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.

][<

--
To terminate puerile preservation prattling among pals and the
uncoffee-ed, or to change your settings, go to:
<http://listserv.icors.org/archives/bullamanka-pinheads.html>