Hunting Art by Carol Wallwork

     

Sea Change in the Arctic Part I

Introduction

The North Dakota prairie was my home for 10 years.  It was far removed from the clatter and swirl of mainstream American life--at the time, a perceived failing.  In hindsight, its greatest strength.  It was there I grew a voice, discovered photography, fell dumbstruck in love with the seasons of the Great Northern Plains.  Brief, but vibrant summers, and winters of such intensity I can still imagine, even in a torpid, Virginia summer, the power of that arctic wind chill.  There are few trees on the prairie, nothing to block the chill blasts dieseling down from the North, from October to March.  And that Cold...

Carol south of Minot, North Dakota circa 1978 photo: Jim Wallwork

Our Coldest time was that February night it was minus 38 degrees Fahrenheit (and Celsius!) a 40-mile-per-hour wind, equaling a near 100 below wind chill.  After warming our car for 30 minutes, its vaporous exhaust clouding the driveway, Jim and I drove out.  Driving along dimly lit streets to a friend's house for dinner, the rubber wheels screeching and groaning on glassy pavement, the car seemed to swim through a swirling wind-whipped ground blizzard.  All sound and light seemed muted, yet magnified, as if we we'd been transported to life on a different frequency, more akin to space travel than mere winter.  It was easy that night to imagine an Inuit Cold, without a warmed car, murky streetlights, a 75 degree Fahrenheit friend's house.  And be awed beyond count.

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                                 Arctic Works 

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In the 1950s, while Swiss photographer Robert Frank was driving across America, soon to change the world of photography, and Jackson Pollock was creating Abstract Expressionism, putting New York City on the international art map, an epic transformation was taking place in the Canadian Arctic.

Toronto, Canada 1939

Canada's Supreme Court ruling on the 1939 Indian Act that the aboriginal Inuit should receive the same rights to health, welfare, and education benefits as Canadian Indians.  World War II delays its implementation.

Baker Lake, Keewatin, Western Hudson Bay, Canada 1940s-1950s

Starvation and tuberculosis were epidemic among the Keewatin Caribou Eskimos in the late 1940s.  The collapse of the white fox fur market and the drastically thinned caribou herds due to disease, were calamitous blows to Inuit subsistence.  The Caribou Eskimo population dwindled to 500 people.   

  Reports flooded the South of dire circumstances in the Arctic  
  and of widespread loss of life.  Members of the Canadian
  government responded to this humanitarian crisis by forced
  relocation of the Inuit into small villages.

Boy with Bear Artist Ohito Ashoona Inuit Courtesy Eskimo Art Gallery http://www.eskimoart.com/

"By 1951, the Eskimo throughout the Arctic were already dying at an unprecedented rate, of malnutrition and its attendant diseases.  In those few areas where the incidence of tuberculosis was known with certainty, as many as 48 percent of the population was afflicted," reported Canadian writer Farley Mowat.  He recounted, in his research expeditions around the Arctic that, "...a series of horrific disasters... resulting in the deaths of at least 200 Eskimos, mostly from starvation and consequences of severe malnutrition."  Mowat also hints that the Canadian government's rush to evict Eskimo from their settlements, was to establish Canadian sovereignty of the resource-rich North, as it was increasingly evident that the Russians could challenge Canadian control of the tundra lands and blurred boundaries of moving glaciers.

These devastating forces set in motion rapid change of the Inuit, from a preeminent hunter-gathering society, that sustained itself for thousands of years in one of the harshest environments on earth, hunting the fiercest mammals, to the bottom of the market economy, domesticated, living in cities.  This would be like plunking Wall Street stockbrokers, in their Brooks Brothers suits, and polished Florsheims, down by seaplane onto the western shore of Baker Lake, to sell stocks in a near-cashless society.  They may have adjusted, but their hearts wouldn't have been in it.

Across the Arctic, from the Beaufort Sea to Labrador, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) began removing Inuit from their camps and placing them in villages so they could access modern medical care, education, and monthly government stipends.  Some were sent to tuberculosis sanitariums.  Many Inuit children were removed from their families all together, and sent to boarding schools in the South, to mainstream them into modern Canadian life. Some weren't even allowed to speak their native language.  The rapidity and method of Inuit removal from their ancestral homes created profound social, physiological, psychological, spiritual, and economic hardship that those communities are still grappling with today, 60+ years later.  According to the World Health Organization, Inuit suicide rates are among the highest in the world.  They also have extremely high rates of alcoholism and depression. The Inuit did not have the right to vote until 1950.

Part 2 next post

Bibliography (for Hunting Art 1,2,3, & 4)                                     

Blodgett, Jean Grasp Tight the Old Ways (Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario 1983)

-Collins, Henry, Frederica De LaGuna, Edmund Carpenter and Peter Stone

The Far North (Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art, 1973)

-Fitzhugh, William W.  and Susan A. Kaplan, Inua Spirit World of the Bering Sea Eskimo  (Washington, DC, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1982) -

-Flaherty, Robert director, Nanook of the North, 1922, Criterion Collection 1998

-Hessel, Ingo Inuit Art an Introduction (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998)

-Houston, John Confessions of an Igloo Dweller  (McClelland & Stewart 1996)

-Houston, John The White Dawn (Orlando, Florida, Harcourt Brace Inc.1973)

-Houston website http://www.houston-north-gallery.ns.ca/  for reproductions

         

-Mowat, Farley High Latitudes An Arctic Journey 

(South Royalton,Vermont:Steerforth 

Press, 2002) 

______ Michael Scott director Lost in the Barrens Sunday Night Productions, 1990

-Report on Violence and Health Summary, 2000,  http://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/violence/world_report/factsheets/en/selfdirectedviolfacts.pdf

-Ross, John F. “Top Dogs” Smithsonian, January 2004, 43.   

-Rowell, Galen.  “Nunavut: What’s to Become the Newest Canadian territory in 1999

  Might Well Be the Continent’s Last Frontier.” Grand Forks Herald, March 19, 1998 

-von Finchenstein, Maria ed. Celebrating Inuit Art 1948-1970 (Toronto Key Porter Books 1999)                                                                                                                                                      

Washington DC's Cherry Trees Peace Garden on the Potomac  by Carol Wallwork, photos by Molly

For dear friends Dr. Kaz & Yukie Umetsu 

First posted March 24, 2012

photo: Molly W.

For one hundred years, Washington DC has delighted in the most famous display of Japanese cherry trees in the United States. Each year Washingtonians and visitors alike are abuzz with the cherry trees' progress from bud to glorious bloom, times thousands of trees.  In Japan this blossom euphoria is called Hanami, a party-like blossom viewing excursion.  In Washington this spring the peak blossom day was Sunday March 18th.  The Tidal Basin was awash in pale pink & white blossoms and waves of Hanami-inspired tourists. 

photo: Molly W.

How the Tidal Basin's was transformed from a miasmic morass to one of the beautiful cityscapes is as captivating as its most inspiring aspect is overlooked, that of Peace Garden.   

What is now known as the Tidal Basin was originally a channel of the Potomac River.  Long Bridge was built in the early 1800s from the District to Virginia. Over the years it silted up around the bridge pylons, known as Potomac Flats, a mosquito infested swamp prone to flooding.  After severe flooding in 1875 the National Park Service requested the Army Corps of Engineers create a flood and sanitary plan for the Potomac River.  This project involved a massive dredging operation.  District engineer Major General Peter C. Hains used the methods the Corps used in the levee work on the Mississippi River.  The dredged river channel became the Tidal Basin, the dredged dirt created 600 additional acres of solid ground.

Looking at the map below you can see how the former river bottom added to the modern boundary of the National Mall, sites of most of the pre-21st century memorials including the Lincoln, Jefferson and F. D. Roosevelt Memorials.

Pencil drawing by Carol W. based on Army Corps of Engineers map

 What to do with the bare, uncultivated land once the project was complete became an issue.  In 1897 Congress dedicated the reclaimed land to be held and used as a park for recreation and pleasure of the people, called West and East Potomac Parks.

photo: Molly W.

Back stepping a few years:  Ever since travel writer, D.C.-born Eliza Scidmore returned from Japan in 1885 she advocated planting Japanese Cherry trees on the reclaimed land.  By 1909 her proposal gained momentum, aided by new First Lady Helen Taft.  Also the successful cultivation of Japanese cherry trees in Maryland by U.S. Department of Agriculture plant explorer David Fairchild helped build a latticework of support for the idea.  

photo: Claire W.

 The keystone however, was a war in the east, the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-06.  Like too many wars it was a lose-lose proposition, for both the troubled reign of tzar Nicholas II and for cash-strapped Japan.  U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt was the chief mediator at the peace conference, held in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, resulting in the Treaty of Portsmouth, in September 1905.  His successful results garnered Roosevelt the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906.  (The Nobel Prize Award was established by Alfred Nobel after his death in 1896.  The first prize year was 1901. From my limited research Theodore Roosevelt appears to have been the first American awarded the prize.)

photo: Molly W.

Amid extensive back-and-forth over many years between Washington and Japan, the brokering of the peace with Russia was the inspiration for the city of Tokyo and Japanese chemist Dr. Jokichi Takamine, to donate 2,000 cherry trees to Washington.  Alas, by the time they arrived they were diseased and had to be destroyed.  Undaunted by this setback another 3,000 trees were dispatched successfully.  On March 27, 1912 Eliza Skidmore, First Lady Helen Taft and Japanese Ambassador Sutemi Chinda and his wife, Iwa, planted the first trees.

photo: Molly W.

Over the course of one hundred years, our two countries have endured the bleakest days of human warfare, and profound, inspiring peace.  Just last year the United States helped with the harrowing battle to save severely damaged nuclear reactors in Japan after an 8.9 magnitude earthquake struck the north east coast causing a devastating tsunami.  In 2005, after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, Japan donated power generators, special equipment, several million dollars and emergency supplies, tents, etc.

photo: Claire W.

 Called Sakura in Japan, these graceful cherry trees are important in Japanese art and culture.  Cherry trees are celebrated in ancient Japartwork as the embodiment of joy and beauty.  We can add to their colorful genealogy that of graceful diplomats. 

photo: Claire W.

Thank you Molly & Claire for your lovely photos, inspiring me to share them with others.

March 26, 2012

Postscript: Today's Wall Street Journal has a full page ad for a Japanese pharmaceutical company who's first president was Dr. Takamine Jokichi, the co-benefactor of Washington DC's Japanese cherry trees.  Among his accomplishments was his discovery of the hormone adrenaline.

My mom, Washington DC 1952  photo taken by mystery photographer, possibly...me for mom's looking down

Friend Naomi visiting from North Dakota  2007

Carol, Washington DC 1952 photo by Julia K.

Molly & Abel's Wedding photo by Claire W.

Jewel on the Prairie

First posted online Dec. 18, 2008

If its a sunny day on December 25th, the 100-foot tall bell banner at Marcel Breuer’s Annunciation Priory, in Bismarck, North Dakota, will cast a cross-shaped shadow at noon on the stone front of the chapel. This article was first published Winter 1986, in North Dakota Horizons Magazine.  Some things have changed, but some things remain the same, such as the beginning.

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A renowned architect, and an innovative prioress defied the odds to build a masterpiece

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Seven miles south of Bismarck, North Dakota, far removed from the architectural epicenters of the 20th century, is an American classic.  It was created by world renowned architect Marcel Breuer, an innovative prioress, and a small band of Benedictine nuns.  It is one of a very few buildings of such distinction in the region.  The place -- Annunciation Priory.

The origins of the Priory are as dynamic as the surrounding landscape of rolling hills and Missouri River valley.  In the autumn of 1954 prioress Edane Volk dispatched two sisters to St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota.  The Benedictine monks there had commissioned Breuer, one of the most influential architects of the Bauhaus period, then living in New York City, to design their chapel, library and future building plan.

The challenge:  Could Marcel Breuer ( pronounced like broiler without the l ) design a cluster of buildings in one of the most remote parts of the country that could withstand some of North America’s harshest climate yet nobly reflect the Benedictine philosophy of prayer and work, and at a price the fledgling order could afford?  Breuer met the challenge.

Prioress Volk no doubt assumed the Lord was on her side but she was also an astute businesswoman.  In making her request she’d calculated that she could clip considerable expenses because St. John’s was paying the architect’s expenses as far as Minnesota.  The short additional trips to North Dakota would save precious resources if Breuer would be so kind as to arrange them while in Minnesota.  He was and he countered that perhaps he could design them a “little jewel” on the prairie in the process.

'Many people in Bismarck at that time thought, Who are these sisters to get this fancy New York architect?  They’d be broke before they begin,’ Sister Volk recalled.  They were all wrong.

 

                                  Madonna & Child sculpture at entrance to chapel

In the late 1940s St. Benedict’s Convent in St. Joseph, Minnesota, missioned 140 nuns to North Dakota to establish a new Benedictine motherhouse to meet the rising need of teachers and nurses for religious schools and hospitals in the region.

Originally the plans were to build the Priory on land the sisters owned in Dickinson.  But when newly appointed Bishop Hacker took office in Bismarck, he made inquiries about locating the Priory in Bismarck, closer to the Catholic establishment in the state.

When a Bismarck farm family, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Swenson, donated a tract of land seven miles south of the city, Bishop Hacker had second thoughts.  Such a remote site could prove to be too much of a challenge for a group of women.  He too was wrong. The sisters wanted a remote place, away from city activity, in keeping with monastic tradition but also close enough to Bismarck to enable them to participate in their work and the community.

“Father Michael Marx was then on leave from St. John’s and teaching in Bismarck.  He encouraged me to consider Breuer as architect of our Priory,” Sister Volk said.

"Glory, who were we to go talk to this great architect from New York City!” But Marx encouraged her.

The sisters had made several visits to new priories in the region, studying architectural styles.  They knew they most wanted a priory that would enhance their lives as Benedictines and would suit the site near Bismarck.

“When we heard about Breuer’s philosophy of contemporary architecture-that buildings show a connection to their surroundings and not just be a replica of the past, as well as his study of the Benedictine Order and his previous monastic work, we were convinced he could build the Priory,” Sister Volk recalled.

“He inquired about our daily schedule, where we ate, what we did for recreation, how we prayed; not just work but our spiritual needs,” Sister Volk recounted.  “Benedictine life-what does that mean?” he would ask.  He wanted to get that into the buildings.”  Breuer asked the sisters their ideas of what they wanted in their home.  “He was very perceptive of our needs and never tried to push his ideas on us, he never confronted people.  Instead, he’d say, ‘Well, Sister, we’ll work that out."

Marcel Breuer drew up a 100 year plan including, in the first stage, a girl’s high school (now part of The University of Mary) completed in 1959; the second stage, providing the permanent chapel and convent for the sisters, completed in 1963; and the third stage, the building of The University of Mary, ongoing.  The first and second stage combined, cost just over $3,400,000 - a modest sum for such a treasure.

State Highway 1804 skirts the Missouri Rver south of Bismarck.  It meanders past large ranch homes with good-sized pastures stocked with well-bred horses.  Off in the distance, on a prominent river bluff, stands a tall concrete banner that recedes from view as the road curves, leaving one wondering what is that prominent, unusual object?  A half mile futher on it reappears, in the near distance.  A simple wooden roadside sign, “ University of Mary and Annunciation Priory.”

                      

Sister Emanuel, "Scrubbing the porch of the Lord."

Turning off the highway onto the Priory road there is no doubt that this is the rugged landscape of the American West.  Sage brush, prairie grasses and wild roses grapple for moisture amid the rocky glacial debris.  Shelter belts and fields of crops cut straight lines in the countryside yet there is a wildness about the site that arriving at the parking lot does not dispel.

Breuer’s bell banner stands off center, in front of the long fieldstone cloister walk establishing the Priory’s southern parameter.  This is in keeping with Benedictine tradition of placing the cloister to the south, and the church to the north.

Three bronze bells are suspended from the banner, one named Hilary, in honor of Bishop Hilary Hacker; another named Joseph, in memory of Monsignor Joseph Raith; and Mary, the smallest bell, in honor of the patroness of the community.

The bell banner exemplifies Breuer’s mastery of concrete.  Varieties of concrete have been used since Roman times but not until the late 19th century invention of reinforced concrete did it become a staple building material, valued for its strength, speed of assembly, versatility and modest cost.

The Priory bell banner soars 100 feet, a huge pennant perched upon a two-way cantilever support.  Its strong sculptural form creates bold shadows on and around it.  No other building material is capable of such height, shaping, economy, and durability.  Stone, brick--impossible.  Metal, wood--maybe but too expensive.  Breuer delighted in using grainy patterned wooden frames to cure his concrete forms, imbedding them with the wood’s pattern and personality.

“Some people around Bismarck were sure the bell banner would topple over in the first good blizzard,” one of the sisters recalled humorously.  It has long since weathered that test.  It is a particularly suitable prairie structure--large, visible from a great distance across the rolling farmland and, of course durable, to withstand fierce extremes of weather.  Its dramatic spiritual form heralds the religious community that resides within earshot of its bells.

Marcel Breuer was born in Pecs, Hungary, in 1902.  he attended the art Academy in Vienna and later the Bauhaus School of Design, in Dessau, Germany, where he became a professor.  It was at the Bauhaus that he established himself as one of the primary design influences of the 20th century, along with Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus founder, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

The  Bauhaus School espoused a radically different approach to design and building that stressed the importance of an object’s use in determining how it will look.  Form Follows Function was their credo.  They strived to mimic the sleek aesthetic of machines.  A car engine, for instance, is purely functional, not glitzed up with superfluous detail.  Objects were made of durable, economical, often industrial materials, such as stainless and tubular steel, concrete and canvas.  These materials were transformed from ugly ducklings into beautiful functional objects such as the Breuer chair, made of tubular steel and leather.  Breuer’s chair is an apt example of successful Bauhaus principles.

              Two Breuer-designed chairs



Hindsight shows something got lost in the translation.  What had initially been intended to produce unpretentious, honest forms quickly became a good excuse to build on the cheap.  Cities around the world show this to be true, with their repetitive plethora of glass and steel boxes for buildings, and mind-numbing interiors for rooms.

This makes the presence of Annunciation Priory exceptional.  A scant 25 years after the closing of the Bauhaus (which existed for barely a decade, from the 1920s to the early 30s) the Priory was designed and built thousands of miles from the origins of its principles while maintaining all of its best ideals. 

The Bauhaus was closed with the rise of Nazism.  Gropius and Breuer soon settled at Harvard University, where they taught at the School of Design.  Together they created one of the first International Style  (what streamlined buildings are called) structures of note in the country, The Gropius House, in Lincoln, Massachusetts, in 1937.  Mies van der Rohe moved to Chicago, where where he joined the faculty of the Illinois School of Technology.

Gropius stayed at Harvard.  Breuer spent the 1940s perfecting house designs, ‘...shelter as simple, expressive geometry in fieldstone, glass and taut white surfaces, cantilevered over the countryside or precisely placed in fields and on hills,” said architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable in her book, Kicked Any Good Buildings Lately?

By the 1950s and 60s Breuer was receiving the meatiest of commissions, such as the UNESCO Building in Paris; the Whitney Museum in New York City; Housing and Urban Development headquarters in Washington DC; and closer to home, St. John’s Abbey, in Collegeville, Minnesota.

These structures established the now familiar Breuer trademarks of ‘...powerful, repetitive patterns of precast facades, artfully sculptured columns, Y-shaped buildings, folded and fanned concrete and elevated sculptural shapes, which push reinforced concrete technology into the realm of abstract art.

Priory cemetery                                                                  Summer 1984

On a warm summer’s day, Sister Edane Volk recalls the events of 30 years ago, when she was prioress and worked with Marcel Breuer to create Annunciation Priory.  She is dressed in the newer, modified habit, and although retired, has just finished a day of volunteer work at a Bismarck hospital.

“Breuer was a very talented man, yet he had great humility.  He was soft spoken, and never talked of the other great things he did, like that UNESCO Building.  He’d say, ‘Yes, I helped with that.”

Breuer lived for a time with the monks at St. John’s to enable him to more fully understand their lifestyle.  Sister Volk did not know what religion he was, only that he was buried in a Lutheran service, in 1981.

At the Priory’s entrance, behind the bell banner, is a fieldstone and white concrete cloister walk, a courtyard and a terra cotta flue tile screen that establishes a sense of monastic seclusion.

The convent and school wings jut out from the flue tile-fronted main building.  To break the monotony of the two wings, Breuer produced a checkerboard pattern of screens alternating with buff-tone brick.  Unlike conventional screens that fit the windows these are set in a framework about 12 inches from the building.

Light and shadow are important components of the Priory, most notably the bell banner.  Once a year near Christmas the shadow of the cross in the banner is cast onto the front of the chapel, 100 feet to the north.

   The bell banner’s shadow cast at noon on Christmas day  photo Greg Becker

The Priory, which includes the convent, dormitory space for religious retreats, communal dining and meeting rooms, is made of simple concrete block walls, with vinyl and brick tiled floors and plaster ceilings, for the most part.  Simplicity is the rule.  There are many windows.  The walls are white with the occasional accent of Chinese red, moss green, yellow an a memorable shade of blue, affectionately called, “Breuer Blue.”

The only ornamentation are the larger than life-size photomurals of Gothic paintings, including works by Duccio, Giotto, Frencesca and an anonymous work of the “Annunciation.”

The chapel is the heart of Annunciation Priory, an intriguing combination of modern elegance and ancient simplicity.  It is a large space with no interior supports, relying instead on master engineering and an hyperbolic parabaloid-shaped roof with exterior buttresses.  Imagine a wide W with outside supports for the lateral thrust of the outer lines of the W.

   The Priory Chapel's paraboloid-shaped roof with bell banner in background

The exterior is bare concrete, fieldstone and copper-sheathed concrete for the roof.  The interior is a striking contrast of light and dark:  Dark-stained simple pews and floor, with walls and ceiling painted white.  A Breuer compromise, and a good one.  At St. John’s Abbey Chapel, Breuer also used concrete but left the interior its natural fieldstone grey, a color he felt was too “masculine” for a women’s chapel, so he had the Priory painted white.  As Breuer said, “Form Follows Function...but not always.”

Two grand floor-to-ceiling stained glass windows flank either side of the chapel, in amber, rose and blue, that changes shades with the changing daylight.  These windows serve to visually separate the choir and the Nave.

The altar is Cold Spring, Minnesota blue granite, and completes an axis line through the granite vestibule baptismal fountain to the bell banner. The wall directly behind the altar is gold-leaf-covered ceramic tile which radiates a lush warm color during mass from the glow of tall candles.

Sister Denise, the Priory building manager, affirms the characteristic resident’s belief that, “There’s something about this place that’s special.”  She qualifies her assertions with the manager’s eye for the accounting books, “However, I’ll be speaking to Mr. Breuer in heaven about all those windows and the flat roofs-such heating and re-roofing bills!” In a snowy, very cold climate.

Sister Miriam recalls the stonemason who faced the local fieldstone for the chapel and cloister walk, “Peter Teminson was originally from Latvia, or Lithuania.  He was a coal miner, who served in the American Army during the war and afterwards settled in Bismarck.  He faced all that stone himself, with a sledge-hammer.  He knew how to hit them too, he never had to swing twice.  When Teminson returned to visit the completed chapel, he was so move by its beauty that he hugged the stone walls."

Breuer also designed the original administration classroom building of the University of Mary, which is about a quarter of a mile to the northeast, by way of a footpath along the bluffs of the Missouri River.  It is the only Catholic university in the state, is co-educational, and just this year reached university status.  It has also made good use of local fieldstone which comprises walkways and portions of buildings.

Annunciation Priory represents the missionary spirit of the Church, the pioneer drive of the settlement of America, and the best of modern architecture.  The great thought that went into its design is enhanced  by its remoteness.

“Breuer couldn’t get over the great open space out here,” Sister Volk recalled, “It’s surprising how many visitors come here on a summer’s evening.  We feel we have a special place here for people, at Breuer’s little jewel.”

                   Lathe walkway showcases Breuer’s use of shadow for design variety

          

Cass Gilbert's Grand Forks Depot-A Notable North Dakota Buidling

First published online December 4, 2008

While visiting Grand Forks a couple of months ago I drove by my favorite building, Gilbert’s Depot. It’s made of stone in a region that uses mainly wood and brick.  The restoration done in 1986 has held up well, creating a fine albeit different impression from the one architect Cass Gilbert created in 1891.  I suspect Gilbert would not be surprised that his depot--designed to inspire a sense of permanence--has actually achieved that quality.   His minimalist early period depot has faced formidable floods and, for awhile, was even a down-at-heel eyesore. 

(The following was first published in the Grand Forks Herald, May 2, 1985)

Photograph courtesy of Myra Museum, Grand Forks, ND

Grand Fork’s train depot:  An echo of another era
By Carol Wallwork                

Burlington Northern Railroad has a white elephant on its hands:  the Grand Forks Depot.

The railroad wants $55,000 for the building alone.  Railroads rarely sell land, and it will cost considerably more to restore it, within reason, to its former glory.

So for now, this once finest representation in Grand Forks of the Richardsonian Romanesque architectural style sits empty.  This dilemma reveals much that plagues building restoration.

If the building were located in Boston or even Indianapolis, it would easily be worth the asking price.  But in this region it is difficult to find a tenant eager for just a 20-year lease.  While BN sits on its asset, Grand Forks is unable to use one of its most notable buildings.

The depot is made of a peach-gray Kettle River stone.  It is one of a handful of stone buildings not only in the city but the region.  It cost a whopping $100,000 in 1891 and was designed by Cass Gilbert early in his career.  Gilbert went on to become one of America’s most successful architects, his crowning achievements:  the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul and the U.S. Supreme Court Building in Washington DC.  And still, despite street diversions since it was built in the early 1890s, Gilbert's depot has a most uncommon regional building characteristic: a sense of presence on its site.  This is not so much the noble intention of its architect as the sheer logistics of train tracks and their demand for space.

This building represents not only the difficulties of building restoration but also exemplifies fundamental facts about architecture:  the needs of the people who built it, their values and skills, and their power to pull off the first two.

Trains are one of the most romantic and sophisticated technological forms ever created, and their accompanying architecture reflects the train culture’s rise to power and its subsequent decline and usurpation by the automobile.

In 19th-century America, the train culture ruled.  Deals were made, empires won and lost, and the Soo Line, the Great Northern, the Sante Fe and many more railroads rapidly dotted cities and towns with one of the most delightful of architectural accomplishments, the train depot.

But railroad depots didn’t just spring into existence.  Not until Henry Hobson Richardson, a great corpulent Boston architect, turned his skills to the lowly railroad depot in the early 1880s did the architectural world take it seriously.  Up until then, depot design was ‘fit’ only for engineers to fiddle with and often looked like houses.  American architects were too busy designing chateaus and palaces and Queen Anne retreats for the likes of the Vanderbilts, Astors and the Mellons.

Richardson influenced the heart of countless American cities and towns that developed around their downtowns.  Richardson ranks with the company of Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan as one of America’s most influential and gifted architects.  He restored that all-but-forgotten practical early American habit of using indigenous materials in his structures.  The amount of marble imported into America in the 19th century could probably have create a small mountain range.

Richardson spent the Civil War in Paris, studying at the Ecole de Beaux-Arts, before he was made destitute by the war’s effect on his Louisiana-family’s fortunes.  In France he discovered the Romanesque.  After the war, he returned to Boston, where he slowly established his architectural reputation.  Boston is enriched by the remaining depots and libraries designed by Richardson.
North Dakota is enriched by his influence on Gilbert, the designer of Grand Forks Great Northern depot.

Gilbert was a hotshot young architect, one of the earliest graduates of the new Massachusetts School of Architecture, in Boston.  Richardson’s influence was inescapable.  Gilbert apprenticed in the premier architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White.  Gilbert worked closest with the firm’s most talented partner, Stanley White.

Early in his career, he became affiliated with one of the most successful corporations in the country, the Great Northern Railway, which later merged with the Northern Pacific to become the Great Northern.  It is to the Great Northern’s credit that it regarded its influence on the Plains as justifying an architect of Gilbert’s caliber.  By the time Gilbert designed the Grand Forks Great Northern depot, Richardson was dead.

Gilbert’s Grand Forks depot exemplifies the most understated point in his career.  Gilbert went on to design the more showy Fargo Northern Pacific depot; and the grandiose but finely balanced State Capitol in St. Paul, modeled after St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.  It has the second largest unsupported dome in the world. 

His most modernist achievement was the 57-story Woolworth Building in New York City.  Its high-tech steel frame has the most Gothic-style facade of any  skyscraper, and was the tallest building in the world until the Chrysler Tower stole that distinction in 1927.  The Supreme Court Building in Washington DC was his last major commission before his death, in 1934, one year before it’s completion.  Built during the Great Depression it was possibly the only public building to come in UNDER budget, $93,532.03 less than the $9,740,000 allocated.

Gilbert’s been accused of retreading tired Renaissance design themes that his avant-garde contemporaries were abandoning.  But critics could never find fault with his dazzling command of proportion, form and overall design.  His later baroque exuberance offers a robust contrast to much 20-century architecture.

His Grand Forks depot has known sunnier times.  When it was built, the first of its two stories was graced with a pent roof that jutted out to offer passengers protection from the weather.  In the center, on the street side of the hexagonal hip roof, was a large, square clock tower, topped with a recessed pyramidal roof.

How the depot lost its clock tower is a matter of debate.  One story has it that a bigwig Great Northern official checked the clock, which was wrong, and missed an important meeting-or train.  His angry reaction led to the ‘axing’ of the tower in retribution.  A railroad official’s account says the tower was removed because it was unsafe.

Gilbert’s depot created, like the Romanesque style it was modeled after, the impression of stability and permanence.  It was no doubt a reassuring beginning to immigrarnt settlers starting their new life in the Red River Valley.

It reveals Richardson’s influence in its rough-faced stone and its almost minimalist but strong design.

Today, the pent roof, the chimney stack and the clock tower are gone.  What remains still makes an impression.  But like an old exiled Russian count working as a waiter in a two-star Parisian restaurant, the old days were definitely kinder.

(The following was first published in the Grand Forks Herald circa summer 1986)

Photo Shoen Associates, circa 1986

GF architect brings depot to new life
By Kevin Bonham

…When architect William Schoen of Schoen Associates and two partners finish restoring The Depot in August, the $500,000 investment will put a new shine on a remarkable Grand Forks building.