When architects travel, what do they do for fun? The answer is easy--they visit buildings--the famous landmarks where all tourists go, but also the indigenous types such as little villas crawling up a steep Italian hillside, one almost on top of the one below, with a single narrow footpath curving up to each front door.
We were struggling up one of these well-trodden paths in Florence, yellow dirt packed as hard and appearing almost as impervious as stone, following a small group of students from Minnesota (or so we assumed--one was wearing a maroon UMinn sweatshirt), stopping every now and then to catch our breath and take a picture, when the whole group of us was overtaken by a very fit old lady carrying a bag of groceries. She unlocked her door, gave us smug little smile, and closed the door behind her. The kid in the sweatshirt shook his head in disbelief--"People actually livin' here!" It was just that perfectly picturesque, like a movie set, with a panoramic view of the Pitti Palace and city below. The Italian lady viewed this scene, famous in travelogues of Florence, every day from her window--along with sweaty tourists, struggling upwards just inches away from her home!
Architects also sketch buildings--we have seen sketch book displays of the drawings student architects on European tours have made and they are beautifully evocative records of the landscapes and buildings they have visited. Along with a camera, Ken, like the student he once was, and really, still is--carries a sketch book that he takes, not just on vacations, but to job sites, visiting relatives--everywhere he travels. He has sketched miner's shacks in Colorado and New Mexico and has photographed seemingly blank walls to capture a texture or a color. This usually elicits a funny look from passers-by, but once in a while, you meet a person who understands.
In New Orleans, he photographed a featureless, but well-worn pink stucco wall--only it wasn't just a plain baby pink blank wall, but also patinated with shades of green, brown, orange--all superimposed on a texture that had seen years of humidity and traffic, both foot and vehicular. Two men crossing the street noticed and approached us. "Are you an artist?" the older man asked. Ken answered that he was an architect. "That's what I told my son--that guy has to be an artist or an architect!" Two tourists themselves, they obviously appreciated the pink wall as well. It's always fun to meet kindred spirits who appreciate a mere color.
Architects often make pilgrimages to visit famous buildings by famous architects. Frank Lloyd Wright, Frank Gehry, the Greene Brothers, I.M. Pei, Fay Jones, Gaudi, Corbusier, among others--all have followers, and we take every chance we get to visit their buildings on our travels. But the architect we have gone out of our way to see is Louis Sullivan, and his banks are the specific buildings we have visited--in very small towns, where they know why you are there if you are not related to someone who lives there.
While famous for many things--he was a pioneer of the skyscraper, he coined the phrase "Form follows function", he was one of ten architects chosen to design a building for the 1893 World's Fair--he died poor. The banks are the products of his declining years and were considered small, unimportant commissions, but today, they are called "Jewel Boxes." One of the prettiest is the Merchants' National Bank in Grinnell, Iowa, a small central Iowa college town, and our tour of the bank was a special adventure.
It was late afternoon and the bank was closed when we arrived in Grinnell. Standing across the street admiring the intricate terracotta ornament surrounding the entry, we noticed that a man driving by was looking at us. He drove around the corner and parked, got out of his car and approached us. "Are you an architecture student?" Ken told him he was an architect, whereupon the man offered to give us a tour of the bank. As a retired president of the bank, this 90-year man was given the perk of having his own key for the building and he said when he saw us standing exactly where every architecture student stands to get the best view, he knew we were on a pilgrimage especially to see this building.
Inside the building, the wall of slim, tall stained glass windows was even more spectacular. It was brilliantly illuminated by natural light--the colors were warm and glorious. The details of the interior were lovely, but it was the shape and proportion of the building itself that made it unique and special--solidly sited on a street corner, simple, rectangular, in a gorgeous purple-brown brick mix that looked artistically done, contrasted with the lighter color of the terracotta ornament around the round window above the entry. The blue stained glass within this oculus (I guess that's what you would call it) rivals any we have seen in cathedrals anywhere. And the terracotta design itself is a wonder of interwoven squares on point, squares set square, and circles, all entwined with delicate, little leafy fronds and ovals and little borders and trims almost as detailed as a medieval embroidery design. Something about the contrast of solid and delicate, fancy and plain, really has the touch of genius about it, keeping in mind that the solid is perfectly proportioned and that the plain brick has those inspired, but very subtle variations in color.
This building, and the other jewel box banks are works of art that would be prohibitively expensive to replicate today. How wonderful that they are being preserved, all eight of them, and are still around today and available for architecture students to visit and see how a master of proportion, scale, materials, color and ornament created buildings that are still functioning as banks today.
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