I just got back from my first taste of poetry immersion at Drew University as part of the MFA in Program.  Wow.  Just to give you a taste, this was the line up of poetry readings open to the public between January 5 and January 11:

Joan Larkin , Judith Vollmer , Michael Waters , Willis Barnstone , Gerald Stern , Alicia Ostriker , Jean Valentine , Ross Gay , Ellen Doré Watson , Peter Waldor , Aracelis Girmay ,Anne Marie Macari , Mihaela Moscaliuc , Patrick Rosal

Plus student readings, lectures, workshops, plus plus plus.  Waves of inspiration, gratitude, awe.

Most of the public readings took place in Mead Hall.  There is an equestrian sculpture of Francis Asbury on axis with Mead Hall’s entrance, so I got to hang out with this horse daily.  There were several horse poems at the readings, too, so maybe that’s what got me looking at this sculpture more closely.  When the sculpture was originally dedicated in 1926, President Ezra Squier Tipple said that the sculpture’s "first mission was to give students faith, zeal, and devotion ."  I have to say, the poetry workshops, readings, and lectures did that, I am less sure about the sculpture.

Anyways, I did a few sketches of the sculpture during the course of the readings as a break from beautiful words:
                            
thinking about relationship of horse and rider






horse and base

  


horse leg vs. man leg, etc.

 

I start my MFA in Poetry today at Drew University.  Alicia Ostriker is giving the first faculty lecture of the semester on villanelles.  So this morning, I have been reading up on them.  Villanelles are thought to have originated in Italian harvest fields as a round or song sung when people were bringing in the sheaves or something else equally agriculturally exhausting.  Anyways, the name is based on villano (peasant), or even villa, which of course the architect in me likes!

I opened the book on poetic forms and there was Elizabeth Bishop looking out at me, sitting on her step in what I imagine is Key West by the Bight; maybe by the Red Doors when it was a brothel (Bucket of Blood, Wendy Tucker called it)—walking distance from where Edna and I lived and not too far from Finnegans, our favorite Irish pub (which seems ironic, since it is in the Florida Keys).

Which makes me really believe in David Orr’s assertion in his 2006 New York Times’ review of Bishop’s EDGAR ALLAN POE & THE JUKE-BOX: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments, edited by Alice Quinn: “You are living in a world created by Elizabeth Bishop.” Well, we all are, but I recognize some of the scenery and landmarks in a real way, having inhabited some of the places, if separated by time—living in landscapes of shared and different meanings.

Orr goes on to say that Bishop's work is descriptive rather than assertive, conversational rather than rhetorical and discreet rather than confessional…If you believe art mirrors life, reticence is the opposite of what you'd anticipate from Bishop, whose biography contains enough torment to satisfy St. Sebastian. An abbreviated list: her father died when she was a baby; her mother vanished into an insane asylum when Bishop was 5; her college boyfriend committed suicide when she refused to marry him and sent her a parting postcard that said, "Go to hell, Elizabeth"; and the great love of her life, Lota de Macedo Soares, with whom she spent many years in Brazil, fatally overdosed in Bishop's apartment. From a writer with a history like that, we might expect announcements like Lowell's "I hear/ my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell." We don't expect to be told "I caught a tremendous fish."

The WASP in me likes her reticence and how she plays with poetic forms like the villanelle with intuition, showing restraint, style, and sensibility. The villanelle, with its required repetitions, necessitates a kind of a layered, circular thinking  with repeated, readdressed considerations in her poem One Art.

One Art 

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster,

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three beloved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

-- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster.

My parents had Thonet chairs in the Living Room.  I think of them as our Christmas chairs, because two of us, either my mom, dad, sister or me, would sit in those two Thonet chairs to unwrap Christmas presents.  Thinking of ourselves as educated, oh so cosmopolitan mid-westerners, we pronounced Thonet-- "Tho-nay".  I just learned this year that the name is pronounced "Tone-eT" with a hard beginning and ending t. J

No. 14 chair, aka the bistro chair, was designed by Michael Thonet in the mid-19th century using bent wood.  I guess I like bent wood and bent metal (see Wassily ) because of the simple lines.  The simplicity eliminates the need for hand carved joints—the back of the chair and the back legs are made from a single piece of steam-bent wood.  I elongated it here to celebrate its latent giraffe qualities.  I think they are so there.

No. 14 is made of 6 pieces of wood, 10 screws, 2 nuts, and a partidge in a pear tree--the last part, not really necessary unless trying to give a truly festive touch. Later chairs are made of 8 pieces of wood: 2 diagonal braces were added between the seat and back. The chairs could be mass produced and disassembled to save space during transportation, an idea over 100 years ahead of Ikea’s flat pack.   Imagine. The seat is often made of woven cane/palm, which lets spilled coffee drain off the chair in café settings, or milk left for Santa in my childhood Living Room setting.  (We won’t talk about the shag carpet now.)  Practical.  Elegant. Fun! (maybe not for my mom...)

No. 14 chair is a gold medal winner!  From when it was shown at the 1867 World Exposition in Paris. Le Corbusier said, "Never was a better and more elegant design and a more precisely crafted and practical item created…This chair, whose millions of representatives are used on the Continent and in the two Americas, possesses nobility,” He asked for Thonet’s chairs in his buildings. Plus, artists like Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec feature 14 in their paintings.   So I always enjoy seeing our Christmas chairs in their cameo appearances, never quite sure where they will turn up.  Kind of like Where’s Waldo, without the red and white sweater.

 

Last Wednesday, I was at the Westcott House for master site plan design reviews by Miami University students.  They were quite incredible—you can see photos of them in this album .

The students started with Froebel exercises, to get an understanding of materiality, process, history, layering, and spatial arrangements.  They made their own Gift sets, which were all beautiful, but I was most struck by their weaving studies—including woven site plans of the Westcott House and property.

Friedrich Froebel [1782-1852] is best known as the inventor of the kindergarten system, an educational method used a while ago to teach children between 3-7 years old. In the 1840s, Froebel designed a number of geometric toys, he called "gifts," as a part of his educational system, including blocks, stick work, rings, net drawing exercises, paper weaving, and slats.

If you think about it, these are things that architects think about, too.  While most architects may know about Louis Sullivan’s Kindergarten Chats, I feel Froebel’s kindergarten work was even more incredibly influential and important to the worlds of art and architecture. As examples, check out Froebel’s Gifts , then look at the works of any of the following artists and architects, and decide for yourself if there is a connection:

Wassily Kandinsky
Paul Klee
Frank Lloyd Wright
Piet Mondrian
Georges Braque
Le Corbusier
Josef Albers
Buckminster Fuller

I did a few sketches showing Wright’s weave at the Westcott House, to get a better understanding of the built-in lights at the dining room table and also, a sketch of the trellis that connects the Main House to the Carriage House.

 The lights are somewhat complicated when you look at them from an angle, but when you just look at each elevation, they become quite simple.



I was struck by the BLUE sky, as you can see and how the trellis grabbed it and wove it into the wall along the street.

You can see photos that I took of the Westcott House in Winter here .

Snowy day in Ligonier.  Just fiddling around with drawing words.  I am not a calligrapher, but I appreciate the touch of the hand in writing.  Here's two from this morning...

I had glimpsed this chair for many years in magazines, studied it in college, met it in person at MoMA, but the Wassily that lives with me, I met in Key West.  We saw each other at a yard sale.  I found out he was from New York.  He was there with a custom bookshelf that was made for the screenwriter of the Hunt for Red October.  Wassily came home with me, as did the bookshelf. Forming our own little suite, we moved three places together in Key West—Margaret Street near the Bight, Grinnell Street between Five Brothers and the cemetery (where me became us, thanks Edna) and finally, a place with a view on the Atlantic on South Roosevelt Blvd.   When we moved to Pennsylvania, the bookshelf stayed in warmer climes, divided itself into two, and is still on Roosevelt Blvd. as far as I know, living in the same place, where Mrs. Arthur Godfrey also once retired.  

Wassily moved with us, first to Somerset, then to Ligonier. Justin Gunther, Curator of Buildings and Collections at Fallingwater, spotted Wassily in our Ligonier living room and asked that he be in an exhibition at Fallingwater on modern chairs.  Wassily readily agreed, but seems happy to be more settled in by the fire now, especially on winter days.  Perhaps his show days are over, although he graciously let me do a few sketches of him today.

Why do I love him?  Let me count the ways. 

Wassily (aka Model B3 chair, but that’s a bit impersonal for all we’ve been through, don’t you think) is believed to be the first chair created out of bent tubular steel (1925).  He was designed by Marcel Breuer, while Breuer was the head of the cabinet-making workshop at the Bauhaus, in Dessau, Germany.  Breuer also designed the addition to the Cleveland Museum of Art, which my dad took to me as a child (see Architecture in early childhood museum memories ), so it’s like having a little good part of childhood at home with me.

Quietly revolutionary in the use of the materials and methods of manufacturing, Wassily’s design was technologically feasible only because the process for making seamless steel tubing had been perfected. Previously, steel tubing had a welded seam, which would collapse when the tubing was bent—not a good thing in a chair.

Trying to draw Wassily brings out his Mobius strip qualities. Wassily takes the traditional club chair and distills it into strong lines.  The seat, back, and arms become thickened lines thanks to cowhide leather slings.  Simple, elegant, comfortable--Wassily is truly supportive and is also an ambassador of another time, a symbol of the industrial heroism and engineering invention of the early 20th century.

Thank you, friend.  We could all do with a few more quiet revolutionaries these days.

Jane is a juvenile tyrannosaur who hangs out near the Hall of Sculpture and Hall of Architecture at the Carnegie Museum of Art.  When I was doing my Saturday workshops, I always tried to find a few minutes to spend some time with Jane.  Scientists estimate that Jane was about 11 years old when she died.  She has incredible structure!

I am really fascinated by all of her great lines—and how they go together.  I have tried sketching her a few times to try and understand her better.

How she might move...

Her foot looks so delicate…

It’s hard not to get distracted by her teeth and skull...

High school students Austin Chappel, Ian Lioon, Lauren McKenzie, Royce Atkinson, and Cody Andos took over the Carnegie Museum of Art’s Hall of Sculpture on Saturday as part of our last Bridging the Gap/Spanning the Space workshop.  They installed temporary installations to transform the space, which served as an entry to the Art of Structure exhibition on view at the Heinz Architecture Center.

The highlight was the suspension structure they designed and fabricated out of drinking straws, paper clips, making tape, and ribbon. There were a few tense moments when it went across the FORTY FOOT SPAN, but it held and was kept in place using only ribbon--no tape or other adhesive touched the marble balustrade.

 They joined forces, merged their designs and formed a team to build a truss.

Here is the truss suspended in the Hall of Sculpture.  They also made and installed the star to the right, using folded hypars and rotational symmetry.

You can see it got people looking up!

We used the marble plinths to show off their month long studies of structure and symmetry, including:

Hyperbolic Paraboloids made of string
 

Folded Hypars

 

Suspension

 

Please join me in celebrating this awesome group of emerging structural artists! I have learned so much from them and look forward to their next work.

There's a lot more to the River Thames than London. I discovered it as the setting of Biblical scenes, from miracles to Crucifixion, in Cookham, birthplace and home of Sir Stanley Spencer, an English painter. He referred to Cookham as "a village in Heaven" and used people and places from the village to paint the Gospel, lending on occasion Christian teachings an eerie immediacy such as his unfinished Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta and The Last Supper , which he sets in the Cookham Malt House.

Edna, my Aunt Elaine, and I visited the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham and saw his meadows, moors, magnolia trees, graves and gardens that he used to make a paradise of Cookham, which in reality is no such thing; but there's the greatness of art for you. In London, you can see his Resurrection, Cookham   at the Tate Modern, but in Cookham, you can see the local cemetery and church that inspired the painting and imagine the dead awakening to new life bathed with the light of the absolutely everyday. His paintings are so rooted in place and show that he is in love with what he sees.

After visiting the Gallery and graveyard, I was struck by the crosses that I found in the roofscapes of Cookham, as you can see from these 2 sketches.

Weathervane Crucifix, Cookham

TV Antenna Crosses, Cookham

We are gearing up for our attempt to span the Hall of Sculpture next Saturday.  So we have been looking at trusses and suspension at multiple scales and thinking about how they span space.

Skeletons
 

Furniture
 

Bridges and Buildings

 

We built simple trusses out of 20 straws to see how much weight they could support.  Quite a lot.

  

Next, we used 28 drinking straws to span 28 inches using suspension.
 

Finally, taking what we have learned, we began designing a structure that will span the Hall of Sculpture—40 feet wide—out of drinking straws.  Students became building their structural components.

Meanwhile, I unwrapped a lot of straws—approximately 500—and created this stunning straw wrapper sculpture.  See any Robert Smithson overtones?