Books offered by JF Ptak Science Books

Richard Neutra Architectural, 1930

JF Ptak Science Books

(Neutra,  Richard.)  Civic Center Design for Richmond, Califonria.  Richmond, CA:  CIty Planning Commission,  1930.  1st edition.  6pp  4to.  Original printed wrappers.  Fine condition.  Rare  $750

This scarce pamphlet--written by Carol Aronovici (City Planner, d 1958) with Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler--contains four drawings for the proposed structure. Aronovici a prolific and esteemed city planner ("a prominent urbanist" according to Richard Pommer in his 1978 article in the Journal for the Society of Architectural History) sought out Neutra and Schindler for this project because of their "outstanding architectural work" which was "in harmony with modernist tendencies". This is a very scarce work, not locatable at auction, and housed in only three libraries worldwide (Harvard, NY Public Library and Columbia) according to the massive FirstSearch World/Cat database. ***This copy was given by Aronovici to the Library of Congress on 15 December 1930. There is a very small perforated "LC" stamp in the front cover as well as a Library of Congress surplus duplicate rubberstamp there as well. But for these a very nice, fresh copy, surviving well for a thin, oversized pamphlet.  

JF Ptak Science Books   re: Post 1794

Kiesler, Frederick.  Architecture as Biotechnique.  Offprint:  Architectural Record, 1940. 12x9 inches, pp 60-75.  Original printed wrappers.  Nice copy.  There's a little bit of dust soiling around the edges of the pamphlet, and a ex-ownership mark on the back cover' there's also a 1/4-inch perforated "LC" stamp at the very bottom of the front cover, as this was part of the Library of Congress' Pamphlet Collection and a Copyright Office copy of the pamphlet. Rare.  SOLD

Frederick Kiesler (Director of the Laboratory of Design-Correlation, Columbia (University)  School of Architecture) has been called one of America's most influential non-building architects of the 20th century for his influence on a generation of modern thinkers and builders.  In a rare pamphlet--an offprint, actually-- called "Architecture as Biotechnique", which was a separate printing of an article Kiesler wrote for the Architectural  Record in 1939  (and printed in 1940, and appearing under the interior title of "Design Trends"), there is a very enticing peep into the future.  Kiesler was looking at ways of making his architecture more "organic", more in touch with the people who would live inside the building, a radical thinker on the design of living space,  and wrote about these ideas in a longer piece called Endless House in which he explained his "design-correlations" in 1937. 

[The cover of the Architectural Record article, which I find to be, well, highly unusual.]

His descriptions of his work escape me some, making me feel as though I've started the article in the middle, when in fact I'm just starting--mainly because of some unfamiliar usages of common words that have been redesigned by the author to mean something else or more...plus the deeply theoretically architectural stuff.  But the article starts with his study of the genetics of architecture and building design, and finishes with eight pages or so on the design for a differently-functioning piece of everyday house interaction--the bookshelves of a library.

It is in the section on the library that Kiesler includes a "Metabolism-Chart of Mobile-Home-Library" (and by this he's talking about a movable library within the home and not a library for a mobile home), the bottom part of which shows the evolution of the way in which information is presented in the library.  The "cultural nucleus" or the way in which the data is presented and the way the presented obecjt is stored, and starts with the scroll in 2000 BC (with pigeon-hole storing), then the bound volume  (stored on shelves, 1445 AD), then the the microfilm (stored by "filing", in 1937-1950 AD), all of which are leading up to "opto-phonetics", stored in photo-cell-unit(s), in 2000 AD.  The evolutionary part in all of this is the increase in concentration/direction, an ease in visual and manual efforts, as well as easing "torsal" ("bending, leaning, rising, turning") and "pedal" efforts (walking, moving, standing), making the acquisition and control of the data in the library over time.

Now Kieser doesn't actually decribe (here, anyway) what he means by photocell-driven opto-electronic information device, but in 1939/40, when this piece was written,, most of what this machien might be was left to the creative imagination--but the fact that Kiesler has come to this at all with the year 2000 as a probable time for its arrival is fairly remarkable. 

It is also interesting to see Kiesler's forensic analysis of the range of human motion regarding the selection of books from shelves (and using a Vesalius image for his 5'6" person):

Notes:

"The term "biotechnique" appeared first in my treaties on "Town Planning" as "Vitalbau", in De Stijl, No. 10/11, Paris 1925 and in America first in Hound and Horn, May 1934."--Kiesler, from his introduction.

"Introjection and Projection, Frederick Kiesler and his Dream Machine", an interesting read,  by Stephen Phillips, in Architecture and Surrealism, by Thomas Mical.

 

America Attacked, 1937--and the Bizarre Architectural Response to Poison Gas and the Homeless Unemployed.

JF Ptak Science Books  

Diamond, Philip.  Should it Happen Here.  1937.  Self-published.  RAre.  12 leaves.  Original printed wrappers.  Nice copy.  Formerly in the Library of Congress Pamphlet Collection, and previous to that one of the U.S. copyright deposit copies.   $125

[An Earlier post on this blog, Mapping the Invasion of America, 1942, addressed another vision of the invasion of the United  States--it is also the Most Viewed post that I've written, having been read more than 400,000 times.  See also Part II of this post, here; and consider a  related post on the Nazi sub-orbital Amerika Bomber]

Philip Diamond discovered an interesting concept in "blurryness" in the pursuit of building with a purpose.  In his pamphlet Should it Happen Here, self-published (and printed by the Brighton Press of Brooklyn, U.S.A.) in 1937, Diamond established a need for creating (1) inexpensive housing for the unemployed and (2) poison-gas-proof housing for Americans in general, and came up with (1.5) inexpensive poison-gas-proof housing.  In blurring the lines between the two needs I'm not sure that he satisfied anyone's needs, spreading his engineering/architectural gifts jut a little (or a lot) of bit too thin.

One thing Diamond was sure of was that the next war would be governed by "one man flying in an aircraft and releasing vapors of poisonous gas for destruction" and assured his readers that in this new war "there would be no front lines".  "The future war will not be carried to the front line; it will be carried to the front door."  That of course was true for hundreds of millions of people in Europe and the Soviet Union and South Asia, but not so in the same sense for anyone in America--unless those Americans happened to live on a remote chain of Alaskan islands.  Diamond was sure that war was coming directly to the U.S., and although he doesn't name the country/countries that would be responsible for attacking America with poison gas, he did name one of the aircraft that would come here to do that--the HE112. (The HE 112 was a prototype fighter aircraft that wasn't adopted, with fewer than 100 produced. How this would get across Europe and then across the Atlantic and then across the U.S. I'm not sure.)

Once Diamond gets to the design of his house things get a little fuzzy--and heavy./  Very heavy.  HE proposed a domed structure with a foot-thick "exterior roof" and a foot-thick "interior roof" of concrete, between which would be sandwiched three feet of sawdust.  The sawdust was supposed to act as both a filter to noise and soot and dust from the outside world, as well as a filter for poisonous gases. 

The 5-foot thick structure would be embedded on a 10-foot thick concrete bed (for earthquake protection) and surrounded on its sides by another 10-foot concrete structure of something that I can't figure out.  Not surprisingly, the author announced with a section headings that there would be "No WIndows".  There would be a double entry equipped with an "air condition" that would wash folks entering the house and decontaminate the gases that might've impregnated their clothing or bodies (though Diamond says nothing about outerwear). 

Once inside (charmingly referred to as "the vault") the occupants would find two bedrooms, a kitchen/dining room, and two lavatories (one "miniature" for the children, not so much for "hygiene", but to "protect the delicate moal grace amongst the children". That was the best line in the pamphlet, and about the only thing that really made any sense.)

6 million of these houses could be constructed for the unemployed, costing $3,000/each, meaning that this part of the project could be funded with 18 billion dollars.  This was at a time when the New Deal was having a heart attack, unemployment was spiking again, and the entire GDP of the U.S. was $91 billion, which means that Mr. Diamond was seeking a 20% cut of the GDP pie.  In current terms, that 20% would mean $3 trillion. 

So far as I can determine Mr. Diamond's plan was not taken seriously. 

Also, this I think is my only encounter with  a title pages that starts out with the words "Sub-title".

A Vision of the Future: Filling Up Manhattan, 1887

ITEM: original woodcut print from Harper's Weekly, 28 May 1887.  Fragment, 11x10 inches.  Fair condition.  $75.00, in mat. 

ref:  JF Ptak Science Books   Qick Post

This peep into a possible future appeared in Harper's Weekly on 18 May 1887.  It is the work of artist W.A. Rogers and depicts a filling-up lower Manhattan, complete with broad avenues lined by elevated trains whose reach evidently knows no bounds. The new elevated subway winds its way across the harbor to Liberty Island, where it wraps itself around the feet and up the body of the newly--dedicated Statue of Liberty (opened in October of the previous year).  In the foreground is the cupola of a transit station with a fluttering flag advertising "Coney Island via Broadway"--I'm not sure what this is all about, as the placement of the island has nothing to do with anything except making a point in the cartoon.  (The original is offered at our blog bookstore.)

A very full interpretation of this image may be found at HarpWeek, here. 

Rebuilding Chicago, 1945--a Map of the Future

ITEM:  Bruce Biossat.  Remaking Chicago.  Chicago, 1945.  6x4 inches, 48pp, illustrations.  Original printed pictorial wrappers.  Nice copy.  Rare.  $95   Ref:  JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1435

Earlier today a post appeared here on re-envisioning the "one city" megalopolis of San Diego--Los Angeles--San Francisco by hoisting 2-acre neighborhoods into the sky to support some 5 million people or so.  Bruce Biossat, a writer for the Chicago Daily News, also had an ambitious plan for the city of Chicago, though in the face of putting thousands of acres of neighborhoods (with years) into massive highrises, Mr. Boissat's plan--while massive--is not nearly so as the L.A. scheme. 

For reasons I cannot determine, this small pamphlet¹ seems to be nowhere--no mention on the web, nothing in city planning databases, nothing in WorldCat (an actually nothing at all in this massive database about Mr. Biossat).  It was a massive undertaking, part of a project of the Chicago Plan Commission, and sought to relieve "blighted" areas from the city by replacing them with new housing and neighborhood design. This was part of a larger construction scheme nationwide:

    "The goal most mentioned as the desired postwar level of home construction is 1,000,000 units a year.  Both major labor organizations call for higher objectives, with the A.F.L. demanding 1,500,000 and the C.I.O urging 1,750,000 annually."

That is a lot of building, and I have no doubt that the ALF/CIO would've been behind a spending/earning opportunity like this 100%.  I'm not sure where all of this money was coming from, though I guess there would've been enough workers to handle the job.

In any event, the plan was massive, as we can see in the map above--perhaps the designers/developers felt the end of the war coming, the return of millions of soldiers, and an opportunity to make some major changes in the development of the future of Chicago. 

The Problematic and Unspeakably Brief Beauty of Linoleum: Italy, 1935

ITEM:  Il Linoleum Nelle Costruzioni Scolastiche, printed in Milano by the Society for Linoleum, 1933.  Spiral bound, printed wrappers, 11x8 inches with about 150 pages,  with illustrations throughout.  Very nice condition.  There is no record of this publication whatsoever in WorldCat.  $225

ref:  JF  Ptak Science Books   Post 1418

In my imaginary History of Lines there is a chapter or two for humans-in-line(s).  In the history of the world, the fourth and fifth decades of the twentieth century—the 1930’s and ‘40’s—were big ones for human lines.   Big does not imply good, because as we all know lots of humans lined up for all manner of unspeakable nastiness during this time and well more than 100 million didn’t make it out alive (considering all of the wars, purges, revolutions and stupidity).

The lines here are a little more benign, though with shriveled overtones of corrected respect.

 Oppressive obedience in a well-designed environment is still like dressing your ear-infected 14-year-old St. Bernard/Jack Russell (?!) mixed breed in baby booties—its just not right, and these images attest to this simpy comparison. All of these photographs come from a delightful manufacturer’s catalog for linoleum products (Il Linoleim nelle Costruzioni Scolastiche), which was printed in Umbria in 1935. 

I’ll undoubtedly write a post on this stylistic beauty later on, but suffice to say for right now that it really is a lovely thing.  If only we could forget the Mussolini part.  Now I’m no fan, necessarily, of linoleum, but if I had to live on a linoleum island far removed from civilization and I had to choose a design for my world, I would choose the designs from this catalog, without hesitation. They’re spare, well-proportioned, beautifully design utilitarian designs; they are also very shiny and cold with a dispirited order, but so it goes.  The catalog seems to speak for its times, the inspired design bowing to the weighty needs of the flatulent state.

 Even though the people (mainly child people) are in very structured environments, they still look as though they really don’t believe in whatever it was was happening--of course they were at school, or in an academic environment, or hospital, or something (as the titlf of the work states). There is something just wrong in the child-straight lines and seemless expanse of linoleum, something that looks as though details have been left out, that there is a ground-in sameness to everything, that the indifference to difference is so to make the children of a sort of sameness.  Ihope that they did okay--most would be around 80 or 85 by now, if they survived.

 

Stuff Blocking the Horizon--Ugly Roadside Horizon-detractors, 1922

ITEM: The Roadsides of California, a Survey¹ (1922)  8x5 inches.  48pp.  Very good condition.  Rare.  $75

Ref: JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1303

“There’s nothing so perfect as imperfection.”–Somebody.

“The great unconquerables in the geography of human thoughts and ideas are the bad ones.”–Nobody.

Bad ideas don’t so much go away as they get recycled. They can be replaced by good ideas or bad, but the ”original” bad ideas seem to linger on and on.  They are perhaps the indomitable inheritance of society, real and imagined.   

Bad human-produced landscapes are an outgrowth of bad ideas, calamities large and small that come and go, the old replaced by something new that is good or bad or indifferent. With the landscape, the original landscape itself--apart from the idea that brought it about--is generally lost forever once it has been replaced.  There is no Bad Idea Spirit that brings it back whole again, unlike the generic Bad Idea, which can live on and on, unencumbered by history, like a Greek play or some deeper mythology.

Theoretically society is supposed to learn from recognized bad ideas, so as to not repeat them etc., which is one reason why we keep track of them, in the vain hope that someday someone somewhere in the history of our future will kill particular bad ideas off one by one. 

In the meantime we can dwell on what we have, though with the removed bad idea landscape, it is more difficult.  That’s why it is important every now and then to familiarize ourselves with them when the opportunity arises, which is just what happened with this innocuous-sounding pamphlet, The Roadsides of California, a Survey¹ (1922)  Its not like it’s Pandora’s box–we can open this one and just a few, limited baddies come out, and fall limply to the floor.  But what we see is interesting, a slice of our memory of the horizon–a part of our “progress” that we’ve tried to excise–and what we can see now are the removed and forgotten things. 



Notes

1. This is actually an interesting pamphlet, an early attempt at removing the quickly generated ugliness that was cluttering new roads for the explosion of automobile travelers.  As quickly as cars were made in the new decade of the automobile, billboards and roadside attractions followed.  This pamphlet identified this phenomenon as a problem.

Verticals and Lead-Spewing Gargoyles: Spires, Rifles, Bayonettes. Reims, November 27, 1918.

ITEM:  original photograph, 8x6 inches, printed 1918.  Good condition.  $350

Ref:  JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1267

Verticals and Anticipation after Four Grueling Years

In developing a history of vertical lines I thought that I would look at single vertical lines, but having just stumbled across this in our WWI News Photo Service archive, I just could not resist.  There is of course plenty of vertical arrangement here--just orders of magnitude more than what I was setting out to find.  So it goes.

(The image is available from our blog bookstore, here.) And the detail:

 And another:

I find this a soaring image, in its own odd way--this is a celebration scene, after,all, a decoration exercise, a military display of French forces that liberated the town of Reims, all taking place in front of the battered cathedral. Notre-Dame de Reims was the place of the coronation of French kings, and was a spectacular 13th century structure built on top of other buildings stretching back the site's inhabitation to at least the 5th century.  

But German artillery shelling caught the cathedral right at the beginning of the war and very nearly wrecked it.  The building was badly damaged by fire, a fire caused by the Germans, which spread along the scaffolding on the building which fed the wooden supports and superstructures, the flames finding its way throughout the building.  The fire was hot enough to melt the lead in the roof, which poured down as molten rain and out of the mouth-spouts of the building's gargoyles. 

As I brought out the further figures against the base of the cathedral one can clearly see the enormous stands of sandbags, the piles stacked up twenty feet or so behind the makeshift wooden fence.  IT was some sort of protection for the building, but not muc. 

This was yet another battle for the city, this one taking place 1550 years or so after the first, the Alemanni defending against the Romans; and then 104 years after the next major encounter, this between Napoleon and a Russian/Prussian force.  The liberating battle (the Battle of Reims, or the Second Battle of the Marne) took place 15 July 1918 to 6 August 1918, and it was a major failure for the German army, and spelled the collapse of the Spring Offensive, opening the door to the end of the war.  There were more than 135,000 Allies killed or wounded in this campaign (including 95,000 french troops), plus another 130,000 German troops.

The process of victory in front of the wounded church seems exhausting and exhilarating, bu tnot without a good sense of anticipation.

The Ghetto as a "Threat to Tax Values"--Missing People

ITEM: Rehabilitation of Sub-Standard Housing Areas.  Fred R. Catlett.  Washington, D.C.  1942.  Rare.  12pp.  Very good condition.  $75

Ref: JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1252 (Rapid Post)

Part of the series Blank, Empty and Missing Things

Fred Catlett's Rehabilitation of Sub-Standard Housing Areas (1942) isn't so much about "rehabilitation" of the houses themselves but to their  neighborhoods and surrounding areas--the "inadequate" housing would be demolished, disappeared, replaced, to re-insure the valid tax basis of the larger area/neighborhood.  Nothing is said about where the original people would go while their old neighborhoods were being razed or whether or not they would return to the new housing. 

The vocabulary here isn't so surprising in and of itself, but rather with teh overwhelming completeness of it.  I'd suspect that at some point Mr. Catlett  ("Member Federal Home Loan Bank Board") would throw some sort of bone to the interests of the occupants of those substandard houses, some interest or emphasis to the people involved.  And even though the pamphlet is only 12 pages long, maybe 5000 words, it was certainly long enough to share some concern or kindness to the occupants of those houses.

"Better housing projects break up slums but not until fine homes have decayed and been ruined and many thousands of dollars in loses have been suffered"writes the author.  I understand that the man was protecting the material bases of his institution, but to have the entire document be absent of any consideration to the people being houses I find remarkable. (The original pamphlet is available from our blog bookstore.)

 

 

 

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.”