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Unique Elements
Learned observations overheard by a freeloader at the Southeastern Society of Architectural Historians
by Jack Neely
This past weekend, the Southeastern Society of Architectural Historians held its annual conference in Knoxville. About 75 scholars, each with his or her own specialty, attended the conference, most of which took place on the fourth floor of the UT Conference Center downtown.
Presidents and presidential candidates may go for the casual look these days, but it’s heartening that architectural historians still wear coats and ties to conferences, even when they know they’ll be spending most of their time in darkness, watching slide shows in the plain, windowless rooms of the conference center. Among the 43 papers presented were ones with titles like “The Influence of Local and Imported Factors on the Vernacular Construction of Mission San Jose y San Miguel de Aguayo in San Antonio, Texas” or “Cultural Coexistence in the Palace of Minos” or “Interpreting the Urban Panorama of Barcelona in 1563.” These scholars spent most of the conference poring over the lighted images, picturing faraway times and places. But like it or not, they were physically in Knoxville in 2004, and had some interesting reactions to the place.
They’d met in Knoxville once before, around 1986. For some, it was the first visit to town since then; for others, it was the first visit ever. They were happy to offer some impressions.
One of the weekend’s special events was a 10-hour bus tour of outlying historic towns: Greeneville, Dandridge, Jonesborough, Rogersville. The leader of that tour was Robbie Jones, who has spent the last few years overlooking archaeological reconstruction at the Hermitage. The Harriman native is a UT grad and former TDOT architectural consultant; he’s proud to show off his East Tennessee. One of the conference’s younger presenters, Jones wears a very close-cropped goatee which he probably didn’t wear at TDOT.
He says the visitors were impressed with modern buildings like Tusculum’s Virginia Hall, Greeneville’s new U.S. Courthouse, and Jonesborough’s International Storytelling Center. “But they were most impressed with our historic buildings,” Jones says, among them, Tusculum’s Old College and the Hale Springs Inn at Rogersville. “Most had no idea that East Tennessee featured such a variety of good architecture, especially early historic buildings and unique town planning.” Of special note to them were some of the “stepped gables” that appear on many antebellum houses; they’re not unique to East Tennessee, but are not as common elsewhere.
East Tennessee is not necessarily known for architectural innovation, Jones says, but Knoxville and the rest of the area does have a wide variety of vernacular styles, many of them interpreted in conservative fashion. “Here you can find federal, Georgian, Victorian, bungalows, even some international style,” he says. More than that, though, East Tennessee presents some thought-provoking architectural case studies, some of which turn out to be subjects of SESAH studies or visits.
The attendees take a trip to the town of Norris, and Norris Dam. Both are among East Tennessee’s more architecturally notable sites: Norris as an unusual planned community, mostly still intact in appearance if not in function as TVA’s early utopians pictured it. And Norris Dam was once internationally recognized as an especially admirable work of industrial architecture designed by some cutting-edge European-trained modernists.
English-born scholar Julia King, now of Fredericksburg, Va., gives a presentation on the architecture of Rugby, the utopian community established for the lesser English gentry in Morgan County, showing how its mid-Victorian houses resembled designs for country cottages of southeastern England.
Rugby is well known, but, as it turns out, the region has a few architectural distinctions we maybe didn’t know about. Delos Hughes of Washington & Lee University spoke about the Cumberland Homesteads, the largest and perhaps one of the most distinctive of Franklin Roosevelt’s Subsistence Homesteads program of the 1930s. In all, 240 houses were built near Crossville for what were considered “stranded” populations of victims of the Depression; they were built in a variety of styles, most of them employing local crab-orchard stone. Knoxville contractors supplied much of the more mundane equipment. Prefiguring Habitat for Humanity, its residents did much of the work themselves and eventually owned their own houses. Its manager, and the man who designed the community’s gently curving roads, was Philadelphia hotel architect William Macy Stanton, who lived in the settlement himself for a time.
The project’s life as a coherent community was brief; it was falling apart by World War II. One of its problems, Hughes says, was that it provided for only one ecumenical church. With slides, Hughes showed in discouraging vividness the natural evolution of distinctive houses in East Tennessee. Some had been augmented with incongruous materials; some had gone to seed, adorned with abandoned cars; some had been McMansionized.
The conference drew some of the stars of the study of architecture; one was John Reps, author of landmark book The Making of Urban America and several other studies of planned cities. Reps has been studying the bastides of southeastern France since 1947. The planned 13th-century villages of southeastern France helped the concept of the city rise from the disorganized villages of the Middle Ages and may have originated, among other things, the concept of the market square. Reps gives the conference its keynote address in the basement auditorium at McClung Museum, showing slides of photographs of bastides, along with numerous maps. The street map of downtown Knoxville, with its rectangular Market Square near its center, might be indistinguishable, on first glance, from maps of the bastides of 13th-century France.
One of the conference’s themes is town planning, though with the exception of Reps’ keynote, the concept was observed only loosely. On Friday afternoon, the scholars emerged from their dark slide-show theaters to set out on a two-hour walking tour of three downtown churches: St. John’s Episcopal, First Baptist, and Church Street United Methodist.
Walking into Church Street, there’s a rustle of interest in the name John Russell Pope, the early 20th-century architect credited with the church’s 1929 design. One of the best-known architects who left work in Knoxville, Pope also designed the Jefferson Memorial in Washington. The degree of Pope’s involvement in the design of the church, which is otherwise credited to the local firm of Barber & McMurry, has been subject of argument and speculation for years. (He’s also credited with the earlier Dulin house on Kingston Pike.)
At Church Street, they’re treated to a brief organ recital. While a representative of Church Street is speaking about the church’s history, a couple of scholars are looking up at the vaulted ceiling.
“Why did they do that?” whispered one woman with a vaguely Eastern accent, pointing to the rear of the gothic chapel, which includes recessed organ pipes. They don’t trouble the old man with their questions. Like all historians, they’d much rather speculate.
They seem plenty impressed with the churches. A few remark that you expect grace and grandeur from an Episcopal or Methodist church, but some confess that they frankly didn’t expect a Baptist church to be quite so interesting. “I’d come to church just to sit in this room,” says one.
The scholars seem sufficiently reverent, but most of them seem to talk more about things other than the three esteemed churches on the tour. “Some of us are especially interested in these old churches,” says Georgia Tech professor Robert Craig, on the walk from the Baptist to the Methodist church. “I’m interested in art deco, so I’m going to come back and look at that one.” He gestures toward the old post office on Main Street. He calls it “New Deal classical—coming out of tradition and into the modern aesthetic.” Several of his colleagues offer their assent. It seems to be their favorite building downtown. (It does look New Deal, but technically, it’s a late Hoover-administration project.) It seems to be the favorite building downtown, but as always in any group of scholars, there’s a nonconformist.
“I love the Sunsphere,” says a young, dark-haired woman. She turns heads. It is, from an architecture-history point of view, an unusual opinion.
Her name is Catherin Zipf, and she’s a Harvard-educated scholar who now teaches at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island. She says the Sunsphere’s value is partly in its representation of an event in history. “In about 38 years, Knoxville will look back, and it will value the Sunsphere.” She adds that its depiction in an episode of The Simpsons gives it a boost, in terms of architecture history.
“That’s cachet. It’s right now.” It’s a little hard to tell whether she’s completely on the level, or enjoying some postmodernist irony.
“Mies van der Rohe, it’s not,” she admits, citing one of the totems of modernism. “But you need to respect what small cities are about. They’re not about Mies van der Rohe. They’re about the people who live here. It’s your Eiffel Tower,” she says, citing another unusual building that got no respect in its youth. “It’s your Space Needle.”
German-born Barbara Klinkhammer, a relatively recent import to UT’s architecture school, was co-chair of the conference. She speaks with a soft German accent, praising some interesting suburban modernist residences, some of them designed by architect Alfred Klaus, in Holston Hills, the Bearden area, and especially on South Knoxville’s Little Switzerland, home to three exemplary modernist houses. She has just given a presentation on one of the last century’s most famous modernists: it was called “L’Usine Verte: Le Corbusier’s Postwar Polychromie Architecturale and the Color Schemes for the Factory Claude and Duval in St. Dié.”
She didn’t go into the accounts of the famous Swiss architect’s 1946 visit to Knoxville and Norris Dam, which reportedly moved and perhaps influenced him; she had heard the story, but like all good scholars, doesn’t present anything she can’t prove.
The conference’s keynote celebrity, John Reps, attended Klinkhammer’s presentation. On Friday afternoon he’s standing on Locust Street near the UT Conference Center. “I see some Corbusier in that,” he says “that wavy awning, that barrel vault.” He gestures toward the aqua-blue skin of the building which was, in 1955, Rich’s department store.
“But that blue—is that Corbusier’s influence?” Barbara Klinkhammer smiles, indicating that maybe the venerable Dr. Reps is just giving her a hard time. The building, designed to look “suburban” in an era when no one wanted to seem urban, and awkwardly retrofitted from retail to offices and convention space, has suffered some knowledgeable abuse at this conference.
One academic who’d rather not be identified has the temerity to call the building “ugly”—but, she explains, in the eyes of architectural historians, ugly buildings have value, too.
But general opinion of Knoxville is sanguine. “Everybody has different interests,” says Craig. “A city that has a good variety of architecture is going to attract everybody.”
Richard Wilson, professor of architectural history at the University of Virginia, visited Knoxville occasionally in the mid-’90s as a scholarly authority on the locally produced America’s Castles cable series. He says he’s impressed with the city’s progress. “I found the city reinvigorated since my earlier visits,” he says. “I think Knoxville has come a considerable distance since then. I was pleased to see more activity along Gay Street, and that Market Square has progressed, and shops and restaurants are located there.” He likes the Knoxville Museum of Art, the old post-office building, and some of the Victorian neighborhoods nearby. “Knoxville still retains some impressive architecture,” he says, citing the “exemplary” examples of “numerous commercial buildings throughout the downtown.” One rare Gay Street printing shop especially got his attention: he calls Yee-Haw a “unique element.” He adds, “All in all, Knoxville seems on the mend in many ways.”
A couple of attendees remarked on downtown’s conspicuous residential resurgence, most of it taking place in renovated historic buildings. Jones, the former Knoxvillian, is particularly impressed, and a little surprised, with the variety of downtown residential development going on. “Last night I saw somebody walking out of a downtown building with a load of laundry,” he says. “You just don’t see that in downtown Nashville.”
Robert Craig also likes what he sees, but was unimpressed with the relative scarcity of sidewalk traffic on which a downtown thrives, especially on Gay Street.
“It is apparent to this tourist, at least, that if a pedestrian life is going to return to downtown, that continuing investment in the now abandoned storefronts and on-going residential conversions, such as the Sterchi Building lofts for in-town living, will be needed.” he says. “But the promise exists that people will return to the center city, because it is here that they will find an architecture of visual interest, streetscapes with an aesthetic vibrancy and complexity, and an urban character and environment which enriches life. Just make sure an architectural historian and preservation architect safeguard the very building fabric which gives this area of town its character, so that in an effort to improve, the redevelopment of Gay Street does not end up destroying the very character which draws us back to this wonderful street in the first place.” The art-deco aficionado from Georgia Tech mentions one favorite Knoxville landmark in particular: “That means appreciating and preserving the Moderne facade of the S&W Cafeteria just as readily as saving a turn-of-the-20th-century neo-classical building or an 1880s Romanesque Revival.”
It seems clear that to several of these visitors, Knoxville’s chief architectural distinction may be that it’s the city where Marian Moffett lived. The scholars in attendance made a special point to honor their beloved colleague, who died unexpectedly about a month before. Author and UT architecture professor Moffett was, by all accounts, a tireless and irreplaceable member of their organization, known as an expert on both Medieval Polish architecture and East Tennessee’s cantilever barns, rare native architectural distinctions of East Tennessee. She’s author of Buildings Across Time: An Introduction To World Architecture. She had been working on final details of arrangements the weekend she died. In the literature she was still listed as one of the conference co-chairs.
“There was a real, genuine respect and love for Marian that a lot of people shared,” says Craig. “She has written a global history of architecture that will impact students for years. We meet somewhere every year, but this conference has been different in a lot of ways.”
November 4, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 45
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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