John C. Lofton / his astonishing miniature rooms

John C. Lofton, Abandoned Nest in an Empty Room (1976). Wood and other materials. Interior 28h x 16w x 22d. Exterior (on sturdy mounted tripod stand) 90h. Lighted inside through window with shade. 

I’m not sure when I purchased this. It must have been in the 1980s. I was teaching in Milwaukee, and became interested in a series of constructions that consisted of mysterious room interiors. They were miniaturized of course, but enclosed in a box and mounted on a wooden pole-like stand (including the stand, the height of this one is 90 inches). 

Lofton was a local artist who was especially skilled at woodworking. I was drawn to this particular work, because it reminded me of the bleakness of an empty room in (let's say) an apartment at the moment one is moving in—or moving out.

There is a detailed hardwood floor, exactly proportioned moulding, and replicas of a wooden chair, a telephone, an ashtray, and a window on the facing wall. The detail which completes its persuasiveness is the simulated outdoor light that appears to flow in from beyond the window shade.

I can’t recall how much I paid for this. Not a terrible lot, I’m sure. But the amount was sufficient that the artist joked I’d “lost my shirt” in acquiring it. As a result, he graciously threw in a second miniature work of his (see below), a hand-carved balsa wood shirt, with appropriate metal buttons and a wire clothes hanger.

I remember another Lofton work, a second room interior, which I saw but, regrettably, did not buy. Fortunately, I still have a full-color photograph of it (also below). He titled it Bird Cage (1976), a name that surely does not “spoil” or give away its range of interpretative possibilities. 

Is that a toucan on the pole?

These two artworks (the empty room and wooden shirt) have traveled with us everywhere in the years since 1985, as we repeatedly moved from state to state. They have survived unscathed, as have so many other wonderful works which remain in our collection. As we age, of course, we wonder what will become of them. It's not unlike finding a home for a cat. So many questions, so many concerns. 

the family chair in which one customarily dies

Above Armchair designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Glasgow (1898).

•••

Stark Young, The Pavilion: Of People and Times Remembered, of Stories and Places. NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951, p. 78—

…in another branch of [his father's] family, nine Douglass men had gone from a single household to [serve in] the [American] Revolution. It was in this Douglass family that they had what was known as the Douglass chair. The custom was for every man in the house, when the moment came for him to die, to rise from his bed and go, or else be carried, to meet his death sitting in this chair. 

High Backs, Ladder Backs, Glasgow Grids

Above One of the slides featured in a talk by Roy R. Behrens, titled Sitting Down with Frank Lloyd Wright. Presented at the annual gathering called An Afternoon with Frank Lloyd Wright, Cedar Rock State Park (Walter Residence), Quasqueton IA, on October 13, 2018.

Poster | Rhiannon Rasmussen

Poster © Rhiannon Rasmussen 2016

Above Poster by Rhiannon Rasmussen (©2016), graphic design student at the University of Northern Iowa.

•••

Frank Lloyd Wright, in Edgar Kaufmann and Ben Raeburn, eds., Frank Lloyd Wright: Writings and Buildings. New York: Meridian Books, 1960, pp. 48-49—

…I tried to make my clients see that furniture and furnishings, not built in as integral features of a building, should be designed as attributes of whatever furniture was built in and should be seen as minor parts of the building itself, even if detached or kept aside to be employed on occasion. But when the building itself was finished, the old furniture the clients already possessed went in with them to await the time when the interior might be completed. Very few of the houses were, therefore, anything but painful to me after the clients moved in and, helplessly, dragged the horrors of the old order along after them.

…about four-fifths of the contents of nearly every home could be given away with good effect to that home. But the things given away might go on to poison some other home. So why not at once destroy undesirable things…make an end of them?

See also: Roy R. Behrens, FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT and Mason City: Architectural Heart of the Prairie (2016). 

Electrifying Modernism

In Mark Leyner, My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist (NY: Harmony Books, 1990), a fictional death row inmate, condemned to die in the electric chair, utters the following frolicsome note about Bauhaus-era furniture—

Luckily, I'd developed an unusually close relationship with the warden. Knowing how much I loved [Ludwig] Mies van der Rohe, he had an electric Barcelona chair custom-built for my execution. And when the date finally came and I was led into the death chamber, I couldn't help but marvel at the delicate curvature of the X-shaped legs, the perfect finish of the plated steel and the leather upholstery, and the magnificent, almost monumental proportions that have made the Barcelona chair timeless.