of this type, its appearance and disappearance in the 1880s and 1890s. I did a quick sketch of the whole monument below:

Splitting Architectural Time

During the last couple of days, I've been working on an essay for Philagrafika on Patricia Gómez and María Jesús González's installation Doing Time / Depth of Surface at the Moore College of Art Galleries. This is truly a ground-breaking project that blurs the lines between historic preservation and art installation. I have finished a draft of the essay that you can read here. Any comments are welcome.