Cue angsty Alanis Morissette music. Insert Capricorn-esque fretting about legacy here. Insert pondering dubious connections to various Eugene communities here. Insert musing about the proto-beach-ball behind my belly button as I reach for another square of chocolate here. Close out with Annie Lennox’s “Money Can’t Buy It.”
I checked out a random book at the library: “Architects of Oregon: a Biographical Dictionary of Architects Deceased - 19th and 20th Centuries.” I will confess that the typeface used for the directory headers was the real reason I wanted to look at it, but once I got the book home I discovered the B, the D, the R, and the S are the only letter designs that are interesting. The book lists Doyle, the architect who designed the original buildings of Reed College (and the Doyle Owl), and the guy who designed Shelton McMurphy House in Eugene, and The First Ever Licensed Woman Architect in Oregon.
This is a book about architects for architects, and not about architecture. One detail that struck me as I was reading was that the architects’ buildings’ descriptions rely on the reader being familiar with the buildings. Since I’m only familiar with the Reed and Eugene buildings, I couldn’t imagine what styles other buildings were using much beyond the generic “bungalow” or “arts and craft” or “inspired by Ruskin.”
Lots of folks were born in the 1800s–so lots of thumbnail photos of handlebar mustaches, sideburns, cravats and ties, formal jackets, and bowler hats. Their parents came from the Midwest States by Ox-Drawn Wagon or The Old Country and there’s quite of few of them who took a non-traditional path to architecture: either by defying their parents and running away to architecture college; or somehow scraping together enough wherewithal to get into an architecture program; or by starting as a teenaged construction worker, becoming a draftsman, and working up the architectural office ranks to fully ranked architect. Lots of folks practiced across both World Wars. And, as the sub-title says, they’re all dead.
It also has a bunch of short entries that end “Nothing else is known about him.” Which implies that somewhere in Oregon there are houses or buildings still standing which are designed by unknown architects; or, probably more likely, demolished or repurposed sites that are the only remaining echo of a century old designer. (Pause to be momentarily overwhelmed by the lyrics of Peter Gabriel’s *Mercy Street* (“…all of the buildings, […] were once just a dream in somebody’s head…”).) This, of course, gives me license to imagine forbidden, gay, or forbidden gay lovers. Or a secret, Free-Mason/Golden Dawn adjacent cabal of mystic architects who have faked their deaths. Or dueling architecture firms with Ninjas/Jedi/Sith/secret agents. Or proscribed architecture because There Are Some Houses Mankind Should Not Build.
I am pretty sure Insane Architecture of Madness and Portals are involved.
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