The Cult of Mithras
When I traveled to Rome thirty Novembers ago I saw many wonderful historic sites and artifacts and artworks but one that made a particular impression was a mithraeum, or “temple” to the cult of Mithras, an early competitor to Christianity. The mithraeum was located beneath a medieval church in Rome. Indeed, many of the hundreds that have been discovered are beneath churches, and while Mithraism and Christianity competed in the realm of eastern-oriented mystery religions from the 1st to 4th centuries, Mithraism was suppressed along with paganism after the 4th century.
Gathering places of the Mithraic mysteries have been found from England to Hungary and the cult was a particular favorite of the Roman military. The basic worship was of Mithras, a sun-god borrowed from Persian mythology, and the key image was Mithras astride and slaying the sacred bull. This bloodletting offered salvation to the participants in the rituals, which included a ceremonial breaking of bread and wine and a promise of resurrection. Mithras is always wearing a Phrygian cap.
So, what was trending in 1st century Rome? Basically, eastern mystery religions, and you had two big choices. The first was Christianity, originally a Jewish sect that had taken a more Catholic approach and had established major centers in Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria and Rome. Part of its appeal was monotheism. One can imagine that the pantheon of traditional Roman gods was becoming a bit outdated in a globalized Mediterranean world. Part of its appeal was its Orientalism. The mysteries of the East were borrowed and reimagined. It also offered eternal salvation thanks to the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, who died for the sins of others.
The second choice was the cult of Mithras. It was also assembled from pieces of eastern mythology, including an adapted Zoroastrian Mithra and an adapted and adopted Osiris, the Egyptian god of resurrection. The rituals included a kind of agape, or ceremonial meal which struck contemporary Christians as a direct copy of their eucharist – complete with bread and wine. They even called the clerical officials “pater” (Father) and their altar illustrated the bloodletting that led to salvation.
So, which to choose? Well, there was one other aspect of Mithraism, and that was that it was male-only. Very popular with the military. In contrast, the early Christian church not only had female martyrs like Perpetua and Felicity, but was often spread – especially among the upper classes – by women. Constantine had his Helen in the 4th century, Augustine his Monica in the 5th and Volodymyr had his Olha in the 10th. Since its founding, more women than men have attended church, While excluded from clerical positions in most cases, women religious have always outnumbered men.
Sta Maria Maggiore, Milano.
One of the biggest challenges that Christianity presented to Roman Mediterranean culture was its focus on mercy and universal salvation. This ran completely counter to Roman ideas of justice, which admitted no humility, no mercy and certainly no forgiveness. In contrast, the message of Christ WAS forgiveness. It made no sense to Romans. For those initiated into the cult of Mithras, your hero and god was depicted literally in the act of killing something. (The technical term is tauroctony)
Mithraea offered resurrection, a full dose of eastern mystery, complete with a Phrygian cap, a ceremonial bloodletting, a meal and best of all – no girls. You could have your eastern mysteries without the kind of radical inclusion the Christians were preaching.
Ironically, once the Roman Empire adopted Christianity, the religion of mercy apparently showed none to the Mithraites and their theology of cruel justice.
Whan That Aprille
In medieval Europe, one of the drivers of economic development was the practice of pilgrimage to holy shrines. The practice began in the 4th century when the Emperor Constantine developed pilgrimage sites in Jerusalem which remain successful today. While pilgrimages to Jerusalem were largely ended with the Fall of Acre in 1291, Rome remained a popular pilgrimage site, as did Santiago de Compostela in Spain, which began in the 9th century with the discovery of the tomb of St. James the Great. The pilgrimage famously began at the Tour St. Jacques in Paris, and was an economic boon to sites, hostelries and businesses en route.
Tour St Jacques, Wikimedia Commons, Cormac 2008
Adrian Bell and Richard Dale have written about the economics of the medieval pilgrimage for years, and they describe the rivalries between various pilgrimage sites seeking to profit – spiritually and economically – from their respective relics. Canterbury was of course a great pilgrimage site made famous by Geoffrey Chaucer, but it had its competitors. Shortly after Thomas Becket was murdered there it became a site of miracles and marvels, leading to “St. Cuthbert performing a sudden spate of miracles at his rival shrine in Durham.”
Statue of St Cuthbert, Durham, 1987
Each of these sites had to have a relic – a piece of the body of a saint, perhaps a piece of the true cross. Similarly, Buddhist stupas and viharas often are centered on a tooth or jawbone of Sakyamuni or perhaps the bones of a boddhisatva.
Unidentified saintly skeleton, Stift Melk, Austria, 2005.
Canterbury found the most economical solution to the relic issue, since they had some of Becket’s blood, which they could almost infinitely dilute with water without reducing its miraculous capacities. Reading Abbey had a hand of St. James and was in competition with Canterbury. Bell and Dale describe how a woman who went to Canterbury for a cure was “confronted” in a dream by St. James who said she would not be cured at Canterbury but had to go to Reading, which she dutifully did. And got cured.
Holycross Abbey, Ireland, 2000
I took the three photos above, which means I also contributed to the economy of these pilgrimages during the late 20th century. I even recall having a St. Cuthbert t-shirt from Durham. I saw St. Thomas the Apostle’s forearm in Chennai when it was still called Madras. Heck, Cologne Cathedral has the bones of the Three Kings behind the altar. Pilgrimages are still an economic boon today, from Mecca to San Antonio, where the World Heritage Mission churches have been promoting El Camino de San Antonio Missions.
“Rose Window,” Mission San Jose. Actually they are pomegranates.
If it was a fight for relics in the medieval era, the competition between cities today tends to revolve around things like convention centers and sports stadiums. As reported everywhere, San Antonio recently released the miraculous Project Marvel, which includes not one, but two sports stadia, an expanded convention center, a new theater in an old theater, and perhaps a park on top of the highway.
Most aspects of Project Marvel had been rumored for a year and a half, and of course the big arena in the center is meant to be for the San Antonio Spurs and implies the demolition of the Texas Pavilion/Institute of Texan Cultures building (CRS, 1968) as I reported last month here.
The good thing about Project Marvel is that it is an example of Daniel Burnham’s “Make No Little Plans” comment. A big plan “stirs men’s blood,” according to Burnham, even if it doesn’t get realized in full. His 1909 Plan of Chicago did exactly that – the majority of it never happened, but some pieces did and it continues to influence urban decisions.
The bad thing about Project Marvel is that it is an example of Daniel Burnham’s “Make No Little Plans” comment. BIG planning grew to maturity in the 1960s and by the 1980s the hubris of big design was already being felt. That hubris is that not even the smartest architect can fully predict the future, so the big plans will have flaws. Also, their bigness can be a hindrance to functionality, an issue that came up today when the Express-News noted that Project Marvel is about 10,000 parking places short of functional.
Hemisfair site with ITC circled on left. Current East Side Spurs stadium, right. Which has more parking?
Beyond parking there is traffic. A big concert in the Alamodome today will quickly back up Cesar Chavez Boulevard for a mile and a half. A big plan putting everything in the center may be bold, but it is redolent of 1960s High Modernist planning. Nowadays we prefer a more iterative, incremental approach. Why put all your eggs in one congested basket? We have a proposed baseball stadium on the northwest side of downtown, the Alamodome itself downtown, and an unused 35 acres at Lone Star. That would give you three major venues in three very well connected locations that aren’t on top of each other.
Chicago has that – a northside baseball stadium, a football stadium five miles south, a basketball-hockey stadium two miles west and another baseball stadium four miles south. Distributes the traffic, you see.
It also contributes economically to the local community, at least on the north side.
Part of the challenge of Project Marvel is that it is trying to do many things. 1. Save the Alamodome, which was a bold “build it and they will come plan” a quarter century ago but needs work. 2. Expand the convention center, because we are losing pilgrims who are choosing Reading Abbey instead. I mean conventioneers going to Austin, but same idea. 3. Do something with the Confluence Theater. 4. Build a new Spurs stadium since they have a genuine superstar. 5. Connect the East Side and St. Paul Square with a land bridge. 6. UTSA hospitality school.
What would St. Cuthbert do? It could all be done, but it might take a miracle or six.
DECEMBER 19 UPDATE:
The Texas Historical Commission has approved a demolition permit for the Texas Pavilion/Institute of Texan Cultures building. The approval has a stack of stipulations before the permit can be issued, so still plenty of time for an injunction. The requirements of owner University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) include HABS documentation, interpretation, the potential rehab of another neglected Hemsifair ’68 building and an executed Memorandum of Understanding with the THC. Bad news always arrives during the holidays! Over, not over.
Duda Forum on Historic Preservation and Sustainability
Next weekend San Antonio will host the Second Annual Duda Forum on Historic Preservation and Sustainability with a reception Friday evening November 15 and a daylong program on Saturday November 16 at Plaza des Armas behind City Hall. You can register and get info HERE. The subject is the design of infill in historic areas and additions to historic buildings. This is an issue that has been discussed by some of the participants for over twenty years, especially given the potential conflict between Secretary of the Interior Standard #3 which says in part “changes that create a false sense of historic development…will not be undertaken.” and Standard #9 which says in part “new work will be differentiated from the old and will be compatible.”
When the Standards were first adopted almost fifty years ago, the tendency was to use contemporary, modern design for additions and infill, as in this famous Brooklyn Heights Jehovah’s Witness Building, wherein highly compatible Georgian and Victorian designs were rejected for a dramatically different modernism. By the early 1990s, the pendulum had swung the other way and historically styled additions nearly indistinguishable from the original became popular.
The section on the left is c. 1990 while the section on the right is c. 1890.
In a city with a century and a half of preservation history, the topic of infill and additions has many examples, like the restoration of the Pearl Brewery, which includes new designs and replications of lost buildings.
Restored, along with all of the equipment in the brewery, repurposed into the landscape.
Replica of brewery building destroyed by fire in 2003. Some rubble reused.
The event is sponsored by the Texas Historical Foundation and the University of Notre Dame. Notre Dame Professor Steven Semes is part of the panel, and I have been following him for 18 years, as you can see by this 2006 blog I wrote, and this one from five years later with lots more photographic examples. We have worked together on a number of things, from a late 2006 panel in Milwaukee for the National Trust to the Castroville survey last summer. I know he will ask me about the new Alamo museum in the repurposed Woolworth and Crockett buildings, since our 2019 suggested design (really a massing study by Alamo Architects) does indeed seem to suggest the current design.
We will also have a panel talking about infill in historic districts, a challenge that has been met quite well in several San Antonio communities, like King William.
Looks to be a good event so if you are in town next weekend, sign up!
Castroville Survey
Two summers ago I was out in Castroville presenting on historic districts and design guidelines, one of several speakers helping Castroville citizens determine how best to deal with the rapid growth of their very historic community. This summer I am helping five student interns survey the early houses of Castroville, thanks to the support of the Conservation Society, and the University of Notre Dame, Texas Historical Foundation and a lot of technical help from the City of San Antonio Office of Historic Preservation and the Texas Historical Commission.
History Center, Castroville
Castroville has one of the oldest National Register historic districts in the state, dating to 1970, but unfortunately that means the nomination is very sparse. It is high time that the historic district is surveyed and inventoried. In fact, the local effort led by Joshua Kempf and Shari Biediger has been looking at ALL of the Castro Colonies, including not only Castroville itself, but Quihi, D’Hanis, Yancey, Saus Creek, Vandenburg, Fort Lincoln and Hondo. The original Castroville district had about 120 homes in it but almost 300 “pioneer homes” exist throughout Medina County.
Steinle House, Castroville
The history is fascinating. In 1842 Henri Castro, in the service of the King of France, became an Empresario charged with bringing 2000 settlers to Texas. Just as the Spanish had a hard time settling the area until they converted the natives in the 18th century and enticed some settlers from the Canary Islands, so the young Republic of Texas was handing out tracts of land hoping to secure European settlers. Castro was the most successful of the lot, although like the Adel Verein that settled New Braunfels, the immigrants arrived in Texas to find that their land grants were many miles away, and as in New Braunfels, they ended up settling closer to San Antonio.
Also like the Adel Verein settlers brought by Prince Solm, the Castro settlers spoke German. But they were French, from the Alsace. Hence, the church is dedicated to St. Louis (another King of France) and there is still an annual festival celebrating the saint 180 years later. The architecture of the Castro colonies tracks with the Texas Vernacular of Central and South Texas – many simple rectangular houses with gable roofs that extend into porches and saltboxes at a different pitch. Mostly 1 or 1 1/2 stories, there are a few examples of commercial architecture and the occasional industrial building – after all, part of the reason they chose the Castroville site was the Medina River, where they could construct mills.
Yesterday I worked with the students on techniques for architectural description as they survey the pioneer houses. Dr. Jenny Hay of the City of San Antonio Office of Historic Preservation provided the survey forms – digital – and the five students from University of Notre Dame and Western University got useful research guidance from Rebecca Wallisch prior to the presentations from Jenny and I. We then walked around Castroville bit testing out survey techniques.
Jungmann House, 1855, Castroville
I am very excited about this project and will be checking in on the students’ progress weekly. They are having a four course Alsatian dinner next Tuesday to welcome the students so that should be great! Guten Apetit, y’all!
UPDATE: Alles war ganz lecker!
San Antonio Roundup May 2024
Tomorrow is the last day of May and the last time the Institute of Texan Cultures will be open in their original 1968 home, a Brutalist landmark that is the only downtown building by a Mexican-American architect, as I detailed recently here.
What else is happening in San Antonio (not counting endless evidence-free speculation about a downtown Spurs stadium)?
This is a 1920s bungalow at 800 W Russell Place in Alta Vista, which is not a landmark district. As you can see, it is getting a new roof. Here is a view from North Flores:
Much of the original clapboard is being preserved. Here is what the house looked like three years ago after its second fire…
In most towns this building is demolished.
In San Antonio, where preservation is more ingrained into the local psyche than elsewhere, this building is coming back three years later in its original form, most of which will be new material. That is how we roll (with the exception of the Institute of Texan Cultures above). I have seen buildings with massive holes in the roof and collapsed porches and chimneys brought back from the dead here. It is not unusual. It is an ethic.
Three years ago Sue Ann Pemberton’s Main Street Architects brought this Monte Vista house back from the dead. Heck, over 30 years ago the Harnisch House in King William was completely gutted by a fire, nothing left but masonry walls. So here it is a few years ago:
But the threats that came up in May 2024 were of a different sort. First, there was a proposal for a 200-foot high Ferris Wheel three blocks behind the Alamo. The Conservation Society was the first to oppose it when it went for rezoning, but we were quickly joined by the Alamo Trust, Centro and others and the matter has been deferred, perhaps indefinitely. The proponents didn’t want to call it a Ferris Wheel but an “observation wheel”. I suppose it isn’t the 1893 wheel by Ferris (which was a riposte to Eiffel’s tower of four years earlier) and it was to be a bit smaller.
The bigger question was why downtown?
Six years ago, the Alamo Reimagined Plan was all about bringing a sense of reverence to Alamo Plaza, pushing out the populist entertainments for a more refined atmosphere. Now they are back? Tomb Raider replaced by Observation Wheel? Even the World Heritage folks got wind of it and were not pleased.
To top it off, a second tawdry proposal emerged. A group called Outfront Media proposed “Urban Entertainment Districts” a la Denver and Atlanta, with a host of digital billboards flying right in the face of the recently adopted Sign Code. Times Square, anyone? Reverence?
Now, Ferris Wheels and digital signs are all well and good. They make sense in Times Square and La Vegas and Pudong and Akhibara. Heck, they would make sense at Port San Antonio or out on 1604. Just not downtown.
And what makes sense for Pudong does not make sense for the Bund it faces.
The digital billboard trial balloon is getting a lot of flak (and for once that metaphor makes sense).
So what else is happening? A five-time building permit violator finally opened his restaurant, presumably treating the health code better than the building code. Here are some before and after photos of how this Lavaca gas station building had all of its proportions changed. How did he do it? He just got a permit for something and did something else. Five times! Mejor pedir perdón que permiso I guess.
Three years ago.
A few months ago. The parapet changed, the walls changed, thje proportions changed. Not only did he violate five permits, he used the nastiest low-quality finish there is (EIFS!!!) and just kept globbing stuff on top of stuff. Poor building’s life just got a lot shorter.
What else? Unlike San Antonio, which has a robust preservation ordinance and department, the city of Alamo Heights does not. They at least have an Architectural Review Board, which recently voted 6-0 to disallow the demolition of Harvey Smith’s own house. Smith was the architect who restored the Spanish Governor’s Palace and Mission San Jose in the 1930s.
Earlier this year they also managed to save a century-old house in Alamo Heights thanks to community uproar. So, kudos to Alamo Heights – at least you have your landmark-free neighbors Olmos Park and Terrell Hills beat! See below – it is still there!
On the other hand, we are probably going to lose the Sisson House, which has been deteriorating for over a decade next to the San Juan acequia, not far from the mission complex. Owned by the National Park Service, there will be Section 106 review. Unlike our burned friends above, this one may not make it, as the city has already proposed making it a training site for the Deconstruction ordinance, which requires older buildings to be pulled apart by hand and the irreplaceable materials re-used.
It has a really cool limestone basement also.
That’s all for now – see you in June!
“A Little Learning…
is a dangerous thing” said Alexander Pope, and he recommended going whole hog (until Alps on Alps arise) or abstaining. Heritage conservation/Historic preservation is a specialized field, and like many specialized fields, the wider world has misapprehensions or misunderstandings about it. We can try to impart a little learning. There are pitfalls though, because misapprehension often rings truer than fact.
A case in point is the National Register of Historic Places. Its name is often misapprehended as “The National Registry” just because that sounds, well, classier. When a building, site, district or structure is listed on the National Register of Historic Places that means it can’t be torn down, right?
Wrong. Also, Wrong. And Wrong again. The list has been around since 1966 and provides no protection against demolition. It DOES provide a review process that MIGHT make demolition less likely, but that is only if it is literally a federal case. It is kept by the Secretary of the Interior, who will have no idea if anyone is going to tear it down unless a federal agency tells the Secretary they are going to. And they can still tear it down, but only after going through the process.
310 W Polk, Chicago, demolished 1991 by the Postal Service because they knew that the National Register doesn’t prevent demolition.
Now, you can explain that time and time again, but it won’t stick, because the misapprehension is so much more plausible. That’s what it SHOULD mean, right? What really amazes me is that people in high positions dealing with real estate and so forth not only don’t get this, but they suspect there is some weird detail of the National Register that is going to somehow – magically – thwart them. Because it is a specialized field. Fear is always based on lack of knowledge.
Even though the National Register can’t prevent anyone from tearing down anything (there I said it again, but you still don’t believe it, right?) it can provide – since 1976 – preservation tax incentives that can be used to restore the resource. Part of the reason we have so many buildings on the National Register is that real estate developers put them there in order to get a 20% investment tax credit. $2 million off your taxes for a $10 million rehab. Not bad.
But wait, there’s more! In Texas, you can get an additional 25% tax credit ON TOP of the federal one, so your $10 million rehab only costs you $5.5 million. Or, in the case of the St. Anthony above, more than $24 million in tax credits. So who wouldn’t want the National Register – it can finance your rehab or, you can ignore it and tear it down! No downside, right?
Another historic tax credit project, right across the street.
And another, across the street again. Not rocket science.
No downside unless you are a victim of misapprehension, or magical thinking. Case in point: the Conservation Society of San Antonio has nominated of the Texas Pavilion/Institute of Texan Cultures building (1968, Caudill, Rowlett & Scott) to the National Register of Historic Places. Its owner, the University of Texas at San Antonio, is going to oppose the nomination because they want to “monetize the site.”
Okay. Site. Money. Weren’t we just talking about a tax incentives worth 45% of rehab cost? That would be an attraction to someone buying it. BUT, they assume it will be torn down so Spurs Stadium IV (A New Hope) can be built on a smaller site than the Spurs II and III. So? You are the UT System, you can do what you want. In fact, the State and the UT system don’t even have to ask the city for a demolition permit like the rest of us.
As they proved with the Sutton Building in 2019.
So why would you oppose National Register listing if it adds potential incentives and doesn’t prevent demolition? How could you be so powerful and not understand your power? You don’t quite believe that truth because it doesn’t feel true – this is the National Registry (sic) after all!
Civilization and the current moment are saturated with people following courses of action that contradict their fiduciary responsibilities because they have a better storyline. This National Register thing has got to be a big green dragon – it can’t be as innocuous as they say, right?
Oh look, another historic tax credit project!
A good storyline beats the bottom line any day.
A little learning is a dangerous thing.
JANUARY UPDATE: We got a unanimous vote from the State Review Board so now it is up to the State Historic Preservation Office to forward the nomination to the Keeper of the National Register (or not). We had 9 speakers in favor at the hearing in Galveston and they also received 47 letters of support and many more online expressions of support. UTSA provided the sole opposition to the listing.
FEBRUARY UPDATE: University of Texas Board of Regents voted in secret to either lease or sell the ITC to the City for a new Spurs arena. No one is talking, though.
The Spurs probably have enough tax liability that they could use the historic preservation tax credits themselves, avoiding a syndication!
Selling House Museums
The Historic Charleston Foundation has decided to sell the 1808 Nathaniel Russell House, which the Foundation has owned and operated as a house museum since 1955. The news has sparked a backlash from those who want it to stay open to the public. Yet many, including house museum expert Donna Harris, have lauded the Foundation’s decision as a way to bring preservation into the 21st century.
I get it. Last year the San Antonio Conservation Society Foundation sold the 1876 Steves Homestead, which it had owned for 70 years and operated as a house museum. As we removed furniture from the house, someone asked if I was sad that it would not be open to the public. I said: “No, my goal is to preserve buildings. Will it be preserved better by having four people live in it or having 40,000 people tromp through it each year?”
Unlike the Historic Charleston Foundation, the Conservation Society Foundation did not decide to market the house museum we sold. We responded to an unsolicited offer and now it is being returned to its original use as a home. That is in line with #1 of the 10 Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation, which states that a building should be used for its original purpose. No house museum can, by definition, meet this standard.
That bit of petty legalism aside, it is important to remember the basic facts of house museums over the last twelve decades. First, they lose money. Typically, visitation can cover no more than 20-25% of operating costs. That was true in 1910 and 1930 and 1950 and 1980 and it is still true. William Sumner Appleton was subsidizing 80% of his house museum costs in the 1920s. The Society for the Preservation of Old Dwellings – also in Charleston – learned the pitfalls of the house museum solution in the 1920s and 30s when they bought and saved the Manigault House three times. That’s why Charleston created the first historic district in the United States – because house museums don’t work.
The house museums that thrive make up that 75% operating deficit one of three ways:
- An endowment (Glass House, Gaylord Building, Villa Finale)
- Very high ticket price (Biltmore, Taliesin)
- A gift shop/merch operation that can add a $35 book or handkerchief to every $12 ticket (Frank Lloyd Wright sites).
For the San Antonio Conservation Society Foundation, which has almost a century of its own history to look back upon, we can see that our mission – saving buildings – is not best served by owning everything. We bought Casa Navarro in 1959 and sold it to the state in 1974. We bought the Aztec Theatre in 1988 and sold it to a private owner in 1993. We have bought another dozen buildings in the heart of San Antonio and turned them over to forever owners with a preservation easement on each to insure their long-term conservation. That’s how you do it.
I served many years as Vice Chair of the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Sites Committee. The Trust was created by Congress in 1949 to receive house museums. But by the early 2000s it was already clear that the house museum model was not functional, as I blogged about in 2008 and 2012. When Stephanie Meeks became National Trust CEO her first question to me was “Would you ever consider selling one of our historic sites?” and my answer was “In a New York minute, if it was better for the preservation of the building.”
Cooper-Molera Adobe, Monterey, California. One of the National Trust Sites we helped evolve from traditional house museum. I blogged about it in 2011 and then again in 2013. 95% of preservation is adaptive re-use and as that 2013 blog explains, new productive uses do not necessarily impede the learning mission of a site. In fact, they can enhance it and bring it to more people.
To quote from my own blog ten years ago: “The only way to preserve something over the long term is to make it useful and productive for its community. Then the community will preserve it sustainably over the long term. There is no amount of money that can save a building forever – none, even if you put it indoors somehow and encase it in amber. Everything deteriorates. The only way to truly save something is to make it vital and central to enough people that they will keep investing in it forever.”
JANUARY UPDATE: Well, the backlash was so strong that HCF reversed its decision. Enough people showed up with enough “investment” of one kind or another. Check back in twenty years.
Techno trivia the backward lens
You have probably seen those lists where things that seem to be separated by great chasms of history are actually closer in time to each other than you think. Or farther, like the fun fact that Cleopatra (VII) lived closer to the invention of Snapchat than the construction of the Great Pyramid at Giza. My favorite is the 66 years between the first powered flight and landing on the moon.
But what really amazes me are the things that seem to be backwards in our lens. Take these two human inventions. On the one hand we have the bicycle, a ubiquitous form of transportation and amusement that is deceptively simple but also strikingly modern. Our contemporary bicycles with chains and gears and rubber tires are basically the same age as the first automobiles, starting in the 1880s. There were velocipedes in the early 19th century, and some form of pedal locomotion emerging in the mid-1800s, but even the term bicycle dates to at best 1860, and the modern “safety” bicycle that begat beer guts in lycra is pretty much contemporary with the first automobile around 1885-86.
Now contrast that with an invention that is a good two generations older – the elevator. The first counter-weighted elevators emerged in the 18th century and were steam-powered by the early 19th century. Elishu Otis patented his “safety” elevator in 1853 over thirty years before the “safety” bicycle.
So, when you get off your bicycle and get into an elevator, do you feel like you are going back in time? Because you are.
The Art and Craft of the Machine in the age of Digital Reproduction
Breitbart said politics is downstream of culture, which means our current political extremism is but a distillate of larger cultural forces. I would posit that while these include globalization, climate crises and inequality, they have been profoundly and quite recently shaped by digital communications. The crowd plodding along the street looking at their phones; the basement incel fulminating in extreme words and images because they are his only communication currency; the politician pushing the goalposts for a given issue further and further because the replication of memery mandates that only violent opinions will secure any attention at all.
And here I sit in the middle of heritage conservation as I have for nearly forty years, a rare combination of education, advocacy, urbanism, regulation and economics that sometimes appears to be the last multipartisan issue. Why? Because it is about culture, upstream of the horses that relieve themselves before it reaches the town hall. But what is culture? Something we associate with aesthetics, to be sure, in art and architecture and costume and song and food and drink. The finer things in life. These too, are kinds of communication, phrases and ideas that because they are standing or dancing physically in the real world do not require ultraviolence. They are real. They do not compete with an endless intergalactic webernet’s flow of rawer and rawer sewage.
The sewage is increasingly available to all, but so is heritage conservation. Every place has its stories, its poems and its puffy tacos and every place has its structures and sculptures and street signs. Climb out of the basement and walk down the street and discover heritage, because every bit of it is a node of empathy and a key to a social contract and communication.
In 1901 Frank Lloyd Wright gave his famous “The Art and Craft of the Machine” speech at Hull House in Chicago, turned it into pamphlet sold at his 1902 exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago and purchased by a teen named Barry Byrne, who read it over and over again. Here was the definition of art AND democracy. The clever title transposed two seemingly diametrically opposed cultural/political movements of the time – the Machine Age versus Arts and Crafts, the celebration of the human artifices of a pre-Industrial era. Byrne’s prodigious writings of the 1940s and indeed his buildings refer back again and again to the pamphlet.
To Wright, the Industrial Age meant liberation and democracy. Now all could enjoy the beauty of machine-sawed wood, the commodity of a clear view of nature, and the utility of affordable home and hearth. To Wright, architecture had been “the universal writing of humanity”, rendered moot by Gutenberg. He agreed with Hugo that the book killed the edifice, but instead of lamenting it like Ruskin he embraced it for freeing us from the drudgery of handcraft and allowing the infinite reproduction of beautiful forms. His European associates would likewise celebrate the Machine Age in their theory, and when time and finance permitted, designs.
Wright boiled it down. Art is artifice and all human creations are artificial. “The Machine is Intellect mastering the drudgery of earth that plastic art may live;” and its replication through industry allowed a broad cast of beauty that would “emancipate human expression.” It was the opposite of the mawkish medievalisms of Ruskin, reveling in ruin.
But a year later in 1903, Alois Riegl gave us the seminal heritage conservation text with his “Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Origin.” I have always had an affinity for his proto-Heidegerrian pseudoscientific categorization of preservation motivations: “Age Value;” “Art Value;” “Use Value;” “Historical Value;” “Commemorative Value;” and even “Newness Value.” He talked of intentional and unintentional monuments. He thought “Age Value” the best because it could be apprehended and appreciated by all.
Wright and Riegl both celebrated nature and science and both were focused on the relation of people to their world and to communication. Wright saw the Machine as bringing a new communication to the broadest possible swath of humanity and Riegl saw the Age Value of the heritage site with similar vocabulary and stimulating that same broad swath. This was an era of world views, of seeking cultural essence. It was an era that revolutionized architecture in dramatic ways but also introduced heritage conservation and its manifold motivations.
These two texts of twelve decades gone may not have anticipated the megafolding multiplicity of our current antisocial media landscape, remaining as they did upstream, on the mountain of culture, where humans and nature intersect for real. I think they would have found the plastic artificiality of our intergalactic webernet as cause for a new essay, albeit one that still valued education, nature and science.
Options, Upgrades and the elaboration spiral
It has been a while since I indulged in a technology rant. Here is one from 14 years ago. Here is an even better one from 10 years ago. And while the intelligent rant to undertake in 2021 would dissect the opioid-like distribution of emotional internet content in an effort to secure money or power via rampant interactive dopamine addiction, I will forego this more worthy endeavor and stick to my grumpy old mannerisms.
I ride a bicycle, and for the last two years I have recorded my rides on Strava, an app on my phone. I started doing this because our health insurance gives us rewards via Go365 – another app – for exercising. Strava records the rides and shares the info with Go365 and if we ride a lot in a given week, we get bonus points. Strava is free, but they have been desperate to convert me and other users into paying customers. What do they offer? More options, upgrades, and most insidious of all – suggesting new routes. I would almost pay NOT to have that.
The problem is, the app already has too many options. I like to know how far and fast I went, and the altitude business is kinda fun, but comparing my Attagirl to McCullough sprint to the rest of the users is stretching the bounds of my attention. If you wanted me to pay for it, you should not have included everything I need (or could ever want) in the free version.
But they are counting on a natural human tendency to get into things. To elaborate. To get more technical, more gadgety. To explore more options. To geek out. To get complex is naturally to get contradictory. I think there is an architecture book about that. It can be nice in the visual arts. When it is technology, i,.e., when it is supposed to be a tool – Not so nice.
I get it a little – I tend to geek out on information. History, historic preservation, the history of zoning (god that sounds boring), art history, even music a little. But basically I am looking for a certain level of competency and involvement, and that’s it.
I made my own beer for 19 years, and then quit. I made it with malt syrup kits for about 18 months and then I graduated to an all-grain system which I used for the next 17 years, occasionally adding hops or coriander seed from the garden. It was kind of elaborate for 1995, but by 2012 I continued to make decent, quaffable suds without any desire to design a hop-back, invest in a counterflow chiller or experiment with Brett or lactose. I had a system and it worked and elaboration was for others.
When someone tells me that an app “does so much more” that is super unappealing. That means it needs me to work more. I am dealing with Blackboard after a 9-year teaching hiatus, and I am told it does lots more. My interest is getting the materials online, attendance and grading, which of course are three separate sections of the app (and in the case of grading a separate app) none of which are named appropriately. Grading? DON’T go to the section called “Grades.” Attendance? DON’T go the section called “Attendance.” Want to the see the Readings listed in the Syllabus and Schedule? DO NOT go to the section called “Syllabus and Schedule.”
Now the old rants are coming back. I resisted digital photography until 2005, partly because I had a “shift” lens on my camera that allowed me to straighten the edges of tall buildings, correcting the perspective of the image. The digital cameras did not do that, but my colleague assured me I could do it in Photoshop. “Oh, Great,” I responded, “two steps instead of one.” Stealing my time, making me do the work instead of the tech. Bad tool!
(HINT: It is NOT engaged by checking the box that says “Perspective”)
I used to do lots of writing for Michelin Green Guides and I can assure you that Word 5.1 was the best word processing program. This is long before “Clippy” or “Grammarly” helped those folks sadly deprived of two of the three Rs to write gooderer. Upgrades – elaborations – ruined it.
Even this damn blog has some wonky new WordPress featurette that forces me to go back to the beginning every time I stop and do something else. This reduces efficiency and makes it take longer – same with the images, which are now impossible to scroll through thanks to the latest upgrades.
But actually, the wonkiness of old and overdesigned apps ENHANCES their appeal to geekdom for the same reasons they annoy the happy novice like me. The point of elaboration is to MAKE IT HARDER, not easier! The geeks who designed it, who troubleshot it, who hack it and who find it fun would NOT find it fun and worth all of their effort if it was intuitive and efficient. As someone said about something else: The cruelty IS the point.
Similarly, when I have to take two (more in 2021) steps to correct the perspective on an image, I am doing more work and the technology is doing demonstrably less, even if, in bits and bytes and sensors, it is doing “more.” Here is where we discover the motive for elaboration and overelaborated technology.
POWER. That is where the cruelty is the point. I remember a discussion with a printer almost 20 years ago about how people were abandoning the offset press for a variety of self-publishing software. He explained it simply.
“People will trade quality for control.”
They will be happy with a less good product if they get to drive it.
They will be pleased with less efficient technology because they “get it” and I don’t.
Just don’t pretend elaboration is progress or upgrades are efficient.
You want to know what is efficient? Stone steps in high jungle. Talk about reducing friction in the 10th century.
See, I did it again.