In Memoriam Rudy Riefstahl

I was in the middle of researching William Bradford, and reading Rudy's essay on Bradford's frames when I got an email informing me that he had passed away. Worse than that, I had just started making headway on This Side of Paradise, a book set largely at Rudy's alma mater -- I was preparing an email to him to ask him how much of it was true (though he clearly graduated a few decades later). I haven't experienced very many deaths in my life yet, but this one hit me hard. I had to put down my work and sit for a long while.

Rudy was a great friend -- he was one of my mentors at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Every Wednesday, we'd get lunch with Robert Hauser and talk about art philosophy, everything from forgery, to proper conservation technique, the differences between "objects" and "artifacts," artist's intention, art's value. He made me promise him that if I ever did an exhibition on what was to become my thesis work, that I wouldn't fail to publish some sort of catalog. He was extremely sharp, irascible, hilarious, and wonderfully honest in the sort of way that only an old man can be. I always made sure to send him an update message with how I was doing, what I'd been up to lately, because I always wanted Rudy to be proud of me. He taught me everything I know about frames and frame conservation -- he is the reason that I'm always gawking at the edges of paintings and considering whether they are appropriate to the subject, period, style, etc.. He was a true mentor and friend, and though I found myself dripping tears on my research, there really is no reason to cry -- at 82-years-old, with children and grandchildren who loved him and a brain full of art, and a firm grasp of virtue

I was intending to visit him this coming August.

Obituary

Rudolf Meyer Riefstahl II, 82, of Rochester, Massachusetts, died unexpectedly on June 25, 2011. Born in Istanbul, Turkey, the son of Rudolf Meyer-Riefstahl and Elizabeth Titzel Riefstahl, Rudy was raised in New York City, where he attended the Brooklyn Friends School. He was a graduate of The Hill School, and Princeton University. After serving in the United States Army in Germany during the Korean War he pursued graduate studies in art history at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University. He was employed by the Fogg Art Museum of Harvard University and The Toledo Museum of Art before working in private practice in conservation of works of art and curatorial services in Michigan for many years. After moving to Massachusetts he found new outlets for his love of art, history, classical and choral music and reading. He found community through his many years of volunteering in the conservation department of the New Bedford Whaling Museum, and through singing with various local choral groups; the Sippican Choral Society, Sine Nomine, and, most recently, Mastersingers by the Sea. An avid reader until his death, Rudy could often be found enjoying the Rochester library, or perusing yard sales on Saturday mornings, from which he often brought home trinkets for his granddaughters, books or old tools to add to his collection. Rudy was married to Deborah Lockwood Riefstahl, who died in 1989. He is survived by his son, Rudolf Meyer Riefstahl III of Grayling, Michigan, his daughter, Sophia Arnfield of Rochester, and three granddaughters; Deborah E. Riefstahl, Albertine A. Arnfield and Beatrice C. Arnfield. Burial and private ceremony will be held at a later date at Oakwood Cemetery in Traverse City, Michigan. Donations in his memory may be made in support of the conservation department of the New Bedford Whaling Museum, the Friends of Rochester Plumb Library, or to Mastersingers by the Sea of Falmouth, Massachusetts.

19th Century Green Writing: Teaching the Art of Fascination

A lover of plots, action, drama, passion, tension, mystery, deception, climax, conflict and resolution, might have trouble with Mary Austin's The Land of Little Rain. Much of Green Writing has very little interest in what is expected of the most basic novel. But if we are to judge Austin's book by the measuring stick of the novel, we would be entirely missing the essence of the genre, which aims to teach a whole new way of looking at the world around us. What then, we might ask, holds our interest in this book? What moves us?

Austin's style is a formally anti-progressive style, in the tradition of contemporary and earlier Green Writers such as John Burroughs, Emerson, and Thoreau. In an anti-progressive style, there can also be no narrative progress. These writers were downright sick and tired of “progress” in all its forms; they were sick of efficiency, of the never-ending search for the next frontier, of the silly belief that the history of man was one of gradual advancement, that everything was moving forward to some great, more-perfect evolution of man (as many gleaned from Darwin). Green writers were sick of trains, steam boats, coal, tanning, power lines, and Speed, that popular God whose worship would flower into the awful cult of Futurism, a cult beheaded by the realization of its own desires: war; progress; efficiency. Future-oriented narrative, plot-oriented writing, the obligatory exposition, rising action, denouement, and resolution, which pull the reader along in anticipation of the next page are not sufficient to convey the values of a Green Writer. Slow down, dear reader, slow down. Don't worry about what is on the next page; instead, enjoy what is on this one.

Rather than plot, the Green writer prefers observation-driven writing. Austin, for example, examines very closely the world around her, her local environment, and she analyzes those everyday details that the casual observer would quickly relegate to the realm of the mundane. Her sentence structure is similar to Burroughs’ in its directness and simplicity; she is not trying to dazzle or confuse, she merely presents what she sees. Her vocabulary only verges into the esoteric out of necessity: she needs Latin binomial nomenclature to differentiate all the different species of flora and fauna she discusses. She presents a close, detail-oriented analysis of generally overlooked topics in a very accessible manner, giving us readers matter-of-fact wisdom in the trappings of humble diction and syntax.

The name Austin gives to her role as a nature-observer is the “true idler” (Land of Little Rain, 12), which is a name that has similar connotations to what Burroughs calls the “Sharp Lookout” (Signs and Seasons, Ch.1), the “keen-eyed observer” (“Art of Seeing Things,” 146), or what Thoreau called the “saunterer” (“Walking”, 592-3), all of which derives from Emerson's “transparent eyeball” (“Nature”, 6). These names all share in common the idea of slowing down, looking, closely observing, and waiting. By means of this waiting and watching, we as waiters and watchers might obtain a sort of transcendental enlightenment (as with Thoreau and Emerson), or at least a certain level of wisdom (as with Burroughs and Austin).

I would argue that there is a very definite connotive shift between Emerson's and Thoreau's idea of the “saunterer” or the “transparent eyeball” and Austin's and Burroughs' “idler” and “sharpshooter.” The former pair attaches a very religious and moral set of implications to the role of the nature-observer, that the nature-observer has the potential to become a sort of wiseman, prophet, or achieve some sort of union with God that is beyond what Austin and Burroughs are willing to admit. Following in the tradition of realism, and moving away from the moralizing/sermonizing force of Thoreau and Emerson, Austin and Burroughs are content simply to observe, and through observation achieve a more muted, toned-down sense of wisdom. They are less likely to make a statement about the world or nature of man and more likely to simply record the observation, allowing the reader to make his/her own extrapolations—though often, they too cannot resist the temptation to take an observation and apply a more universal metaphor to it. Take the following quotes for example:

As the weather grew hot, her position became very trying. It was no longer a question of keeping the eggs warm, but of keeping them from roasting. The sun had no mercy on her, and she fairly panted in the middle of the day. In such an emergency the male robin has been known to perch above the sitting female and shade her with his outstretched wings. But in this case there was no perch for the male bird, had he been disposed to make a sunshade of himself. I thought to lend a hand in this direction myself, and so stuck a leafy twig beside the nest.
(S&S, 73-74.)

The quick increase of suns at the end of spring sometimes overtakes birds in their nesting and effects a reversal of the ordinary manner of incubation. It becomes necessary to keep eggs cool rather than warm. One hot, stifling spring in the Little Antelope I had occasion to pass and repass frequently the nest of a pair of meadowlarks, located unhappily in the shelter of a very slender weed. I never caught them sitting except near night, but at midday they stood, or drooped above it, half fainting with pitifully parted bills, between their treasure and the sun. Sometimes both of them together with wings spread and half lifted continued a spot of shade in a temperature that constrained me at last in a fellow feeling to spare them a bit of canvas for permanent shelter.
(LoLR, 7-8.)

We see in the above paragraphs Burroughs and Austin observing the same phenomenon of birds keeping their eggs cool in a hot environment. Both authors have the same impulse to give the birds some sort of parasol to ease their plight. But note that these paragraphs avoid any moralizing statement. Rather than mention something about the relationship between mother and child, the natural, self-sacrificing altruism of mother bird to baby egg, the intimate relationship that is built during this crucial period of incubation as an edifying metaphor for human relationships or for the world at large, Austin and Burroughs are content to simply make the observation. Observation perseveres for observation's sake; the metaphor that is extrapolated from it is left for the reader to put together on his own. This is not to say that the extrapolation is unimportant, merely that it is left to the reader to apply the analogy to his or her own circumstances:

Man can have but one interest in nature, namely, to see himself reflected or interpreted there, and we quickly neglect both poet and philosopher who fail to satisfy, in some measure, this feeling. (S&S, 37.)

Nature remains the engine of metaphor for these later Green Writers, but they refrain from the antebellum tendency to do the moralizing for the reader. We have moved into the realm of realism, where the goal is to depict objective reality in a clear, literal fashion. What we glean from the observations (and we most certainly are supposed to glean all sorts of various connections and comparisons from these observations) is entirely up to us as readers.

It is important to note that, following the trend of realism, Burroughs and Austin also describe the unpleasant sides of nature. Austin spends a fair share of her pages describing the unfriendliness of the desert, the death that haunts it, its pitilessness. Nature is described not in the terms of the sublime, as it so often is in Emerson and Thoreau, but as it is: thorns, vultures, death and all. This is the post-Melvillian understanding of Nature, that Nature, beautiful though she may be, is not simply a place of butterflies, sunshine, and transcendentalism. The Melvillian perspective is much more akin to the Puritan relationship with Nature, and takes into account that Nature is full of all sorts of dangerous things; that if you go out into nature, all the time looking for some sort of sublime experience with God, you may just get your leg bitten off. Burroughs and Austin have thus shifted to an unidealized relationship with nature, a very respectful one. The “dark side” of nature is faithfully portrayed, and presented as further metaphorical inspiration.

While we as readers have an experience that is one of quiet pleasure, of slow marvel at another ecosystem likely different from our own, we are not meant to want to go to the place described. Austin and Burroughs are not writing a travel guide; their primary concern is not enticing tourism to their neck of the woods. There is no mention of monuments, or specific “must-see” natural phenomena as in Bryant's Picturesque America; indeed, a tour guide interpretation of these works would be completely contradictory to the anti-progressive outlook. Rather, these essays aim to teach how one without any training (for surely, Austin's and Burroughs' writing is relegated to the realm of the naturalist rather than that of the scientist) can, by spending time and careful examination, find such wonders in his or her own backyard. Their message is much more profound than the travel guide, which simply states “come here and look at this!” Austin and Burroughs are saying that there are all sorts of natural phenomena to be studied, that there is fascinating stuff happening all over the world all the time, and if Austin can find it in the middle of the desert, and Burroughs can find it in the Hudson Valley, then surely we as readers can find it wherever we may be. The Progressivist travels to Paris in order to have a fascinating experience; the Green Writer recognizes that wherever you go, there you are, that “one has only to stay at home and watch the process pass” (S&S, 3).

Ultimately, that's the brilliance of late-nineteenth century Green Writing: it teaches us how to become fascinated with where we are, how to become satisfied with what we have. It is trying to bring about a whole new way of life. Stop looking for plot. A plot is a destination, and a destination implies a purpose, and a future-oriented world view; not everything needs to be viewed in terms of progression; not all who wander are lost. By becoming fascinated with where you are, there are all sorts of wonderful things to be learned. Lewis Mumford notes the outcome of regionalism:

With local history as a starting point the student is drawn into a whole host of relationships that lead him out into the world at large: the whaling ships that used to cast anchor at Poughkeepsie and other river towns will carry him to the South Seas; the discovery of the Hudson will take him back to the Crusades; one begins to follow the threads of local history, local manners, local industry, local peoples, one finds that they lead in every direction. And that is the proper method. ("The Value of Local History", 25.)

The Green Writer is thus saying by example, by the explanation of his or her observational processes, the following to his reader: “This is my place, and here is how I love it. You too can find a similar love for your place, wherever that may be. And as you love your backyard, soon you shall love also your neighborhood, your city, your country, indeed, soon you'll find that you possess a love for and responsibility to the whole world.” They are conveying a sense of pride in regionalism; they are demonstrating a non-narrative way of life. Austin and Burroughs are not just teaching the art of observation, they are teaching the art of fascination.

Bibliography

Austin, Mary H. The Land of Little Rain. The Modern Library classics. New York: Modern Library, 2003.

Burroughs, John, and Jeff Walker, ed. Signs & Seasons. Syracuse, N.Y: Syracuse University Press, 2006.

Mumford, Lewis, & Marranca, Bonnie, ed. "The Value of Local History," A Hudson Valley Reader. Woodstock, N.Y: Overlook Press, 1995.

Thoreau, Henry D, & Carl Bode. The Portable Thoreau. Viking portable library. New York: Viking Press, 1964.

Inspiration and Transcendence as an Aspect of Monumentality: The Courtyard of Louis Kahn's Salk Institute

Creating an environment designed to inspire inspiration itself is no easy task. In many ways, it is equivalent to creating a religiously transcendent place. How does one represent inspiration in form? How does one prepare a place for enlightenment to occur? This paper strives to analyze Louis Kahn's Salk Institute as a place of both rational and spiritual transcendence; that is, how Kahn links inspiration in architecture with his understanding of monumentality.

The Purpose
The Salk Institute was founded in 1960 by Jonas Salk, the inventor of the polio vaccine. He hired Louis Kahn as the chief architect in order to create an institution that would unite people “from different disciplines and backgrounds” to explore “the organization and processes of life.”¹ Kahn sought to construct a space that would facilitate collaboration and synthesis across the sciences as well as foster thought, meditation, and genius; the challenge was to create a space for the greatest scientific minds to work, and also to think. Perhaps the most interesting concept Kahn tried to realize was the idea of “a lab fit for Picasso”.² Science and art were meant to meld at the Salk Institute; intuition, inspiration, and rational thought ought to blend; genius must be accommodated, nurtured, and given space to roam. In order to achieve a space that supersedes these boundaries and combines these various elements, whether they be disciplinary, rational, or divine, Kahn had to find a way to seamlessly integrate poetics and science into a single unit, a transcendent but utilitarian architectural chimera.

The Plan: Beaux-Arts
The Salk Institute is a Beaux-Arts plan: perfectly symmetrical. Perhaps Kahn chose a Beaux-Arts design because so many successful monumental structures have employed symmetry in achieving timelessness. Kahn himself was educated at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and its influence is visible in Khan's revival of the reflective plan.³ In essence, the Salk Institute is two identical, parallel buildings, each lined with five wings of offices. The two buildings are separated by a wide, concrete courtyard which itself is bisected by a long, narrow strip of water that drops off into a lower-level fountain and sitting area. The courtyard below terminates into a sloping canyon of sandstone Southern California coastal sagebrush which leads out to the Pacific Ocean a half-mile or so away. When one stands at the head of the fountain, one cannot quite see the termination of the courtyard, and the gray concrete seems to meld with the Pacific, as if the whole ocean were pouring into the Salk institute through this narrow strip of water, or as if the fountain were flowing directly into the ocean. This is the great moment in art in which Kahn incorporates the ocean, horizon, and sky as integral parts of his architectural whole, or perhaps visa versa—the Salk institute becomes an integral part of the sea and sky.













The Open Courtyard and Infinity
The overall design of the Salk Institute in many ways parallels Thomas Jefferson's plan for the University of Virginia. With the University of Virginia, Jefferson used a Beaux-Arts, neoclassical design on top of a small hill with a central lawn that terminates on one end with the famous Rotunda (the pinnacle of education), and on the other end with an open view of the beautiful Virginian landscape. Jefferson thus directly incorporates a symmetrical layout with a central garden for meditation, reflection, breathing space, and clarity of mind. The one end is closed by the architectural symbol of knowledge (the library), and the other open into the wide world of nature and the sublime.⁴ The central courtyard area in both cases delineates clearly between places for work, study, science, and places for thought, relaxation, and meditation.⁵

The power of Jefferson's famous lawn relies heavily on the incorporation of the surrounding landscape and the connection of the building to the larger world, just as Kahn's open courtyard derives its perspectival force in part from uniting the courtyard with the sea and sky beyond. The Salk Institute is an example of the Renaissance conception of correspondences, that the microcosm of the earth is a reflection of the macrocosm of the heavens, that all things are are connected within some great, cosmic synecdoche. Kahn's thin fountain seems to extend into the infinity of the Pacific, and even further to unite with those blue sunny San Diego skies. It is the miraculous nature of infinity (the perspectival wonder), that reminds the viewer standing in the Salk Institute courtyard of his place in the world, his smallness or greatness, that his actions, ideas, and study will extend outside the property of the Institute into the infinity beyond, and conversely, that this power of creation and infinite propagation seems to be a divine gift, handed down from the sun itself.

Infinity is a quality that relates both to monumentality and inspiration. According to Kahn, “The sense of wonder is so very important to us because it precedes knowing. It precedes knowledge... The immeasurable is the one thing that captivated the mind; the measurable makes little difference.” It is those many aspects of the universe that are simply beyond human comprehension (the profound, the infandum) that confound and dumbfound the human mind and create a sense of wonder in man. To comprehend something is to have knowledge of it, and to have knowledge of something is to ruin its mystery. When one looks down the thin fountain stream that divides the courtyard, the illusion of infinite continuation is created as the concrete and horizon blend. Rationalizing the courtyard, measuring and quantifying it potentially destroys the phenomenon. Kahn's fountain, set within the grid of the courtyard, creates a one-point perspective in concrete and water, the vanishing point disappears in the sea. Kahn gives any person standing in his courtyard the opportunity to experience the sublime, to transgress the empirical, scientific perspective and instead to become captivated, fascinated, to hand oneself over to the wonder of infinity.⁶


















The Elemental Temple
Part of the greatness of the Salk Institute is the way it combines all the classical elements (earth, wind, water, fire, air) in a modern structure. The element of water cuts through the textured concrete, which is the structural, earth element of the institute. From here, the sky brings us into the element of air and finally, burning in the sky, the fiery sun illuminates the whole structure. Each element interacts and depends on the others. Water we might take as a symbol of the flow of energy, the lifeblood of the Salk Institute, while the concrete is the bones, the structural form. The sky then becomes the realm of the divine, the space the courtyard seems to extend infinitely into, while the sun's rays make the whole structure visible. Kahn said that “Integration is the way of nature. We can learn from nature”, and though this quote isn't referring specifically to the merging of the primeval elemental forces in his architecture, it fits nonetheless—by integrating the primordial elements into the Salk Institute, he achieves the feeling of ancientness and timelessness requisite for any monumental work.⁷

Kahn uses water in the Salk Institute to give it a zen-like atmosphere, and he employs the element in a way not unlike Mies' Seagram Building in New York City. The Seagram Building, which Kahn described as “a beautiful lady in corsets” used reflecting pools in front of the skyscraper to attain a temple-like atmosphere, tranquil, calm, separating the building from the street and muffling the noise of the chaotic New York hustle and bustle.⁸ Water is integral to the creation of a silent space. And silence, in turn, is integral to meditation and the birth of inspiration.
















Light, “What slice of the sun does your building have?”
Kahn paraphrased the above line from a poem by Wallace Stevens to express his understanding that structure is defined by light. He felt light is a magical substance. Light is utterly invisible, undetectable unless it reflects off of something. It seems not to exist unless there is something for it to bounce off of, and reciprocally, any object must also remain invisible unless there is light to bounce off it. We might also note that the immeasurable quality of light, the paradox of its simultaneous existence as a wave and a particle, fits it neatly into the realm of the immeasurable, and thus the awesome. Perhaps Kahn's sensitivity to light and shadow was particularly acute on account of the fact that he regularly hid his scarred face under a deep hat as a young man, thus his eye for light and shadow became particularly well-honed.⁹

In any case, his tour in Greece reveals his unique perception of light as it plays across the ancient temples, their forms shifting with the lability of the sun. Note how the forms of these ancient temples become colorful, and attain an almost mirage-like ephemeralness, as if they might evaporate into steam. Kahn's point here is that, while these structures are solid, permanent and mute, they come alive, speak, change colors, moods, even seem to have movement when hit by the sun. Light gives life to their form.





















Natural light is therefore paramount in Kahn's works. The Art Historian Alexandra Tyng relates the following anecdote regarding Kahn's fascination with natural light:

Kahn was intrigued by the nuances of mood created by the time of day, the weather, and the seasons. Scorning the static artificiality of electric light, he would often sit at his desk between the tall windows of his office, waiting until the daylight was completely gone from the room before deigning to reach for the light switch. He believed that the changeable quality of daylight gave life to architecture because one's relationship to a building changed according to the light surrounding and penetrating it. For this reason, no space was truly a space unless it received the life-giving touch of natural light.¹⁰

If, as Kahn thought, form is a result of the interplay between an object and light, then we can say that the form of architecture changes depending on variations in light, color, intensity, as a result of the time of day and year. And what a perfect place to observe the power of light: San Diego has one of the most moderate climates worldwide; it is sunny almost perennially. As a result, Kahn angles the windows of his parallel office/lab towers westward toward the sea and setting sun; each window reaches out to grasp its own slice of sun; the whole structure is heliotropic.

















Silence: the Void
Kahn believed that silence was the opposite of light, and the combination of the two creates inspiration. Silence, strictly speaking, is the absence of sound; it is a void, emptiness, nothingness. It can be compared to structure: structure has no form without light, it too is nothing, a void; without light, structure and silence are merely the potential for form. In Alexandra Tyng's words, silence is “the desire to express” whereas light is the “means of expression.” At the point where these two forces meet lies the instantaneous moment of inspiration. Tyng extends the analogy further to compare the relationship between silence and light to the poetic versus the rational, the yin versus the yang, the feminine versus the masculine:

The poet, who is comfortable in the realm of feeling and intuition, will follow his urge to express for as long as possible before finding the means of expression that would put his images into concrete words. On the other hand, the scientist, who is at home in the rational world, might stay as long as he could in the realm of light, collecting facts and figures to prove his hypothesis before acknowledging its connection with wonder and mystery.¹¹

There is something almost Blakeian about Kahn's sense of duality and paradox in the universe. The idea that something can come from nothing, that the void is a vast expanse of potential that merely needs to be animated or illuminated is an almost mystical conception of architecture. To many, it might seem an implausible philosophy—yet miracles often seem dubious to those who have never experienced them.

Poetics and Inspiration
The poet and teacher Dr. Gideon Rappaport argues that the relationship between inspiration and the human mind is a reciprocal one: “It takes two, the poet and his muse. But the muse cannot be compelled. She may be invoked or appear uninvited, but she can dwell only where a place is prepared for her.”¹² The courtyard of the Salk Institute is a place uniquely prepared and equipped for the arrival of the inspiring muse. Inspiration is an ephemeral, divine phenomenon. It is an enlightenment in the miniature. One can only prepare one's mind, make a place ready for the muse—but inspiration cannot be forced.

Similarly, monumentality is a quality that is eternal, but also seemingly random. One can beg for monumentality, incorporate all the attributes whose aggregative force seems to make monuments monumental, but the quality itself simply cannot be compelled. Monumentality is a divine phenomenon, a transcendent feature of a work that usually is not present, and seems to only occur by thaumaturgy.

Furthermore, inspiration takes effort, patience, and time—thus, for 360 days of the year, the sun sways north and south along the western horizon of the Pacific as the seasons pass and the Earth tilts on its axis, and it does so out of alignment with the line of the fountain. Only for a brief few days does the sun perfectly line up with the fountain, and the whole structure takes part in a galactic alignment, an inspirational equinox. By incorporating the essential element of time into the architectural experience, the building becomes part of time itself, and achieves monumentality through the melding of eternity and form. The whole structure is a monumental metaphor for inspiration, a metaphor for the rare, divine moment when the muse speaks to man and ideas are born from the void.

It's been said that part of the difficulty with discussing architecture is the fact that buildings are, in and of themselves, inexorably mute. And so is Kahn's Salk Institute. It is monumental in the gravity of its silence. Yet when the right moment hits, when the light suffuses it and ignites the strip of fountain, the structure comes alive in a transcendent event that speaks volumes to those present to witness, volumes that must remain in the realm of the unspeakable.

End Notes

¹ Vincent Scully, “Works of Louis Kahn and his Method”, Louis I. Kahn, (Tokyo, Japan: Architecture and Urbanism, 1975) 288.

² Qtd in Ezra Stoller, The Salk Institute, (New York, NY: 1999), 2.

³ Jonas Salk, “A Proposed Institute: A Statement [in connection with consideration by San Diego City Council of proposal to make land available...],” typed manuscript, March 15, 1960.

⁴ Unfortunately, as a result of one of the world's many architectural travesties, the quad is now closed on all four sides on account of the construction of a new building, blocking Jefferson's intended view of the landscape.

⁵ Stoller, 6.

⁶ Louis I. Kahn, “I Love Beginnings,” Louis I. Kahn. (Tokyo, Japan: Architecture and Urbanism, 1975) 279.

⁷ Qtd in Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, (New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art, 1966) 50.

⁸ Louis I. Kahn. “Architecture is the Thoughtful Making of Spaces”, (1957) 272.

⁹ Ravi Kalia, Gandhinagar: Building National Identity in Postcolonial India, (U of South Carolina Press, 2004) 77.

¹⁰ Tyng 265.

¹¹ Alexandra Tyng, “Silence in Light”, Louis I. Kahn: l'uomo, il maestro. (Rome, Italy: Edizionie Kappa, 1986) 271.

¹² Gideon Rappaport, “While Standing on One Leg”, 8 Nov. 2009, http://raplog.blogspot.com/2009_11_01_archive.html.

Bibliography

Kahn, Louis I. “Order in Architecture,” 1957.

Kahn, Louis I. “Architecture Is the Thoughtful Making of Spaces,” 1957.

Kahn, Louis I. “Monumentality,” 1944.

Kalia, Ravi, Gandhinagar: Bulding National Identity in Postcolonial India. University of South Carolina Press, 2004.

Louis I. Kahn. Tokyo, Japan: Architecture and Urbanism, 1975.

Ed., Latour, Alessandra, Louis I. Kahn: l'uomo, il maestro. Rome, Italy: Edizionie Kappa, 1986.

Giurgola, Romaldo., Mehta, Jaimini. Louis I. Kahn. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1976.

Maki, Fumihiko., ed. Futagawa, Yukio. Louis I. Kahn: Richards Medical Research Building, Pennsylvania. 1961 and Salk Institute for Biological Studies, California, 1965. Tokyo, Japan: A.D.A EDITA Tokyo Co., 1971.

Stoller, Ezra. The Salk Institute. Friedman, D.S., “Introduction”, New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999.

Tyng, Alexandra. “Form, Order, Design: The Inspiration Process”, Beginnings: Louis I. Kahn's Philosophy of Architecture. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 1984.

Venturi, Robert. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art, 1966.

Cornelisen Fellowship Report

My experience during my Cornelisen Fellowship was a blast. I went with three goals: to improve my Russian; to study post-Soviet states; and more generally, to examine all those parts of Russia that aren't relegated to Moscow or Saint-Petersburg. My program was in two parts. First I spent three weeks enrolled in the Tallinn University intensive Russian program, and then I spent the following two weeks traveling across Russia on the trans-Siberian railroad, all the way to Vladivostok.

In Tallinn, I tested into the advanced Russian course with a motley crew of two Italians, one Finn, and two Americans; our teacher, who was born in Russia but emigrated to Estonia, was an involved, dedicated woman who never got tired of my constant strings of questions about Estonian identity and her own migration. Our discussions generally revolved around the summer school cultural program, which we participate in during the afternoon, and involves a number of lectures (my favorites were on the Estonian economy—who knew Skype was an Estonian company?—and the history of Estonian art), weekend trips to neighboring Estonian cities such as Tartu, guided tours in the local art museums, tours of the cities bastions, and its winding Medieval streets. Historically I was most impressed by how this country, whose entire history is defined by subjugation, still manages to define itself as a unique cultural and political entity.

Estonians have a fascinating history. In a nutshell, from the very founding of the Medieval city of Tallinn, Estonia has been successively occupied or controlled by one of its powerful neighbors, such as the Danes, the Livonian Knights, the Swedes, the Imperialist Russians, the Nazis, and the Soviet Russians, with only very brief respites of independence. True independence was established after the fall of the Soviet Empire. The Soviet occupation was so brutal, (it was based on a program of cultural genocide, eradicating all things Estonian, even bulldozing graveyards to erase cultural memory), that when the Nazis briefly took power, the Estonians welcomed the Nazi armies as liberators. You know you are in hell when the prospect of a Nazi invasion inspires hope.

Nothing, however, was more inspiring than watching videos from the 1991 “Singing Revolution”, which stretched across all the Baltic States as a result of the fall of the Soviet Empire. As its name implies, the revolution was a remarkably peaceful one, and Estonians were faced with the challenge of establishing their own system of self-government, economy, and culture. The Kumu Art Museum was in my opinion the most valuable representation of this effort to define Estonian identity, as it demonstrated the winding route Estonian art took from the fascination that early 19th century German artists took with the idealization of the Estonian peasant, to the Soviet period where large, formal paintings depicting happy Estonians freely and graciously handing over Estonia to the communists, to present art which, while often very personal and specific in subject matter, as a whole is constantly struggling with the difficulty of creating something uniquely Estonian without relying on the precedents set by another people. By far my favorite work of art in Tallinn was the Jewish Synagogue, a testament to freedom of speech with architecture that speaks for itself.

The trans-Siberian offered me a number of epiphanies. While I spent the majority of my time looking out the window, reading, walking up and down the train meeting passengers, and stepping off to bargain with babushkas, these ideas dawned on me slowly. The first of which is the most obvious: Russia is enormous—plainly enormous. And when you sit there on the train for a really, really long time, looking out the window, just chugging away the landscape, you start to come to a new understanding of this fact. Your sense of time gets pretty zonked while you are on the train, and one thing I noticed was the vast majority of the cities we stopped at were small, post-industrial cities, cities that had been built because of the railway, and whose economies depended on the railway. Yet these many cities are still few and far between when you look at what an expanse you're traveling across—Russia, for all its size, holds almost all its people and money in the two nodes that are Moscow and Saint-Petersburg. Out East, these people are practically off the map of government concern, apart from major lumber and oil industry operations.

The other thing I realized was the border between Mongolia, China, and Russia is, for all intents and purposes, defined by this railway; tensions over Chinese border encroachment would make the trans-Siberian a modern Rubicon. Finally, and this was the most harrowing realization, because the trans-Siberian runs primarily along the southern border of Russia, you forget that there is a huge amount of land up north in Siberia, enormous tracts of land that, as far as I can tell, there is only very limited access to. The Siberian peninsula of Kamchatka, for example, has no infrastructure with the main body of Russia, and is only accessible by ship and by plane (though it is physically connected to Russia). Looking at this enormous amount of mostly empty territory, I still marvel at the fact that Russia’s control here was established by the construction of the railroad, and to this day depends on it. While on the one hand, one might look at the untapped wealth of land and natural resources in Eastern Russia as indicative of Russia's ability to remain a world power well into the 21st century, I am skeptical. Government corruption makes such a venture extremely difficult. Moreover, I still cannot tell to what extent the Russian government directs its gaze eastward. Powerful neighbors such as North Korea, and especially the booming economic and military power that is China seriously threaten Russian dominion over these lands, and whether or not they remain in Russia’s control over the course of the next century is, in my opinion, extremely tenuous.

I'd like to conclude by thanking the Cornelisen Fellowship fund for providing me this experience. It was a once in a lifetime journey, and I learned so much from it. What an expanse!

John Burroughs Q of the W: Santa Claus

Vol. 9, pg. 36; Dec. 19, 1886 (morning)

19 Julian said this morning soon after waking up that he felt as if a great change was coming — "as if a great joy was passing away" — he is beginning to doubt the existence of Santa Claus! Poor boy! Such a discovery does leave a void.

Burroughs spends a fair few pages of his journals railing against organized religion in favor of his agnostic, semi-transcendental religious beliefs.  When his son, Julian, first came to doubt the existence of Santa Claus (above), Burroughs followed up with eight straight pages in his journal comparing the belief in Santa to the belief in an anthropomorphic God.  In fact, the majority of the journal is consumed questions of religion and god... nonetheless, even after such persistent argument and refutation of the existence of God in any biblical sense (such ideas, he would say, are the result of mankind's imaginative childhood), he still found himself trumped at what to do when his own son became and apostate of Ol' Saint Nick.

Vol. 9, pg. 44; Dec. 19, 1886 (evening)

-- The same evening Julian remarked with a sadness that went to my heart, "The world has told a great many lies if there is no Santa Claus; making pictures about him and telling so much about him in books."

Needless to say, it was a rough Christmas at the Burroughs family home that year.

Forget the Princeton Review.

Forget Kaplan. Forget Barrons. Forget Peterson's. Forget Sparknotes.  I like standardized testing about as much as I like a rousing bout of dysentery.  I did it their way for the SATs, but for the GREs, I'm doing it my way -- with one book, and only one book:

Leviathan Melvillei

Things used to be bigger on our little planet.  Everything: trees, animals, fishes, all bigger.  I wonder if there is an evolutionary explanation as to why organisms are overall smaller than they were in, for example, the Triassic Period.  Was the Earth simply more fertile millions of years ago, such that it could support such organisms?  Well damn.  They discovered this little guy, the whale-eater-of-whales, two years ago and just published the discovery yesterday. Awe-some.

Update: more on this prehistoric whale.