The house:
https://archive.org/details/mettomo00ferr/mode/2up
Its roof:
architecture
Iron, 1922
1.
“I saw the hardware store from across the street. I didn’t know you bought flat-irons by the pound.”
2.
The speaker will decide on two, weighing six pounds each. He is The Sound and the Fury’s Quentin Compson, and he will use his purchase to weigh down the body when he drowns himself. The date of the event, in unpunctuated lapidary uppercase, will be JUNE SECOND 1910.
3.
In 1910, customers would ordinarily have bought their irons in pairs as Quentin did. The appliances were made of cast iron, they resembled the fourth of these tokens from a 1935 Monopoly set,
and while one was in use the other would have been heating on the stove. But the metals were changing.
4.
The iron made of iron gave its metonymic name to a building erected in 1902 on a triangular lot in New York formed by the diagonal intersection of Broadway with Fifth Avenue and East 22nd Steet. In 1904, an era when photography emulated what were then called the beaux arts, Edward Steichen shaped this image.
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/267803
5.
But compare
See this one contra-Steichen: from top to bottom, starting with the printed date. For a year in a magazine about changing social fashions, that’s a point of origin. As of 1922, for one instance, 1922 was the year when the American novelist Sinclair Lewis published a social satire named Babbitt which by 1930 would make him the first American writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature. It’s all but forgotten now, but in 1922 its description of an evening cityscape seemed memorable. It was full of styles. But just as a matter of professional practice, Lewis didn’t build anything in 1922 that Dickens in 1852 hadn’t built with more imaginative use of material in chapter 1 of Bleak House. More, and decisively: 1922 happened to be a year when the technology of writing English entered a new stage of development. With T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses, a poem and a novel did to literature what the steel skeleton had done to architecture. Babbitt was to remain in the iron age. The Waste Land and Ulysses were wired for steel.
6.
In front of a high steel tower in 1922, a low steel tower moved traffic through gridded Manhattan. Entering stage right, a man in spats and a top hat came dancing through the grid. The zigs of Archie Gunn’s cartoon architecture were now ready to be seen as a jazz.
String quartets all over the place
Between 1925 and 1958 it went through 36 editions (Veselá 105). Every time the party line changed, the author changed his story, and he kept changing it until death claimed him. Long before then, it had became a canonical paradigm of the Socialist-Realist novel.
And in after years the revisions underwrote rereadings, like this sample snapshot in time.
But passim, when their changeable language tried to change itself from dead to living through metaphors like “stormy blood,” it tended to mean words like “blood” as unchangingly as could be, in words that were themselves always stably dead. Liv Tadge’s translation (the 1981 edition quoted above) omits the word, but in the biology of Cement, cement is always to be mixed with blood. That’s one of the constants of this novel, no matter what the edition. When bodies are imagined as if outside the blood-red band of the spectrum, they are to be tinted a mere livor mortis.
The contrast between red and unred happens to be a little hard to see in Raduga’s Cement typography, because the only color in its presses for that run was extratextual: the green of the page numbers. Everything else about the prose was a uniform gray.
In Gladkov’s time, movies too were generally monochrome. But the cement in this 1933 movie poster is not a single shade of Gladkov gray. It is radiantly spectral.
That’s because Mikhail Dlugach, the designer of the poster, did his work of envisioning under the lights of a different spectrum: one meant to illuminate a studio, not a library. Because they were created under that regime, the stairs that lead the eye upward from words to a smiling unspeaking face are Constructivist, and the shadow of the human that has been left behind by the ascent is Expressionist. The unspeaking face’s cosmetics too come from a silent repository: the cabinet of Dr. Caligari. But the dentistry that constructs its smile is the artifact of an aesthetic dating from long after the time of Tatlin’s tower and Wiene’s asylum. In fact, the poster suggests that the smile isn’t even attributable to dentistry. For that humble domestic science its scale is too vast. On the poster’s lavishly laid down slabs of color it erects itself like a heroic architecture, and as an architecture its relation in scale to the human it is not 1920s Expressionist but 1960s Brutalist.
So think now, in the aftermath of the Brutalist era, of how the sound of your stormy pulse might have reechoed from the walls of a Brutalist bedroom where you and Comrade Dasha had shared the concrete mattress. One of the purposes of modern architecture since at least the days of Le Corbusier has been social control, explicitly stated as theory (in, for instance, Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture), and Socialist Realist fiction provided a way to translate the theory’s language of instruction from body to text. Raise your eyelids and grin, the translated schema instructs the body waiting on its postcoital cinderblock. Then look out the window, sight down the barrel of your rifle at that string quartet in the distance, and aim.
Prophetic book: what William Blake foresaw
This is how William Blake understood art at the end of his life, in 1826 or 1827.
As of the early twenty-first century, this is one of the fortresses where art is watched over by Fasolt and Fafner, the giants who once decreed that the gold of the Rhine be piled so high it would hide Brünnhilde from view. Click the link for details and investment advice.
But the architecture had been anticipated by Blake. Look up top and see:
Technical note: vision and the passage of history
To repair a historical damage
can be to reset the function of seeing to an earlier state. On the evidence of this artifact, for example, it may be possible that the advent of photographic vision in the nineteenth century didn’t just coincide with the advent of a metal-framed, curtain-walled architecture teaching its era a newly ample definition of the idea soar
but made it conceivable. Suddenly, cameras on their tripods were equipping the vanishing point with an azimuth and an elevation. Seen in restored state, this image reenacts one of those nineteenth-century instants when sight realized it could sail forever toward an ever receding horizon.
Echoes of singing women, no longer quite audible
A dance to time
From left to right the words dance past. As words, they claim to mime a song of pain. “Badly handled,” they say they are crying. But the words “badly handled” are visible, only: particles of gray prime-coat, mutely darkening a surface.
But an image isn’t a surface. If it is seen to be dancing from left to right, it is dancing all the way to the depths of itself. On their page the New-York Tribune’s gray paragraphs are separate from one another and static, but this horse en pointe and the three men with clubs work with one another in a single moving mass. In fact, they seem to belong to one another, as if they had been conceived in unity by someone raising his legs toward a barre as his body thought through an idea about space.
Close to the image but still outside, one more paragraph frames the unity as an expression of a concept such as “pain.” Pain is kinetic in the transformation of the word stone from noun to verb, but it also distressingly latent in the fear-adverb inside. The image itself has attempted to make a break with uncertainty by perforating one of its own imaged windows, but of course that can’t let us in. Read from outside image, the term inside can only signify terra incognita. We will never see far enough inside. Never again will this horse descend from pointe.
But the custodian of the horse-image has noticed some other words within, and keyed those to a history preserved in words outside. With that key the Library of Congress’s online link teaches us the image’s coordinates in time: “Photo shows the garbage strike in New York City, Nov. 8-11, 1911.” It adds a coordinate in space, “The lamp post sign is for East 57th Street,” and with that we may seem to have escaped from ahistorical image and reentered the chronicle of time through which we pass. Year by year we have been stepping away from the image’s cobblestones and leaving behind the people inside, and now that they are interred where lies the year 1911, we seem to have broken free into a margin-free, illimitable field of vision. Far from sight or memory of the horse on his cobblestones, we may think that the East 57th Street we see now is a state of being that we actually know: the state we see on today’s TV, decisively erased from print’s black and white: a finally permanent history of a stage across which will now go dancing — forever, and forevermore unregulated! a corps de ballet of hedge funders and international criminals.
But the horse with the sore on his hip and the men with clubs haven’t finished dancing themselves into realized being. They have only begun their translation from life to image, but having begun, they have begun putting on immortality. For them who started dancing and for us who have seen the dance, East 57th Street will remain a 1911 coming again and again to mind. There, in the mind, 1911’s stony thoroughfare will remain under the control of men with imaged clubs who have been authorized to force us, when the time comes, back to the barre for the next position.
Where time sleeps with shadow
Curve, regardless
Le Corbusier complained that when people moved into his architecture they spoiled the geometry.
So new, so new!
On Thursday, December 23, 1920, The New York Times reported on page 9:
The article was headed “Olympic’s Notables See Gain in Europe,” and among the disembarking notables its reporter interviewed was New York’s Assistant District Attorney Owen W. Bohan, on his way home from having assisted in Italy in a prosecution for murder. A photographer from the Bain News Agency was also on hand.
On the other side of the Atlantic, earlier in 1920, the architect Charles-Edouard Jeanneret had caused himself to be made over as a theory apparatus named Le Corbusier. Throughout that year, that apparatus outputted a series of polemics in a journal named L’Esprit nouveau. In 1923, it collected the articles into a book and called the book Vers une architecture. The title implied that architecture was something that lay ahead, something yet to be achieved. Much of the material that supplied the book’s thesis and body of examples was marine architecture — specifically, the architecture of the great four-stacker ocean liners whose creators were now teaching — if architects would only listen! — that steel could be a system of the human body like muscle and bone. “So old, so old!” cried the apparatus as it contemplated the time when pre-metallic humans lived in caves of stone.
And so, on a December day in 1920, another apparatus sailed up the bay into icy New York: a cylindrical construction built of linen and starch. At its apex, the construction displayed a triumphal decoration shaped like a head. The head looked human, but because the apparatus was made of cloth, the construction was only an idol. The cloth could have been woven in a cave, and one of its purposes as an idol was to represent to its cave-bound worshiper that there is a reality beyond representation. It is waiting to be seen. It is in the light, outside.
And yes: outside on December 22, 1920, looming behind the notable, not wrapped like him in cloth but warm from its own source below decks, there stood a cylinder of steel.
Perhaps the steel thing was only another idol, a transitional object erecting itself to mark the evolutionary passage from soft cloth to hard metal to a pure idea standing at the end of change. If it was, we probably don’t have to worry about our own soft mortal selves. There will be more idols to come, interposing their comforting representations between us and the moment when our hearts stop beating and desire ends. Le Corbusier himself was famously annoyed when the tenants of his buildings insisted on filling them with comfortable furniture. But for the quarter-century that began in about 1920, many people took Corbusian steel itself to be the idea, and worshiped it with temples and blood sacrifice.
Image source: George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2014711873/. Photoshopped.