We, a few of us here on BP, had the opportunity to interface w/
Greenfield Village & the Henry Ford museum when we re-moved Edison's
Building #11 back to East Orange and set it back up w/in 10' of where it
had first stood. On these out-of-town projects I always try to spend
some time to see something more than the 'project' and I did go
particularly to look at the Dymaxion house. The house that is there was
reconstructed from two of them... I'm not sure but I get the impression
either that was as many as were built or as many as survived. One of the
two had been lived in by a family and as their family grew in size they
built onto the house a very much larger longer rectangular stone
structure that you might think of as the tail of a comet trailing off
into a mesa of stone. Or possibly a crude representation of the wings of
Mercury. The Bucky concept of the Dymaxion house seemed to me to be this
portable drop-it-anywhere living machine (it rotated or would have could
have rotated) that would serve all human needs and the only real
manifestation of its use was to do the adaptive re-use equivalent of
anchoring it into the earth with a large mass of square architecture.
When you go to the exhibit they have a smiling docent dressed in period
costume that guides you through the house, you can walk through it. I
was struck by how small the loo was. The concept of living that this
space embodies would be best suited for a neutered small single person
under 100 lbs in weight with one not-overweight cat, no interest in
playing darts, and no desire to be a culinary chef at home.
The HFM is a nice classical approach to muchness. The museum was
consolidating their outdoor collection and Building #11 did not fit
their Menlo Park motif and though it was a significant building for
sentimental reasons to Henry Ford, and to Edison (it was where he went
to hide and tinker out of the way as an old man still hanging around...
supposed to be working on inventing rubber out of golden rod... though I
suspect he was sleeping) their idea was that if the NPS did not take it
back that they were going to trash it. The building in its original
location actually is in one of the early films of Edison that you can
download from the Smithsonian film website. The outdoor collection
during Henry's time he would come out in the morning and tell his crew
that he wanted the buildings moved around... and they would then be
moved around.
The story about the Gog & Magog building, the one with the clock and the
moving figures, I like. Henry saw the building for sale in London and
told his secretary to buy it. Henry then went to some place like France
and forgot about it. I imagine the paid staff running after Henry
writing checks and arranging work crews and shipping and unloading and
Henry not paying one whit of attention to any of it. He was on a roll.
The building, masonry, was dismantled and moved to Greenfield Village
where it was dumped out, without any documentation having been made,
into a pile of masonry rubble. The architect of the site, having no clue
what it was, found it a nice place to go sit in the afternoon and smoke
his pipe. Eventually someone remembered and told him it was a building
that he had to put back together. As I remember, without checking
details, the building was originally 3 stories and they only rebuilt 2
stories as they considered it needed to be in-scale to the surrounding
buildings. Where some in histo presto now come off with an objection to
Polish facadism I don't get other than a hyper-hypocritical political
purism that borders on [objectionable scatological word censored].
My take on it is that there was a bit of competitive acquisition between
Henry and Rockefeller with Colonial Williamsburg and that the two sites
came up in tandem as a competition, possibly one sided, as to who could
capture the most stuff from the past that they imagined was valuable...
and since they had the money and the resources they built a sense of
past that we have inherited. Each site has then been interpreted anew by
those who are the stewards of the physical. When I trace my family roots
back to the Mayflower era I don't get the impression that any of my past
ever lived or interacted with or gave a hoot about any of these
particular buildings. The collections are iconic as we adopt them into
our sense of a past that was never our past. We are often told that it
was our past and it goes along with a general modern sense of a visceral
disconnect with our own lives in preference for some other person's life
that may not even be their real life as much as one more mirage. Amazing
though how a building here or there suspends the imagination.
When I was a kid and we wanted to pretend we were playing with buildings
or to make a village we would take rocks and lay them on the ground then
put a large rock over them to make a roof and that was a house.
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