Primitive De Luxe versus Civilized No Lux

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 992

I’m not sure exactly what Solomon Butcher told his subjects when he photographed them outside of their frontier houses out there in the Great Plains in the 1880’s.  His spectacular portraits included not only the family of the house, but in many cases, everything that the family owned.  Possessions were an

encumbrance making your way across the country in the mid/19^th century, especially if you didn’t have very many to begin with.  These families—the first generation in their mostly sod-built houses—would’ve been farmers scratching out a minimum trade and decent subsistence.   City/town goods would’ve been not-usual in these circumstances, and evidently whatever it was they had of these things wound up outside, displayed around the house and on the roof, when Mr. Butcher arrived in his photographer’s wagon. 

(Who was it, I wonder, who came up with the initial idea of displaying all of the family’s possessions:  did Butcher set out with that idea, or did it happen spontaneously?  I wonder what it was the families thought as Butcher was packing up his equipment, his horse fed, his cameras stowed away, climbing up onto the driver’s bench.  Did they wait until he was a spot on the horizon to put away their things?  Did they gather everything up as Butcher gathered up his own material, or did they just wait for the stranger to disappear before pulling the family back together? Sitting their surrounded by the things that they owned, did these families feel a quiet pride, or were they embarrassed have their pictures made together with their frontier opulence? I suspect that the idea for display did not begin with the families.)

On another part of the luxury spectrum is this floor plan for a “No-Lux Hotel”, a 2x3 metre/room place for folks to stay cheaply/inexpensively.  There were 50  rooms packed into a 36x24 metre footprint,

leaving precious little room for hardly anything else, like hallways (which seem very narrow), stairways (actually a singular, as there is but one) and bathrooms (one with 8 sinks and four toilets per floor). 

The center of the structure seems curiously blank in the top plan.  The bottom one is confounding, a mysterious mystery:  why on earth would there be musical notation written backwards (via “Arabic Notation”) in the center of the plan?  No doubt the architect was on the iconoclastic side to have included such a thing; but its inclusion no doubt meant something to the author, though it is now lost to his/her dust.  Pity. 

“Lusux” is Latin for something like “extravagance”.  “De luxe” appeared in France in 1928 or so for the first time to describe this added opulence in a word of its own, though there is a certain geology to the idea.  A luxury might well be a spice on a camping trip, or a back-up aircraft to the family helicopter.  Perhaps it was an extra sink in a cheap hotel, or a violin for the kids in a house that stood by itself in 10-square-mile solitude. At least the multi-floored Hotel No-Lux had a stairway.