newly revised site map for ballast / camoupedia

At long last. We have finally succeeded in cleaning house on our website—or at least on the site directory. Essays, design and art portfolio, blog links, online video talks: all in one location.

she spent half her life in a pink chenille robe

Above Image sequence from a talk I once presented on the history of chair design, called Sitting Down with Frank Lloyd Wright.

•••

Richard Critchfield, Those Days: An American Album. New York: Dell, 1986, pp. 376—

In one corner of the dining room, by the hot-air register, was a big old Morris chair, where Betty, when she still worked at the bakery, would sit and fall asleep, she was so tired. Billy used to say, "Betty's spent half her waking life in a pink chenille robe." The stairwell to the attic was always loaded with things left there by somebody intending to take them up later: books, clothes, tennis rackets, skates, Tinker Toys, little trucks that always seemed to have a wheel missing. Like the road to hell, the stairs were paved with good intentions. 

we do not first see, we define first and then see

related online video talks

Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1922, p. 81—

[In Art as Experience, John Dewey] gives an example of how differently an experienced layman and a chemist might define the word metal. "Smoothness, hardness, glossiness, and brilliancy, heavy weight for its size…the serviceable properties of capacity for being hammered and pulled without breaking, of being softened by heat and hardened by cold, of retaining the shape and form given, of resistance to pressure and decay, would be included" in the layman's definition. But the chemist would likely as not ignore these esthetic and utilitarian qualities, and define a metal as "any chemical element that enters into combination with oxygen so as to form a base."

For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.

regarding montages and vision

 

the extraordinary visions of Joseph Podlesnik

Above The photographs of Joseph Podlesnik are simply astonishing. A large selection are on sale through December 8, 2023, online here.

PBS gift / Frank Lloyd Wright and Mason City

I couldn't be more delighted to see that my recent book, titled Frank Lloyd Wright and Mason City: Architectural Heart of the Prairie, is currently being offered as a free donation bonus in the fundraising campaign on Iowa PBS. It is featured in two donation options online here and here. 

I think it's a pretty good overview of the influence of European and Japanese traditions on Wright's architectural style (and vice versa), as well as an explanation of why Mason City's architecture is of genuine significance. There is a shortage of serious writing about the importance of things that surround us.

a meeting of midwestern minds? one gets nasty

The lives of Wisconsin-born architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) and Iowa-born artist Grant Wood (1891-1942) overlapped for a half-century. For a dozen or so of their mutual years, they were both celebrities within their respective professions. Surely, they were well aware of each other's work—but did the two men ever meet?

Wood was greatly interested in architecture, as is apparent in the subject matter of his paintings. But what did he think of Wright's architecture? And, in turn, what was Wright's opinion of the Regionalist paintings of Grant Wood and others? Based on evidence from the time, this essay surmises the answer.

the process by which creativity works / koestler

Roy R. Behrens, from the film narration in HOW TO WIN KINGS AND INFLUENCE CABBAGES: The Process by Which Creativity Works (2022), free to watch online on YouTube here—

As a college student, I was required to read for a humanities class Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Albert Camus’ The Stranger, and Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit. Years later, I found out that, amusingly, all three of these literary titans had been drinking companions in postwar Paris, and that on one unforgettable evening in 1949 a greatly intoxicated Koestler (who was small and reputedly scrappy) had thrown a glass at Sartre and given Camus a black eye.

My favorite photograph of Koestler was made in the same year as that famous brawl by Dmitri Kessel for Life magazine [see above]. A double portrait of the Hungarian-born British writer and his magnificent boxer Sabby, it is memorable in part because of the uncanny resemblance between dog and master—boxer meets boxer, they seem deliberately to be imitating one another.

It is also, as might be said, a “self-exemplifying” image because that portrait is a superb example of what Koestler identified as the key ingredient throughout all creative activity: “The discovery of hidden similarities” or bisociation (perceiving things “in two self-consistent but incompatible frames of reference at the same time”).