All posts by Colin Morgan

Friday Finds: Sir Christopher Wren Biographies

As an alumni of the College of William & Mary, I was happy to find not one, but two biographies on Sir Christopher Wren in the Architecture & Planning Library Special Collections. For those who don’t know, the (current) Religious Studies building at William & Mary, and the oldest academic building in America, was named after and designed by Sir Christopher Wren. The Wren Building adorns much of the College’s iconography and is the section of the campus most closely connected to Colonial Williamsburg, thus being the first thing most tourists see when they encounter campus. Having spent more of my life associating the name Christopher Wren with a building and not a person, I was excited to learn more about the man.

Published in 1923 to coincide with the 200th anniversary of his death, Lawrence Weaver’s Sir Christopher Wren: Scientist, Scholar & Architect opens with “on the 20th October, 1632, Christopher Wren was born in the…”, confirming it’s the standard, by-the-numbers biography that the title promises you. (1) Each chapter heading cleanly points you to the section’s subject matter, whether it’s “family life,” “St. Paul’s Cathedral” or “Oxford career and early inventions.” It’s a solid example of the type of biography/non-fiction that no longer exists, the one where the author will put the greatest possible effort into making it seem like they have no opinion whatsoever on the subject. In Scientist, Scholar & Architect Weaver assumes you, the reader, know that Wren is a Great Man, so that’s not what he’s going to argue. Instead, he crafts a narrative around how a Great Man expressed his innate Greatness.

Lena Milman’s Sir Christopher Wren is on the same laudatory bent as Weaver’s book. Like Weaver, she structures each section around an individual project or a distinct phase (college, final years, etc.). She does call to consider how “strange” it is that Wren “had no architectural practice in his early life” despite his immediate success when he adopted architecture as a career. (55) Yet she does not really interrogate that emotion further, keeping the biography on the rails of telling Wren’s life story. Published 15 years apart, Milman and Weaver’s biographies work as good examples of a pre-modernist form of biographical writing.

Funnily enough, I could not find a single mention of William & Mary’s Wren Building within the pages of either Sir Christopher Wren biography. The British origins of both texts likely account for that, considering that both writers would probably want to highlight works on the home turf as opposed to the one in the former colony. Despite the dated content of the writing, both texts also have very well-done illustrations. In the Milman text, it’s some lovely black-and-white photographs; in Weaver, it’s some beautiful ink drawings, which I’m unsure if they were crafted by Weaver or an uncredited artist.

NEW BOOKS: Parliamentary Photographs

Cover for Parliaments of the European Union
Credit: www.ideabooks.nl

Happy Wednesday everybody! New Graduate Research Assistant Colin Morgan here, bringing back the New Books segment of Battle Hall Highlights! Today, I want to highlight one of my favorite books to arrive at the Architecture Library since I started working. Dutch photographer Nico Bick‘s Parliaments of the European Union comprises of thirty photographs of European parliamentary houses, twenty-eight for each of the member states, two for the European Union’s parliament. Outside of two brief introductions, there’s no text in the book aside from captions noting the name of the country and the name of the building. The interiors Bick captures have to speak for themselves.

And united in one bound volume, they do speak. Countries whose histories have featured the accumulation of wealth and notable royal bloodlines, like Spain’s Congreso de los Diputados, hold massive portraits, statues, the country’s crest. The book’s size (it’s a folio) and fold-out style (each photograph folds out onto three or four page, with clear demarcations paneling that section of the photo within the page) fit well with Bick’s human’s-eye-view style of photography. In looking at the photograph, your eye has to crane up the way your head would have to if you were in the actual room, allowing a stimulation of experiencing the overwhelming decor in person. Without a single human face in any of the photographs, the power of these states are shown, not told.

States without that extensive history of wealth have more office-like, anonymous parliaments. The state exists as a functionary device, not as something integral to the identity or culture of the nation. Lithuania’s Seimas, for instance, contains no mark of the nation’s history beyond a crest and the flag. The photograph’s size provides plenty of negative space for the upper two-thirds, as the parliament’s white wall dominates the upper levels of the photograph. Your eye is kept to the bottom, gliding along the chairs and desk on the ground. For parliaments where your eye is mainly focused at one level, you would notice that the most common motif in the book is the presence of computer screens.

Without a human presence, the high number of screens, for the majority of parliaments in the text one per chair, become the photograph’s subjects. Even more so than international histories, computers are the “main character” of Parliaments. The screens, just as much as the European Union’s parliamentary building, are what allow these states to connect with one another. Without explicitly dating the parliaments’ construction in the captions, Bick’s book presents them all as modern structures, with the reader contextualizing the spaces. The modern structure, just like the modern state or the modern economy, can no longer exist in isolation. The interior photographs of buildings dozens or hundreds of miles away from each other highlight how connected they all are.

You can put Nico Bick’s Parliaments of the European Union on hold at the Architecture & Planning Library here.

Friday Finds!: Built In U.S.A.

Cover of Built in U.S.A. (Source: Museum of Modern Art)

Written to accompany Art in Progress, the Museum of Modern Art’s fifteenth anniversary celebration exhibit, Elizabeth Mock’s 1944 book Built in U.S.A. is a portrait of an institution granting itself a victory lap for it’s role in establishing then-modern tastes. Taking their taste-maker status for granted, Built is the Museum’s attempt to assert itself as a great enough authority to not only say what is worth the audience’s time, but to lay out the foundations of the modern architecture canon. Mock, curator of Art in Progress‘ architecture section, uses her introduction to set-up a vision of the “modernist architect” as an individual whose work can walk in perfect balance between “present conditions and future needs.” (9) The utopian-minded ‘modernist architect’ works at odds with the skeptical public, who can only think of the “heat bills” and “glare” that result from the glass-heavy modernist home design. To Mock, these shallow critiques of modern architecture are born out of ignorance, critics who think all of modern architecture can be reduced to “large areas of glass.” (21) Her introduction posits a conflict between the modern style and the cult of practicality. Written in wartime, Mock condemns the point-of-view that states that architects are only there to provide “trimmings,” using the fifty examples in the text to show how architects straddle the line between the practical and the aesthetic. (9)

The Museum of Modern Art, as celebrated on pg. 88 of Built in U.S.A. (Source: Museum of Modern Art)

The subsequent two-thirds of the text showcase the fifty American buildings highlighted in the exhibit. Including several photographs of each structures’ interiors and exteriors, Mock also includes a basic floor-plan. Alongside the visual aspects, Mock features critical notes for each work highlighted. The book functions as a useful source if you are looking for contemporaneous reactions to buildings like “Falling Water” or “The Red Rock Amphitheater.” Perhaps the most striking choice in the text, considering the publisher, is Philip L. Goodwin and Edward D. Stone’s design for the Museum of Modern Art. Praising the architects, the notes also make a point to distinguish the museum as a “flexible” museum, distinguishable and new from the “static collections” that defined art museums in the past. (88) Built writes of the Museum’s architecture as essential to its functionality as a new type of museum.

For additional context around Art in Progress and Built in U.S.A., the Museum of Modern Art has recently provided scans of the three 1944 press releases promoting both to the general public. The best of the three articulates the goals of Built so well it is just as good of an introduction as anything within the text itself. Starting off with a quote from Park Commissioner Robert Moses debasing the Municipal Asphalt Plant (highlighted in Art in Progress and Built) as “horrible modernistic stuff,” the Museum holds it in regard as “one of the buildings… which best represent progress in design and construction during the past twelve years.” In the press release, Moses functions as a real-world version of the abstract ‘public’ Elizabeth Mocks talks about in her introduction. In openly clowning this establishment figure, the Museum not only heaps praise upon the artist, but on itself as a taste-maker. Built in U.S.A., and the marketing surrounding the exhibit and text, establishes an ‘us vs. them’ narrative with the stakes being the aesthetic, and the soul, of a nation. All of the materials the Museum of Modern Art has shared related to the Built in U.S.A. section of Art in Progress are essential to understanding what the discourse surrounding architecture was like in the mid-20th century.

You can read Built in U.S.A. in our Special Collections (or even in the PCL stacks!). Or you can read a PDF (as provided by the Museum of Modern Art) here, further exploration of the Built in U.S.A. section of the Art in Progress exhibit can be found here.