art school

ARCHITECTURE + CHOCOLATE

/ janpriddyoregon / 4 Comments

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My dad used to tell a story about his first job at a California aircraft company. The new head offices had a problem. The roof leaked on the President’s desk and the famous architect who designed the structure refused to address the problem. “It’s a work of art,” he is supposed to have said. The CEO tore the entire building down.

I was reminded of this while reading an article in The Washington Post about how office layouts might change to ensure distancing and a healthier work environment.

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A student took a photo of me into Hagia Sophia so I could say I’d been there.

Gustav Pundt was among my favorite professors at the University of Washington. Hermann Johannes Gustav Pundt (28 August 1928 – 15 September 2000) was a leading architectural historian and Professor in the University of Washington Department of Architecture. I took his architecture history series in 1971, I think, and he introduced me to such wonders as Hagia Sophia (in Istanbul, Turkey), which is among the beautiful buildings in the world. His photographs of the interior, taken at a time when it was forbidden to take such photos, completely captured my imagination. Light flooded from a circle of windows at the base of the main dome. Magic. I have wanted to visit ever since. I really did love the guy for that.

As a student himself, Pundt participated in the restoration of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House (1909, above) in Chicago, a beautiful building in the Arts and Crafts style, showing the influence of his Mentor, Louis Sullivan (the “father of skyscrapers”, but also a designer who appreciated detail). True, the Robie House was designed to have no blinds or curtains on any room, the leaded patterns dividing the glass was intended to ensure privacy. How did that work for the occupants? You decide. 

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Windows in the Robie House. Most of the window is clear with only small bits of colored glass.

I was not a fan of the architect. The Johnson Wax Headquarters (1936) was a nightmare to my way of thinking: too many specialized brick forms (over a hundred molds which looked less innovative than inefficient to my 19-year-old eye), the glass tower continuously leaked (this was later corrected by the Johnson Wax company’s innovations, not Wright’s), Wright’s special three-legged chairs fell over, and it included the dehumanizing “open office” plan he’d used in an earlier office building.

The Larkin Administration Building (1906) is touted as the “first modern office” with entire floors left wide open for secretarial pools. If you have seen The Apartment with Shirley McLaine and Jack Lemmon, the open space where Lemmon is working at the beginning of the film is Wright’s fault. This “regimented approach, where workers sat in lines of desks with managers in offices surrounding them”—what fun. Today it’s blamed for the spread of colds and other viruses in offices. How to prevent the spread of covid19 in such wide open spaces?

The saddest part of this might be that I know all this because Pundt told his students all about Wright, warts and all. He loved the guy whose architecture placed function below innovation. So I did not agree about Wright. I want to have my cake and eat it. Give me a beautiful building that is also a pleasure to live and work in.

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Wright proved that his beautiful reverse “lily pad” columns could support weight. He did not prove that people enjoyed working in what he envisioned would resemble a “factory floor.”

Don’t even get me started on Falling Water, with the dysfunctional stairs to the water and unremitting damp (again, a detail thanks to his admirer—it was an unliveable house). Beautiful site and stonework, but, like so many of Wright’s designs, it fails its primary purpose. It’s a showcase, not a functional building. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is showy too and notable for forcing visitors to look at art from a slanted floor. Yeah, I’m sure it looked spacey and futuristic in 1959. Now, to me, it’s just an ugly airport parking garage or an out-of-scale child’s toy.

Speaking of frustration and scale: We are waiting for two and a quarter pounds of chocolate to arrive.

I bought three bars of Theo baking chocolate back in December. Organic, gluten- and dairy-free, Fair Trade, and made in Seattle. Practically local. I meant to make vegan chocolate pots de creme when our sons and their families came for Twelfth Night. I ran out of cooking motivation before I got to the pots, however, and the chocolate remained in my baking cabinet until last week. I used two huge chocolate bars and pecans to make brownies last week. They came out so thick it was hard to get my mouth around them, and dark, very dark. I love dark chocolate. We each had a square the other evening and again yesterday because I put some in the freezer before we could gorge.

There is also a single 4-ounce bar left in the drawer, so I went to the Theo website to order more baking chocolate. It’s sold out. I checked Amazon, but they only have the same high cocoa content in 3-ounce bars. Back to Theo. Sadly, this Seattle company sells their candy cheaper on Amazon than directly from their own website. I ordered a dozen bars last weekend. Yes, I am weak.

Amazon Prime shipped FedEx. You probably see where this is going. Oakland. Seattle to Oakland, so far. Had it shipped USPS, I’d have my chocolate by now. It would have gone Seattle to the regional center in Washington, to Portland, and here. Three days. Instead, it shipped right past Oregon to California. If it were in Oregon by now (630 miles back north), that would not be so bad, but you know FedEx doesn’t work that way.

This is my current entertainment: watching FedEx ship my chocolate around western states. It left Oakland yesterday afternoon. Idaho next? Eastern Oregon? I was actually looking forward to finding it had gone to Wyoming, but this morning it is in Portland. There is still time for the order to wander through a few small towns or head back to Washington state. FedEx can prove that the meandering delivery routes are actually functional. Unlike some of Wright’s designs that were unusable, my chocolate will arrive at my house after it takes a tour, and is functional. I will make more brownies.

I am easily entertained.

BECOMING

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Our tenant, Greg, brings his cactus outdoors when it blooms, a rare semi-yearly event.

One day my favorite design teacher, Hazel Koenig, saw me walking to a metals class in the Art Building. She stopped me to ask if I would be willing to help out at a state art education conference. That would have been about 1974. Later, she got me my first teaching job. I thought of myself as an artist, and I still do. My work space where I write and make things is not a “craft area” as someone recently called it. It is studio space, work space. Calling myself a writer was harder somehow that calling myself an artist. I was exhibiting while I was still in high school. It took years to become a published writer of fiction. I had many articles published in dog magazines, I didn’t count them.

Calling myself a teacher also took time. I came to teaching relatively late in my arts education. I had avoided thinking too much about how I would make my living. I was in a five-year BFA program, most of the way through a BFA in Ceramic Art, when I “moved up the hill” from the Fire Arts building to the great facility in the Metal Arts wing of the Art Building on the Quad at the University of Washington.

From 1970 to 1976, I was a student at the UW. By 1974 or 1975, I was thinking about my future in a more realistic way. I toyed with transferring to a Botany major. I considered the law. I had wanted to be a an architect since I was no more than 11, but somehow failed to pursue it, though I took the non-major architecture history series from Gustav Pundt and then finagled my way into the majors-only series. Later I would make a decent supplementary income drawing plans for clients and for an architect.

Anyway, somewhere along the way, I realized that I was always teaching. Maybe I liked telling people what to do. Maybe I was good at explaining things. Maybe teaching was the creative and professional outlet that I needed. Maybe I was still under that favorite delusion that I would have “three months off every summer” and time to do my own art. That last one for sure, and even working half time as an art teacher, I never got “my own work done.” Teaching is more than full time work.

Even as a student, I knew classroom management would be my greatest challenge. Part of my educational preparation was brief field assignments in classrooms from Kindergarten through high school. When it was time to begin a longer term field placement, I asked for middle school. It was the hardest assignment and the right choice. I earned a k-12 certificate and later taught Art at a girls’ prep school for three years.

Then I moved back to Oregon and my husband and we began our family. For a few years I drew plans for clients and Jay Raskin. When I looked at teaching opportunities on the Oregon coast, I chose Social Studies as a second subject endorsement. I learned to write essays in my SS classes, how to reason and think. I began coursework, but then took an NTE exam and was awarded Social Studies certification.

I subbed for teachers all over the school district, our children were born and graduated and went off to make their lives. After substitute teaching for 11 years, I taught English for 25 years, earned an MFA in writing, and now I teach only two college classes, Writing 121 and Writing 122. I have my 10 weeks of summer and then another 12 weeks in the fall without teaching. In November, I write a novel. I am not inclined to do nothing. I will be busy Winter and Spring with my two college classes.

All this summer, Gary and I have been sorting possessions. We are each of us the end of the line. I have personally cleared the possessions to my parents, aunt, step-grandmother, and even my step-grandmother’s second husband’s brother. People gather unto themselves. Going through tiny professional pins with my son, Ian, I found I had no explanation for the pin from the carpet business in Portland, the mysterious Mason’s pendant from a hundred years ago. I know how they came to me, but there is no one to ask why they exist or what they mean.

Today, we went through the “treasure chest” and the linen closet together, and eliminated a great deal of “stuff” we didn’t need. Blankets and sheets and linens, bits of wrapping paper and ribbons from past holidays. The habit of my mother and her mother before her: keep what might be useful in the future. But I do not think I will ever want that rest of the red eyelash yarn I used to wrap packages a dozen years ago. There is also the joy of finding things I’d forgotten I possessed, the occasional gift I do not remember ever having.

Then I sorted my jewelry. The small jewelry box is completely empty, while the other is neatly sorted. The ladies in my family are going to do well this Christmas.

A necklace I used to wear every time I flew needs to be restrung. I have been putting that off. It is a luck piece, plain elephant ivory beads. I like to think the ivory did not come from a slaughtered elephant, but that is not a story I possess. I only know the beads are nearly 200 years old and when I was in a plane, I folded my hands over their smoothness and stroked them for comfort.

I finished the last of the blackberry crisp this afternoon. I sipped a half glass of wine as a reward for my industry. I feel enlightened.

When I go looking for something, I will know where it is, but I also know the greater value I possess. I know myself to be teacher, writer, artist.