Books offered by JF Ptak Science Books LLC

The World of Tomorrow, Today--1938

Monaghan,  Frank.  The World of Yesterday and the World of Tomorrow.  1938.  11 laves  Offset type collected leaves  Address of Dr. Frank Monaghan, Professor of History, Yale University, and Director of Research of the New York World's Fair 1939, before the Members of the Robert E. Lee Memorial Foundation, October 12, 1938.

Contents: on history, the future, and the work of the World's Fair. "I would like to say that many of the persons most responsible for the planning and the building of the Fair have a keen sense and lively appreciation of these values. If we in the Fair talk frequently of the "World of Tomorrow" it is because we are intensely interested and concerned with making a lasting contribution to it."

This is a gathering of 11 offset (or mimeographed) sheets, gathered by a paper clip. Size & Pages: 11 x 8 inches 11 pp, printed on one side only. Conservative condition grade: a sold, and retrospective, VERY GOOD (say, a conservative 6.5 on a 1-10 scale (ten being Mint)). There is some overall browning and dusting to the front and back sheets. The interior sheets however are in fine condition with just a little ageing/browning. The paper is still crisp. $250.00

Bad Ideas Department: Restructuring the City and the "Terminal Box", Neopolis, 1938

ITEM: The New City, an American Plan of Social and Economic Reorganization (1938).  7x5 inches, 29pp.  Very good condition.  No copies located in the OCLC/WorldCat.  $100

ref:  JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1421

The unnamed author of The New City, an American Plan of Social and Economic Reorganization (1938), makes a hard-edged plea for the formation of a new American society—and by “new” the author really means it, advocating a different economics, social structure and even the physical development of new cities and abandonment of the old physical and philosophical structures. 

Sprinkled among the Swiftian notions of rightness, quixotic lancings of social ills and a general bombardment of the structure of society are some interesting and isolated points: 
“America is the supreme user of the machine…ravishing the irreplaceable wealth of one of the earth’s richest continents, tearing down forests, looting the treasures of coal and draining the reservoirs of oil and natural gas, by methods scandalously wasteful.” 

This leads the author to the Depression, “a decade of demonstration of the profit system’s inability to deliver to the people the needs of life, a painful heartbreaking demonstration”. 

It is the profit-deliverers, not the machines or people, who are to blame.  One way of addressing the distribution system, was, unfortunately, Russia—“a form if society set up to overcome this impasse of the capitalistic system of production and distribution”.  Of course the Russians--the Soviets--were just in the middle of their enforced starvation/gulag/brutalization period under Josef Stalin, the gigantic negative parts of which were still in general not known to the great unwashed. 

The unnamed author dips lightly into Socialism, and then into Fascism and Nazism, though the only thing he/she really has to say about the later two is that “their answer [to economic woe] was in the seizure or control of the means of production by the state”, their own brutal means skipping off unnoticed into a pinkish glow, though the loss of personal freedom is “disdained”. 

The New City is actually a new world order, a new governmental form to take advantage of technological advancements leading to “nationalized urbanization” The first city in this new order is Neopolis, and this pamphlet was a call to those who would stand as its citizens.  (There’s actually a sort of application form, though all it really is a bill-of-sale for ordering more copies of the New City pamphlet.)

Even though the pamphlet is easily obtained, membership, the possibility of being a Neopolitan, is something entirely different.  The difference is actually exceptional, perhaps the most extraordinary thing about this whole misguided idea.  “Membership is to be carefully controlled at all times” we read. . “It is not desired to build up a huge and unwieldy membership of poorly-assimilated elements….interesting educational instruction…with tests to determine the fitness of the member for loyal, cooperative activity, leading, necessarily, to the elimination of those who may be found undesirable”. 
That’s some pretty muscular, steroidal stuff, particularly after such a glancing blow against the Soviets and Nazis. 

Since this is just an “abridgment” of a soon-to-be-written 250-page explanation of the concept, the complex and concentric organization of society is left mainly to the drawing of its plan, the physical layout of the city based upon this ideal. 

The Seattle-based author never did quite make it past page 29, never did name themselves, and never provided a concrete place where all of this heady stuff was being think out.  It is a sort of pretty design in a creepy/queasy way, there on the front cover, but that’s about as far as it goes.  If anyone actually did send any money to this quack thinker, it wound up in a nicely metaphorical place:  at “Terminal Box 3463”. 

This may be the very best idea to come out of touching this pamphlet—a place where people can send correspondence regarding Bad and/or Dead or Dying Ideas: “Terminal Box ______”.  I guess that box number would be pretty high by now. 

(Uncle Joe, before he killed the children, and dozens of millions of others.)

Structure for Wide Thinking--Walter Gropius' 1942 Design/Exercise Book

ITEM:  Gropius, Walter & Martin Wagner. Housing as a townbuilding problem; a post-war housing problem for the students of the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, February-March, 1942. Harvard, 1942.  10x8 inches, 59 sheets.  Offset printed. Gathered by one brass paper punch.  Very good condition.  Rare.  $450

ref: see JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1247

Walter Gropius (1883-1969, founder of tthe Bauhaus School and one of the principle builders of modern architecture) and Martin Wagner (1888-1957) were thinking of a new type of “town”, of a different sort of settlement for people, when they wrote this exercise instructional for their Harvard course. Housing as a townbuilding¹ problem, written during the war in 1942, was intended to be an exercise (or  “problem”), a case to be studied by the students in the departments of landscape architecture and the graduate school of design at Harvard. The class opened with this rare² pamphlet as a basis for course work, given to the students on 2 Feb 1942, with the problem’s answers expected to be on Gropius desk five weeks later.  Gropius and Martin put a tough, wide-ranging, landscape-changing question and expected answers in a very short period of time, though they definitely had a very structured plan and approach to dealing with massive implications of their exercise.  The theory was outlined there in the paper, of course, and was expanded much more fully in class.  And then there was this: a full page of datelines and expectations, a way of dealing with a large problem in logical chunks, adding up the answered bits, and then delivering a larger answer at the end and on time. 

I’m not an architecture or design historian, so much of this paper was a little lost on me–but I could definitely appreciate the way in which the great Gropius outlined the process of problem-thinking and solution for his students.  This may be the part of this paper that I liked the most. 

In  "The Walter Gropius House Landscape: A Collaboration of Modernism and the Vernacular"³ (published in the  Journal of Architectural Education, 1984, 57 (3), p. 39) Eric F. Kramer wrote:

“Sounding similar themes in a 1942 joint studio problem for landscape and architecture, Walter [Gropius] wrote of the inspiration of the vernacular landscape and of integrating with existing systems: ‘Such a landscape invites the artist planner to observe and preserve its variety of aspects, and to invent a settlement pattern that .ts into its natural beauty. Fortunately our forefathers have already traced out a settlement pattern that fits very well into the landscape.’ Gropius–the grand master builder and master teacher–set out the problem and the solution”.

There are of course major statements in city-building and human resettlement in this work, but for now, I’m still concentrated on the Bauhaus-founder’s outline for problem solving.   

Notes

1.  The full title: Housing as a townbuilding problem; a post-war housing problem for the students of the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, February-March, 1942.

And in that publication Gropius writes: “When we speak of ‘new townships’ we think of a new type of human settlement “, with a redefined vision of what a “town” means, using an idea of “reception basins” for spheres of cities as centers of culture, art and commerce “and our open country as furtherer if an industrialized agriculture and of forestry and recreation”. (page 21).  And all of that to be manufactured along the lines of “planned super-highway systems, one branch of which is to go through New England region and will supposedly cut through the towns of Weston and Weyland”.–Gropius and Martin.

2. This copy was in the Office for Emergency Management; only  six other copies have been found and these in excellent collections: MIT, Harvard Special Collections, Harvard College of Design, Cornell, Columbia and the NYPL (Special Collections).  So the publication is pretty scarce, and given its method of printing and distribution, it looks like not many survived, though it is difficult to say how many were actually printed.  In any event, few survived.

3. The abstract of this paper is helpful: “The Walter Gropius House Landscape A Collaboration of Modernism and the Vernacular”. “The Gropius house landscape is a potent physical manifestation of the design debates of its era. The landscape is an element of both mediation and integration forging a reciprocal and evenhanded relationship between architecture and site. Shaped by modern architectural sensibilities translated to the landscape and developed at a moment when landscape architecture was struggling to .nd a modernist inspiration and voice, it is an object lesson in the development of a modernist landscape architecture in America...”   
“In these studio problems, Gropius consistently encouraged students to find new form in the functional requirements of modern times and yet to integrate with existing systems through an understanding of their own functionally driven evolution.”

Stuff Blocking the Horizon: Christopher Wren's Buildings

ITEM:  Christopher Wren's buildings, in The Illustrated London News, 15 October 1932, 13x10 inches.  Very good condition.  $35

In a short line of my favorite English Baroque architect/masters, there is no superior to Sir Christopher Wren, and there is no second.  Granted my interest in him comes ‘round the back door, through the almost-eternally-fabulous Robert Hooke (one of the great master British scientists of the 17th century and to whom nearly everyone owes some debt, a genius of great difficult and whose maligned reputation is somewhat deserved) who assisted/worked with Wren for a time after the Great Fire. 

Hooke (1635-1703) and Wren share a big Something–they were both capable of great thinking across many fields and disciplines  As a matter of fact Wren (1632-1723) received a formal scientific training and was a gifted astronomer and mathematician in addition to being perhaps the most-gifted architect in the history of England.  To give the devil his due, though, few people could touch the depth and breath of Hooke’s incredible interests, or match the phenomenal diversity of his productions. (He has been referred to, justifiably, as “England’s Leonardo” by Alan Chapman in his 2005 book o the same name. If it wasn’t Hooke as Leonardo, I don’t know who else it might be.) Wren as it turns out was also a founder of the Royal Society and acted as its president from 1680-1682–a Society to which Hooke was deeply devoted, and which was probably kept alive by his efforts.

When you look at Wren’s accomplishments writ large, all drawn together  in this reproduction, you can really appreciate the great spectrum of his building career--not the list of which includes the iconic St. Paul's, featured, looming, in rear center.  Some people are able to place their accomplishments in great bumps on the horizion; some give you the opportunity to see or visualize them; some help you understand how those things are held together; and some give you the horizon.  Wren's accomplishments are definitely very pretty horizon-blockers. [This image is available for purchase from our blog bookstore.]