abandoned buildings

abandoned 01

What is the fascination with abandoned buildings?  There is certainly some attraction to the mystery and faint danger of these places, but I think there are darker forces at work as well.

In abandoned industrial sites, much of mystery of the place has to do with the fearful contrast of the quiet stillness of the place once so vibrant with noise and activity.  Of course this is also a confrontation with the humility of realizing that the promise and productivity of an industry or a hospital can be so swiftly displaced with the simple closing of the doors.  These places do seem so full of ghosts because so often the signs of human activity, the equipment and architectural elements that were designed to be engaged with the body, are still there, echoing the uses that have long since disappeared.  The door knobs and levers, the switches and furniture are all scaled for us, made for us, and are waiting for us to return.  I think this has much more to do with why these places attract us than the recognition of them as B-movie horror sets and gory extravaganzas.

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Of course there is a whole community of folks out there that explore and photograph these places, known as Urban Explorers or Urbex.  Their photos are all over the interwebz and they document more the desolation of these places than their lost grandeur.   These folks and their photos are more akin to dystopian novelists than the pioneering work of the early preservationists who documented the abandonment and destruction of these places as a last desperate attempt to pull the handbrake of so-called progress.

For my part, what is so intriguing about especially abandoned houses are the fading signs of seemingly tranquil domesticity decaying with time.

abandoned 02

These abandoned houses make you feel small, in the way that walking around an unfamiliar city for the first time does.  There is clearly a continuum that you are a part of, that you recognize, but that clearly posits you as just a tiny, maybe unconsequential part of the whole. That is something devastating to the ego and thrillingly liberating, especially for this architect.  It is a kind of existentialism laid bare and maybe even exposed in its own self-importance.

Preservation worth preserving

MTG328

I recently attending some sessions of the Colorado Preservation Inc.'s Saving Places 2012 Conference.  As usual with these things there are plenty of educational sessions that you can geek-out on various preservation topics, from process-heavy advice for preservation commissions to very technical analysis of window retrofitting techniques.

For me the most interesting event was the Saving Places luncheon.  (Mind you not the food.)  The keynote speaker was James Loewen, sociologist and author.  He gave an impassioned plea for inclusion and precision in the presentation of historic places, especially the painful omissions and/or outright misrepresentations of Native Americans and women in historical markers and interpretations.  A read through his Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong will be an interesting read.

The other event of the luncheon was the video presentation of the yearly "most endangered places" designated projects across Colorado.  These brief presentations  highlight more the stories of the people attempting to save the featured building or structure than concentrating on only the physical aspects of the resource itself.

What I was left with was how interesting and frankly touching are the stories of the people for whom an effort of preservation has become a meaningful aspect of their lives.  As an architect I think it is very easy for me to concentrate on the physical building and its character and details rather than the human aspects of the history of the place.  What is surprising here however is that I am not as interested in the story of the historical persons who might have lived in the building but rather the stories of the people for whom the effort of saving the building has become an important part of their lives.  The inclusion that James Loewen makes such an elegant plea for should include the second story of the place or building - the effort of the people to save or at least somehow mark the place.

Como roundhouse

Preservation, at least at these kind of gatherings and conferences, has become such an institutionalized and professional pursuit that it is easy to forget that its genesis was, and often continues to be, a grassroots, activist-lead endeavor.  I have written about Richard Nickel's pioneering efforts in Chicago and at the conference I heard touching stories of some folks down in Pueblo who have embraced the preservation of their down-at-the-heels neighborhood for whom  this effort has become the catalyst of self-discovery and community pride.

Richard Nickel -01

As a board member of my local preservation commission in a wealthy community, the projects I see are largely opulent proposed additions to fabulous, and fabulously expensive, large and expansive Victorian houses.  Our role is more often that of the preservation police, guarding and protecting historic districts from misguided contractors and careless homeowners.  Preservation as an aspect of positive community activism seems like a distant planet.

For some, preservation is rooted in identity and feels like a life and death struggle, a small cry against the erasure of self and place.  That is a kind of preservation worth preserving.

Haertling's Menkick House for sale

Menkick House 02

An astute client pointed out that the magnificent house on Green Rock Drive, the Menkick House, by Charles Haertling, is up for sale.

Completed in 1970, the Menkick House is among Haertling's finest works and ranks alongside his Volsky House, Benton House and Willard House as one of the finest examples of late Modernist Organic architecture in the United States.  Placed against a large, vertical rock outcrop, the Menkick House dramatically highlights this with its expressive horizontal emphasis.  Heartling wisely located much of the plan of the house on a lower level so that the overall size of the house does not overpower the presence of the rock and from the street a great balance is achieved.

Menkick interior 01

Menkick plan

The plan and building form are reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian work in the middle period of his career and the house's use of the large rock outcrop is a vague allusion to Wright's similar use in Fallingwater.  However, Haertling's house sits rather comfortably within a relatively dense suburban neighborhood on the edge of the foothills.  It is difficult to imagine Fallingwater with any adjacent structures and in fact the later guest house designed by Wright does seem to crowd the expansive plan of the original house.

Menkick House 01

Menkick aerial

One can only hope that the new owners will treat the house with the respect it is due.  As the building sits in Boulder County, just outside of city limits, it does not come under the potential protection of the city's Landmarks Board.  The County's record of preserving Haertling's work is a bit blemished with the allowed demolition of the albeit much compromised house in Eldorado Springs designed by Haertling and Tician Papachristou.

From the street, the house looks to be in excellent condition and I know some work has been done on the interior over the years.  Someone will get to own a really great piece of not only Boulder history, but one of the finest houses of its era in the United States.

Some photos 'borrowed' from the great website on Haertling, Atomix, and ModMidMod.

San Luis Valley - chapels

San Luis chapel 03

I have finally gotten around to processing some more film from a very rewarding trip to the San Luis Valley in southern Colorado last year.

San Luis chapel 04

San Luis chapel 02

San Luis chapel 01

I will certainly be going back there again this year, later in the Spring when the heavy snows have past but before the major snowmelt swells all the local rivers and streams.  I hope to have much more interesting historical and cultural info on the various locales  than in the past.

mississippi river mansions

Cairo map

On a narrow spit of land, at the confluence of two mighty rivers, lies ancient Cairo.  Not the one in Africa, with pyramids and camels, rather the one along the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, Cairo, Illinois.

Cairo has seen better days, the 1920 population of 15,000 having dropped below 3,000 souls.  Once a shipping center strategically located at the two rivers, the city later developed as a rail center, consolidating its status as a bustling nexus of commerce.  During this period of prosperity, merchants and shippers built themselves grand mansions and protected them with ever-increasing levees.  However, as commerce increasingly hitched a ride on trucks and roadways, ever more efficient and larger bridges were constructed across the Mississippi River, by-passing Cairo.  This loss of trade and a history of violent racial interactions isolated the city and like many cities in the turbulent late 1960's lead to white flight and subsequent further loss of businesses and population.  Rapid economic decline soon followed and with it came its usual fearsome playmates, crime and poverty.

Cairo mansion 02

Cairo mansion 03

Cairo now is a shell of its past former glory and the old mansions and former Custom House still haunt the city's architecture and memory.  Even when restored and blessed with careful stewards, the grand houses of the wealthy businessmen only accentuate the despair of the place.  Hundreds of years after the Fall of Rome, when cattle grazed in the Forum and moldering ornate capitals and pediments lay half-buried, what did the contemporary Romans imagine of their past? Were they proud of their heritage crumbling under their feet or burdened by it, unable to synthesize their current plight with the desperate melancholy of a past long since gone.  And once mighty Cairo, by-passed by technology and progress, torn apart by race intolerance and violence, has to live with the mocking edifices of past glory glaring with unapproving eyes, fully restored in body but not spirit.

Cairo building

midwestern bridges

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Before interstate engineers replaced our river crossings with solid, straight, under-supported super-slabs of concrete highways, spidery steel bridges carried us across the impediments to the relentless to- and fro- of an increasingly mobile society.

steel bridge 01

When you pass through the steel rib cages of these older bridges, especially the narrow, long spans, crossing a river feels like a celebration, an exciting transformation from one place to the next.  The uniformity of road surface, side rails and driving surface of concrete pier bridges celebrate only the efficiency of travel, not the journey.

steel bridge 02

These bridges make a space amongst themselves, an interstitial place between here and over-there.  Because the structure of the bridge is above you and around you, you don't simple glide across a river or steep valley, but you feel the suspension from gravity of that leap across space.