New and Old #195

Friday roundup and commentary

“America was supposed to be Art Deco,” Fashionably Late Takes, Megan Gafford, September 10, 2024

Gafford is responding to an earlier essay by that title, but adds some of her own commentary. This is a neat observation:

One of the most striking features of Art Deco skyscrapers is that so much ornamentation is at the very top. The patterned crescents and chrome eagles on the peak of the Chrysler Building are at eye-level only in the heavens, as if they were an offering to some ancient god. Photographers have the honor of bringing the details down to earth so that us mere mortals may marvel at them.

Throughout the decades, photos taken of Manhattan from atop the Chrysler Building document a stark shift in the American architectural tradition.

And this:

Like the jazz music that scored the rise of New York City's earliest skyscrapers — the style was often called Jazz Moderne in its own time, and only became known as Art Deco during its resurgent popularity in the ‘60s — Art Deco was a syncretism of many older traditions, reimagined during the dynamism of the early 20th century. While Modernist architects of the day were following Bauhaus orthodoxy of “starting from zero” by liberating buildings from ornamentation and historical influence, Art Deco upheld art traditions from across the world — Greek, Egyptian, Mayan, Japanese — and merged them with new, industrial materials and methods. It represents everything that architects of the International Style railed against.

The idea that Art Deco was fundamentally continuous with architectural evolution over time, and that modernism was not a further evolution but a break with a long, recognizable traditional, is maybe arguable. But Gafford, and the original author, make a very good argument for the former view.

Chicago Workers Cottages Gave Immigrants Access to Homeownership, Bloomberg CityLab, Zach Mortice, July 28, 2024

Even the sub-head is really interesting: “The cottages’ modest design provided entry-level homes after the Great Chicago Fire. Attempts to preserve them now reflect the ongoing struggle for affordable housing.”

There’s an interesting story about the unintended effects of regulation:

The popularization of workers cottages required disasters as well as champagne-popping technological innovations. After fires in 1871 and 1874, the city changed its laws to ban wood houses. This spurred a cottage diaspora in surrounding townships, as many people couldn’t afford to build with more expensive brick.

There’s a bit of Victorian-ish social engineering that sounds as if it’s being read into the past, but is very likely a viewpoint expressed by elites at the time:

Establishing post-fire homeownership for working-class immigrants was a priority for Chicago elites, an odd choice considering that one in three Chicagoans was homeless. But paternalistic city leaders saw homeownership as a civilizing and homogenizing force that could inflict respectability on the immigrant masses, pulling them away from the sordid mixing of genders, races and ethnicities that tenement living seemed to inspire.

These structures were the same sorts of structures that made suburban subdivisions like Levittown possible in terms of engineering:

Because it was held together with nails and not handcrafted joinery, it didn’t need especially skilled labor, so a small group of builders could erect a lightweight and strong balloon framed house rapidly. This building system was also quasi-modular, and easy to expand with a floor above, or even below. Even today, it’s not uncommon to see multi-story cottages with brick on the first floor and wood framing above, evidence of an addition slotted in under the original lightweight wood-frame house. “Another family is coming over? Jack up the house, put in another floor,” says Mary Lu Seidel, a Chicago preservationist that has researched workers cottages extensively.

And there’s the interesting then-and-now element of these modest single-family detached homes once being cheap worker housing, and now being a sort of luxury simply because they are detached houses in a large city. (Although many of the demolished homes are replaced with larger detached homes, not denser housing types.)

Read the whole thing.

Q&A: Two Stevenson alumni, creators of ‘FailArmy’, Chicago Tribune, Aileen Simons, June 16, 2018

Over the Christmas break we watched a lot of these videos from FailArmy, a YouTube channel that does compilations of people screwing up various things. It’s basically America’s Funniest Home Videos. (We used to watch a lot of Three Stooges during the holiday breaks; it’s nice to watch stuff that’s just fun and low-stakes. I’ll certainly never watch It’s a Wonderful Life again, unless I wake up one day and decide that smashing up your house and then jumping off a bridge is a little bit of Christmas magic. Sorry, I will not take any questions.)

I was curious what sort of company story there was to this channel, and it turns out a couple of guys who’d always wanted to be in the television/entertainment industries founded it and have made a lot of money simply licensing and compiling these videos.

I’m sure some people find this unbearably stupid, but the best ones are like old-school slapstick, like the guy standing on a chair placed on a cheap table and falling straight through it, while still standing perfectly straight on the chair. You can just hear Curly going “What happened?” and Moe saying “Nothin’,” before delivering a slap.

Against Communion wafers, Draw Near With Faith, Ben Crosby, November 20, 2024

This is a little out of left field for the sort of thing I usually link here, but it’s really interesting. I like this bit particularly:

To be sure, I affirm that the bread and the wine of the Supper do more than symbolize Christ’s body and blood; they are instruments by which Christ’s body and blood are truly offered. But they are not less than symbols, even if they are more.

The author is an Anglican priest, and the best Anglicans do a really good job of splitting the difference between Catholicism and Protestantism. As a Catholic, I do find that the emphasis on Christ’s presence in the sacrament can be so overwhelming that you forget the symbolic element: that the thing is what it signifies, that the bread is Christ but also that Christ is bread, that the bread is the body of Christ but we as the church are also the body of Christ, etc. There’s a rich symbolism in the Eucharist that a didactic focus on transubstantiation can almost obscure, even if it is true that the Eucharist is really the body and blood of Christ.

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Related Reading:

New and Old #78

New and Old #79

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