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historic architecture

Wednesday Web 7-13-11

Abandoned House, Jefferson Co, Wisconsin

I recently joined the LinkedIn group Urban Photography. There’s some great photography going on there and I’m hoping to pick up lots of good pointers.

On another note, I shot this abandoned house a couple years ago for a photography class. No, it’s not an urban shot. And, yes, snow on the ground creates a bit of an oxymoronic message here in July. But, like all architecture, this house has an interesting story.

Better yet, here’s a link to 100 Abandoned Houses, by Urban Photographer member Kevin Bauman, of Detroit, MI. Beautiful houses. Beautiful photography. Beautiful, but sad and haunting.

I wonder what’s the story for each them?

Arts & Crafts: A Movement of Beauty and Integrity

Prairie-style home, Milwaukee, WI

When I was a kid, my paternal grandparents lived in an awesome house. It certainly wasn’t as grand as this one, but I loved it nonetheless. It was a bungalow, most likely from the turn of the century, and its enclosed front porch was filled with black wicker furniture and fringe-shaded lamps.

Things didn’t get more Arts and Crafts than that front porch.

At the time of my 1960s childhood, such style was beyond its original popularity. Today, however, it’s celebrating a magnificent revival and it’s one of my favorite styles in architecture, interior design and graphic art.

(This past weekend I got to feed my Arts & Craft fix with 14 Milwaukee homes in the Wright and Like 2011 Tour. Jealous? The house above is one of them, along with the one below.)

The linear style of Arts & Craft

The Arts and Crafts movement started in England in the 1870s as a reaction to the industrialized Victorian excesses of the mid-nineteenth century. Here in the U.S., it’s heyday lasted well into the 1930s.

According to Isabelle Anscombe in her book Arts & Crafts Style, “the new idiom of Arts and Crafts was strong and simple in form, rich and intricate in craftsmanship, with a fresh morality based on fitness for purpose.”

Simply put, this was a style that evoked honesty, warmth, informality and unprentiousness. It emphasized clean lines and quality, natural materials.

 

Owen Jones Grammar of OrnamentDigital ID: 818869. New York Public Library

Architect and designer Owen Jones (1809-1874) was a great influence in the Arts and Crafts style. In his book The Grammar of Ornament, he formulated 37 propositions for form and color in architecture and decorative arts. For example, Proposition 5 says “Construction should be decorated. Decoration should never be purposely constructed. That which is beautiful is true; that which is true must be beautiful.”

This could be a credo for life in general, couldn’t it?

William Morris

Digital ID: 118685. New York Public Library

Another leading member of the Arts and Crafts movement was William Morris. Involved in textiles, wallpaper and anything related to interior design, he brought great influence to the decorative arts. He later started Kelmscott Press, where he strived to produce high quality, hand bound books using traditional, 15th century methods. He was dissatisfied with the commercially available typefaces of the day, so he designed Golden, Chaucer and Troy, which he based from historic Gothic typefaces. Many of the popular Arts and Crafts style fonts we see today are based from these three typefaces.

Arts & Craft home, Prairie-style, Milwaukee, WI

Of course, if we’re speaking of leading influences, we have to come back to the Wright and Like Tour, namely Frank Lloyd Wright. This huge icon, as we all know, was an architect, interior designer, writer and educator. His design is likely the most revered by Americans today and many architects have followed his example, including Milwaukee architect Russell Barr Williamson.

Williamson worked as Wright’s draftsman and office manager from 1914-1918, and in 1922 he constructed the house shown above (my favorite on the tour). Note the geometric stained glass windows—definitely a style Williamson carried over from Frank Lloyd Wright’s stained glass designs.

For more information on the Arts and Craft movement, check out this great resource on design history.

 

Old Barn Texture

nails

When we bought our property more than 20 years ago, we inherited an amazing architectural gem: A fachwerk barn. With hand-hewn beams, rough, weathered bricks and bent, rusty nails, it’s a photographer’s dream. My limited skills, however, could never quite capture its essence.

Now I’m learning to see things differently. There’s art everywhere we look and sometimes capturing the parts rather than the whole can be very intriguing.

I like how this shot turned out.

I’m still working on texture assignments for my photography class and this shot came up with texture galore. The nails are the old, square kind; possibly handwrought in the early to mid-1800’s. And the ragged chunk of wood is part of a large beam separating brick sections in the fachwerk design.

I like how the viewer’s eye is drawn back and away. My mind does the same when I think of days gone by and the work that went into handcrafting the nails and timbers of this barn. Simply awesome.

Will people ever say that about the work we do today?

An Emulation of Herman

shimon-and-lindemann

One of my recent photography class assignments was to emulate a favorite photographer. Hands down these days, my favorites are the photographer duo J. Shimon and J. Lindemann and I’m emulating their Herman Christel. They did their photo in 2002 as a gelatin silver print, a process that uses black-and-white film and printing paper coated with light-sensitive silver salts. My photo, of course, is merely an Epson copy.

My photo: Gorgeous George Resting in Front of his Farm House

Gorgeous George was our neighborhood phenomenon for more than 40 years. As the story goes, he and his family moved to the area from Iowa in the late ‘60s and, together with their seven children, lived and worked this farmstead.

In years gone by, the house and yard were less kept than it appears today. Stacks of chopped wood filled the front porch from floor to ceiling. Decaying bales of straw, once having served as insulation, surrounded the foundation and likely served as home for any number of rodents. Old autos, farm machinery and miscellaneous parts rusted away in the yard.

Legend has it that social services took George’s children away from the home due to it’s poor living conditions. Yet, George and his wife continued to live there many years after.

George, an eclectic character with a long white beard, was resourceful and industrious. Neighbors often saw him pulling a wagon load of corn with his Volkswagon Rabbit or hauling water from an artesian well many miles away.

George and his wife no longer live in this house. The farm’s been sold. The machinery’s been hauled away. The house, now empty and deserted, actually looks better than it has in a long time. And George, portrayed in this picture by another man, supposedly lives in an area institution.

My Favorite Photographers

John Shimon and Julie Lindemann are Wisconsin photographers who “have made a career using antique cameras, modern lens technology, artificial light and contemporary pop culture to create portraits of people in their native state,” as biographed by the Milwaukee Art Museum (MAM), where their Unmasked and Anonymous exhibit was recently featured.

Shimon and Lindemann met as art students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the early ‘80s. After a brief stint in New York, the pair returned to Wisconsin. They now work from a 19th century warehouse storefront building in downtown Manitowoc. Their work has been showcased in galleries, magazines and books throughout the U.S. They also work as art instructors at Lawrence University in Appleton.

I was fascinated by Shimon and Lindemann’s exhibit at the MAM. Their work captures the unique and interesting characteristics of everyday people, transforming them into icons of our fascination. I especially love the narratives they include with the portraits. These stories attest to the relationship the photographers build with their subject and ultimately the success of the portrait.