it was a special day today because one of the oxford kids, and the head tutor and wadham (our sister school at oxford or whatever) are sitting in, as well as alex forte, joe's son! so we were all very surprised by this and very interested to see what he was like. anyways, today we talked about CHICAGO from 1871 to about 1880, i.e., adler/sullivan, the great fire of 1871, and why chicago is so important. this was especially exciting for me, because i just finished "the devil in the white city," so my mind has been constantly occupied by burnham/the white city/etc. unfortunately we mostly focused on the pre-Fair chicago school, and by that i mean sullivan, though i got the impression that he was always a little bit behind burnham/root, and was sort of a jerk. i mean he was eventually evicted from his own building, which is so unhappy. i asked justin, and he said that sullivan was artistically much more advanced than burnham. but in a city of commerce doesn't a love of the business count for more than anything!?
so we talked a lot about adler and Sullivan's schiller building.
it's important mainly because it's a clear visualization of the cultural temperature of chicago vs. the eastern seaboard: which is to say, whether commercial culture is a totalizing force, or not. and the idea is that the bottom part of the building housed a popular theatre, and on top of that, the arches that progress up the facade anchor modular office blocks, and the loggia at the very top houses a men's club. i.e., there is a vertical progression from communal to individual cultural practices. which leads into a comment on the psychological presence of 'the vertical' in chicago, whereas in NY it was much more about the block, the horizontal. of course an easy comparison to draw is the upward mobility of the immigrant classes in chicago - especially the germans. apparently, olmstead believed that the german immigrants displayed the most viable system for democratizing traditionally bourgeois cultural practices!!! he wrote a series of articles about this in the herald and i guess this is what ultimately lead to the beginning of the integration of parks into the urban fabric of american cities. i mean it was natural for the german immigrants to become a model of this assimilation of upper-class activities because the immigrants olmstead was talking about were politically and culturally literate since they immigrated because of the 1848 revolutions, as opposed to immigrants who came because of financial reasons.
so this is the stuff forte was talking about. and it was GREAT. i felt very proud of forte, and our class, and all the subject matter, for some reason. i got the feeling that maybe the brits didn't like the emotion and enthusiasm of the lecture. later at lunch justin said, that was why i hated oxford and why oxford hated me - if you're not lecturing in an old boy academic monotony they see it as illegitimate. and tasteless. and it was so fitting that today our subject was the breaking away of america from the tired, british colonial styles, and creating the first native american style!!! and that it helped america far surpass england in terms of architecture, and culture for that matter.
damn, i have to go to a pre-calc conference at four. my god that class gets worse and worse every day. i dont even answer his simplest questions anymore, because when i do, there's a good possibility that it will snowball into a waterfall of painful references to your confusion that have less and less to do with the original topic as they progress. in fact i think i may be in danger of loosing credit - i missed my third class before break because i overslept for once, and he emailed me like "JUST BECAUSE YOU'RE MISSING CONFERENCE TOMORROW DOES NOT GIVE YOU A REASON TO MISS CLASS TODAY." oh. it's my fourth class anyways. i began this course thinking it might be a chance to redeem myself, mathematically speaking, of all my failures - but now it's clear it's just a redux of every other math class i've ever taken. my professors are so sickened by my complete incompetence that they slowly become more and more uncomfortable with even addressing them, and therefore subvert their anger into chiding me about attendance.
my mom is coming out here on the ninth, and then on the 10th we're renting a car to go to ithaca! hah! there's a sentance i never thought i'd utter! i've been researching cornell a lot, and it seems i might choose it over columbia - it's less fashionable but has wayyy more of a soul. though i'm going to reserve judgement until after the open houses.
graduation is quickly approaching - today at lunch the subject was "what goes under your cap and gown?" as well as "what is the appropriate price range/fanciness range for senior/don dinner attire?" and of course, "does tao have private rooms?" for the much-anticipated full-family all-friend dinner that we are supposedly having. which of course is going to end up being 70 people. this discussion brought me back to thinking about when justin and i are going to go up and have drinks at the lever house - something forte said we must do when we graduate. i have the perfect dress for it now. justin also commented that his parents are giving him a blank check for a suit for his graduation present. luckily hunter had the newest issue of GQ which had a huge section on new suits. i personally think thom browne is the 'duh' choice, but then justin said something classic and simple - like brookes brothers. but thom browne is doing a new line for brookes brothers. which might be better anyways because t.b. is haaard to pull off. but at the same time, the era which he contacts is the same era, and epoch, which justin draws from in his academic life. it fits. so to speak! hah!
just as an endnote i would like to note just how attached i am to chicago right now, architecturally and musically. the last two minutes of "the tallest man, the broadest shoulders" informed much of forte's class for me today. i feel so connected to the whole thing - it's weird. justin says i'm not a midwesterner cuz i went to a waspy high school, but he's misinformed about shady side's beginnings - poor scottish and german immigrants, who almost instantly became steel tycoons (andrew carnegie) - began a tiny private school in the wilds of the Appalachians to educate their sons on how to become tycoons of industry - that's classically midwestern. anyways, this whole story is so gripping right now. maybe i see some kind of paradigm at work which i reticently believe is at work in my life too. forte talked a lot about the psychology of the prairie today. i think that might have a lot to do with it. "from the plains?"
