 Figure 1 The City of Los Angeles belonged to Raymond Chandler (figure 1) and his iconic fictional alter ego Philip Marlowe1. Like Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, no other fictional detective has been so enmeshed with a city. Marlowe was active between 1939 and 1958, a period of rapid growth in Southern California. There many factors that contributed to the growth of the region, not least being the automobile. The 1930s saw the automobilization of not only the hospitality industry but also the home by way of the house trailer and the restaurant via the drive-in. In Southern California, the combination of a good climate, trailer camps, courts, and parks began to emerge as a major type of permanent housing to accommodate newly arriving defense workers. By 1940, the automobile culture was in full swing in California in anticipation of the way Americans would live in the post-war years.2 In the two decades of Marlowe’s activities, crime and corruption, which came with rapid commercial development, were interwoven with urban fabric.
 Figure 2 Philip Marlowe’s (figure 2) territory encompassed downtown Los Angeles, Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Westwood, and Santa Monica. Each of these locales has their own distinct ambience, visual style, and psychological climates, faithfully recorded by Chandler. For example, in Farewell My Lovely (1940) Chandler describes a house in Santa Monica stand-in Bay City,
It [Number 862 Aster Drive, Bay City] was close to the ocean and you could feel the ocean in the air…Aster Drive had a long smooth curve there and the houses on the inland side were just nice houses, but on the canyon side they were great silent estates, with twelve foot walls and wrought-iron gates and ornamental hedges…3
Chandler’s vision of Los Angeles was accurate with occasional affection and cruelty mixed together like a good stiff whiskey and soda. Chandler’s Marlowe knew the city’s every mood: hot and smoggy, air thick with carbon monoxide and faint odor of blood, or deceptively fresh with a touch of chaparral and corruption. A layer of decay and corruption lies just underneath the glitter and glamour of a beautiful location blighted by humanity, a beautiful night wrecked by a corpse.
 Figure 3 The “hard-boiled” detective of American mystery fiction first came to life in the 1920s and it was no surprise that his beat was the streets of California. It is not because the streets of California were meaner than New York or Chicago instead the journey of the private eye was a journey of truth. His was a lone quest for unraveling a person’s tortured truth (figure 3) and Southern California provided ample quarry. The allure of the glittering surfaces concealed tarnished surfaces offering cynical sympathy to those who were cheated out of their dream at the edge of the continent. Southern California was a paradox: the desert met the sea, sunshine prevailed most of the year, and “Southern California is the land of the ‘sun-down sea, where the sun suddenly plummets into the ocean, disappearing ‘like a lost and bloody cause.’”4 In this land of the “sun-down sea” immigrants from the East Coast and the Midwest were free from the constraints of the past and were able to reinvent themselves. David Smith writes, “However, this ‘new’ society was no more detached from a past that shaped its public form than were its denizens free to make themselves anew…the probing of relationships between the fixed individual and his forming society….”5
One recurring theme of the detective fiction genre is constant movement. Philip Marlowe is a man always on the move through the mean streets, cocktail bars, waterfronts, and mansions. He knows them all with a restlessness that mirrors the restlessness of the city. Chandler appropriates the Los Angeles basin in a consistently symbolic manner. The criminals committed their misdeeds in the flatlands and them move into the hills or the bluffs above the ocean. “Move up” is both literal and metaphoric.6 People live in walled fortresses above the city insulated from the crimes they committed below. They take on new identities and locations, purchased as form of immunity from the past. This type of movement is encouraged by the fluid lifestyle that was typical of Los Angeles in the thirties, forties, and fifties. It was Marlowe’s job to go into the hills, drag the perpetrator down into the flatlands, and make him pay for his crimes.
Like the city he wrote about, Chandler and his wife Cissy mirrored Los Angeles’ restless nature at the edge of the world. Throughout the thirties, the Chandlers moved numerous times: Silver Lake, Downtown, Hancock Park, Fairfax, Santa Monica, and the Palm Springs area. The urban nomads kept their possessions in storage lockers drawing on them as needed for whatever specific rental, which they abandoned after a few months.7 In general, Chandler did not have a high regard for Los Angeles. In a letter to Fellow Black Mask∗ writer George Harmon Cox dated October 17, 1939, he complains, “I’m sick of California and the kind of people it breeds. Of course I like La Jolla, but La Jolla is only a sort of escape from reality. It’s not typical…She [Cissy Chandler] agrees with that that the percentage of phonies in population is increasing…”8 Of La Jolla, in a letter to Cox on April 9 the same year, “If you come to the Coast to live, you should look at La Jolla before you decide where to live. I think it is a much better place than Laguna in every possible way. It is dear for a small town, but it is has perfect climate in both winter and summer, …”9
Raymond Chandler and his fictional alter ego's relationship with Los Angeles was complicated. On the one hand the city had eaten him up and kept him on the precipice of nothing. Yet on the other hand, without Los Angeles, both he and Marlowe were nothing. Without the City of Angels, Marlowe and Chandler would have disembodied ghosts, perhaps like the nameless, faceless spirits that wonder the streets of Tinsel Town in search of their big break. The city fired the writer’s imagination and he, in turn, did the same. Without the crime and corruption, the seedy hotels, the shakedowns, and payoffs, what would he have written about? How would have Philip Marlowe made a living? Like Chandler, Marlowe knew the raw underside of a city that could destroy people by giving them false hopes. Where else could Marlowe exist? Pain and bad behavior were his passion and obsession. Like the inhabitants, Marlowe heeded the Siren’s call to migrate from Santa Rosa, California to travel the mean streets. In Little Sister (1949) Marlowe declares, “I used to like this town…A long time ago. There were trees along Wilshire Boulevard. Beverly Hills was a country town…Hollywood was a bunch of frame houses on the interurban line. Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but goodhearted and peaceful.10
Raymond Chandler arrived in Los Angeles in 1912, coinciding with opening of the Mulholland Aqueduct. The aqueduct was the brainchild of William Mulholland and was designed to bring water from the Owens Valley River to Los Angeles. The project involved a highly intricate series of scandalous manipulations by a consortium of bankers, politicians, businessmen, and newspaper owners who swindled farmers in the Owens Valley out of their water rights and then through bribery and deceit had public funds voted for their scheme in order to profit on apparently worthless land in the San Fernando Valley. It took over six years to build the aqueduct which consisted of two hundred thirty-five miles of canals, conduits, flumes, tunnels, penstocks, tailraces, and siphons from its intake point in the town of Independence in the Owens Valley twelve miles away. The project completely ruined the valley by 1927 but created highly desirable irrigated land in the San Fernando Valley. The importance of water, as well as oil and real estate, are never far away from the iconic Marlowe.
 Figure 4 Oil (figure 4), like land and water are what built Los Angeles. Oil created the industrial infrastructure of Southern California beginning in the 1890s. By 1924, the Los Angeles Basin produced 230 millions barrels of oil and 300 billion cubic feet of natural gas.11 Land speculation created a transit system that produced communities spread out across the southland. Oil is what made the Sternwoods of Chandler’s novel The Big Sleep wealthy. Chandler writes, “On this lower level faint and far off I could just barely see some of the old wooden derricks of the oilfield from the Sternwoods had made their money…But little of it was still producing in groups of wells pumping five or six barrels a day…”12 This excerpt presents a clear example of Chandler’s moral geography. The oil field is a family secret, which Philip Marlowe must uncover in order to restore order to the landscape. It is a symbol of wealth and corruption. It is in the oil field that the central crime is hidden in the past and Marlowe must seek it out and bring it to the light of day. David Fine writes,
Crime in the southern California version is ordinarily an act carried out in the past and hidden behind a respectable façade in the present…Respectability comes with the large house in the hills. Barricaded behind high walls, Chandler’s criminals are insulated from the past…13
 Figure 5 Philip Marlowe’s adventures frequently brought him in contact with wealthy. They were sometimes members of the established elite and other times they were the nouveau riche who made their fortunes through very questionable means. Either way, Marlowe takes it in with equal doses cynicism and suspicion sometimes grudgingly admiring all the trappings of wealth but with a keen awareness of the difference between good taste and vulgarity.14 Raymond Chandler describes the fictional Sternwood manor in the opening pages of The Big Sleep (1939),
The main hallway of the Sternwood place was stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady tied to a tree…On the east side of the hall a free staircase, tile-paved, rose to a galley with a wrought-iron railing and another piece of stained-glass romance…15
The fictitious mansion was based on severable recognizable models, including Greystone Manor (figure 5). Sternwood Manor is confluence of gloom, stained glass, wrought iron, and the sinister association with orchid, a “…fleshy, fungoid, requiring a steamy artificial atmosphere in which to live.”16 In Chandler’s familiar view of Los Angeles, rich equals degenerate, poor equals honest.
 Figure 6 Raymond Chandler’s General Sternwood, the dying father of two dangerous daughters, is an oilman whose mansion is built on black gold and dubious business methods, like Edward Doheny. By 1925, Doheny had amassed a sufficient amount of capital to build Greystone Manor for his son and heir. Construction took more than two-and-half years at a cost of four million dollars. No so coincidentally, it was the sight of the most famous or infamous murder-suicide, which Chandler fictionalized in High Window (1942). The Sternwood Mansion combines elements of Greystone, Edward Doheny’s Senior’s mansion Chester Place (figure 6), the home of Joseph Dabney, President of Dabney Johnson, located at 420 South Lafayette near Hancock Park17 to create a perfect setting for murder and mischief.
Chandler’s familiarity with oil industry came from the job he held upon his return to California from Europe in 1917. Chandler found work in the state’s booming oil industry as an executive with Dabney-Johnson. The budding crime novelist was later sacked for drunkenness.18 Further, Chandler’s acquaintance with Greystone might have come about from a party he attended while still employed with Dabney-Johnson.19 From Greystone, the Dohenys, like Marlowe, were able to see the outline of the derricks against the sky. The oil refineries in Long Beach, El Segundo, and Wilmington made Los Angeles County the number one petroleum production center in the nation.20 The Port of Los Angeles, twenty-five miles south of Downtown, shipped about hundred million barrels of petroleum every year.21
 Figure 7 Hollywood is Marlowe’s home turf, his office is located in the Guaranty Building (figure 7) on Hollywood and Ivar, Musso and Frank’s Grill was nearby; Stanley Rose’s bookstore next door became Bennett’s Bookshop (a front for pornography in The Big Sleep). The latter was a case of art imitating life Rose was arrested for pornography. Hollywood began life as a motion picture colony in the Edendale district of Los Angeles. Early silent filmmakers were able to take advantage of a variety of natural scenery that was suitably adaptable for making movies. In 1911, the colony moved from the Elysian Park area to Hollywood. By 1920, the population grew to twenty thousand and two hundred thirty-five thousand in 1930.22 But even as the colony became more fleshed out, it already began to experience the taint of scandal and vice. The colony was populated by individuals deemed “…unfit to mingle with respectable citizens.”23 There was notorious Fatty Arbuckle case, the murder of William Desmond Taylor, and the murder (maybe) of Thomas Ince aboard William Randolph Hearst’s yacht. In forming the Motion Picture Producer’s Association, Will (“Deacon”) Hayes was retained to clean up the industry. His efforts resulted in the Hayes Code, which required morals clauses in performer’s contracts and private detectives were hired to closely examine the actor’s private lives.
Geographically, Hollywood extends north to south, from the summit of the Hollywood Hills to Beverly Boulevard and Hoover Street to Doheny Drive, east to west. It is a district made up of apartment buildings with high occupancy turnover rates attesting to the mobile nature of Los Angeles. Its population is engaged in the motion picture industry. Carey McWilliams divides this population into three strata: the two hundred or more that make in excess of seventy-five thousand dollars a year, the junior elite who make between twenty-five and fifty thousand a year, and the lesser elite, the “workers” defined as administrative staff, skilled and unskilled laborers, and craftsmen who make between ten thousand and fifteen thousand dollars a year.24 Below that are the hangers on such as the extras and hustlers who move about the streets looking for their break.
Horace McCoy, a contemporary of Raymond Chandler chronicles the tragedy of the hangers on in his book They Shoot Horses Don’t They (1935). McCoy tells the sad tale of Gloria Beatty, a “…half pretty girl capable of exciting the lotharios in West Texas but not good enough for the silver screen…”25 and Robert Syverten who desperate for a job as an errand boy for a director. The two enter a dance marathon on the pier in Santa Monica but their efforts are doomed by a series of events that force the cancellation of the marathon. Gloria, hates her life, with no prospects in life wants to die and ask Robert to shoot her. The book illustrates the cruelty of the Hollywood dream factory. Pretty girls are a dime a dozen. Hollywood has little use for “Cracker-type.”26 Gloria and Robert are like the Joads of The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Okies clinging an illusion that turns out to be a nightmare. These are the people that wonder the streets of Raymond Chandler’s Hollywood and make it the perfect setting for Philip Marlowe. It was a place where people like Paul Wharton∗ could continually run from their pasts and refashion a new identity for themselves. Beneath the glare of the fantasy lies a place that sucks the very soul out those who live and tosses the bodies out. The pier might have offered respite for Gloria and Robert, instead becomes an agent of their doom. The Santa Monica Pier also becomes the jumping off point of a variety of sordid activities.
 Figure 8 Santa Monica (figure 8), one of the oldest settlements in Southern California, is at the center of the Bay area, and served as a model for Chandler’s Bay City.27 It fulfills every fantasy a person could have about Los Angeles: five to six miles of waterfront, wide stretches of yellow sand, which combined with the year round temperate climate could accommodate tens of thousands of Angelinos on the weekends. The focal point is a rickety wooden pier, one a few still surviving to this day. The Santa Monica of Chandler’s era was the ocean front playground of Hollywood. Marion Davis maintained her residence and the downtown Jonathan Club operated a branch. It was the epitome of Southern California lifestyle as a suburban seaside; on Sundays, the middle classes filled the region.28 Nearby Venice was also a popular place with its boardwalk and arcade. Santa Monica was popular resort with its Ocean Park amusement district with roller coasters, skating rinks, and the carousel. The city boasted itself as “The Coney Island of the West.”29 In Farewell My Lovely, Chandler writes,
Outside the narrow street fumed, the sidewalks swarmed with fat stomachs. Across the street a bingo parlor was going full blast and beside it a couple of sailors with girls were coming of a photographer’s shop where they probably been have their photos taken riding on camels… After a while there was a faint smell of ocean. Not much, but as if they had kept this much just to remind people this had once been a clean open beach…30
But of course, in Chandler’s seaside playground corrupt police and dubious characters lay just beneath the surface.
Raymond Chandler did not have to look far to find criminal activity in Santa Monica. All he had to do was look of the coast and there he could find the gambling ships. The offshore gambling ships were a fixture in the Bay Area and provided the climax for Farewell My Lovely. Other than changing the names (to protect the not so innocent), Chandler did very little to disguise then. Chandler writes,
The Royal Crown seemed to ride as steady as a pier on its four hawsers. Its landing stage was lit up like a theater marquee. Then it all faded into remoteness and another, older, smaller boat began to sneak out of the night toward us. It was not much to look at. A converted seagoing freighter with scummed and rusted plates the superstructure cut down to the boat deck level, and above that two stumpy masts just high enough for a radio antenna…31
The ships were the idea of Tony Cornero, a racketeer who prospered during Prohibition as a rumrunner32, who was hoping to avoid the reform minded Fletcher Bowron. He realized that Santa Monica and Long Beach were ideal places to go into the gambling business. Refurbishing four ships as casinos: the Rex, Texas, Tango and Showboat, Cornero anchored them beyond the three-mile limit claiming his operation was legal.33 Cornero went as far as to advertise in the local papers claiming the best gambling establishments west of Monte Carlo.34 The flagship, the Rex hosted about three thousand customers on the hour. No one seemed to pay much attention until Earl Warren became Attorney General of California and raid the boats on August 2, 1939. A judge’s ruling finally closed the ships and Cornero went off to Las Vegas to run the Stardust Hotel.
To conclude, as a writer, Raymond Chandler created a world that was as real a world of his contemporaries, Horace McCoy and John Steinbeck. His nomadic life immersed him in the essence of metropolitan Los Angeles. Chandler’s Los Angeles reveals a catalog of places, that when taken individually, forms a symbolic map of the city: Hollywood, Santa Monica, the oil fields in Baldwin Hill, and Pasadena. Both the author and alter ego are mirrors of a city during a time of transition and growth.
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Saturday, March 3, 2012
James Gibbs
It is a particular pleasure to me that this paper gives me an opportunity to declare the real sentiments of gratitude and respect with which I am, dear professor, your most dutiful and most obliged humble student… from the dedication, with liberties, Book of Architecture by James Gibbs.
 Figure 1 The architecture of James Gibbs (figure 1) came to represent both church and country. His work was widely disseminated thanks to copies of his text Book of Architecture published in 1728. The book provided a catalog of plans, sections, elevations, and details that could be copied in parts in whole. Gibbs’ architecture represented a social convention that was brought to the British colonies in North America and replicated in the vernacular. We have examples of this at St. Michael Church in Charleston, South Carolina and Mount Airy by John Ariss in Richmond County, Virginia. Book of Architecture is also the ancestor of Asher Benjamin’s books The Country Builder’s Assistant, The American Builder’s Companion, and The Rudiment of Architecture, which enabled the settlers American West to replicate familiar architecture in remote places. The goal of this paper is an analysis of how Gibbs’ visual vocabulary is translated in North America. As part of this, the paper will look at his work in England, specifically St. Martin-in-the-Field, and how his book came to North America. We begin this examination with St. Michael Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
 Figure 2 St. Michael Church in Charleston, South Carolina (1752-61, figure 2), built in the 1680s, was the site of the first Anglican Church south of Virginia. Originally a small wooden church, it was erected for the new town of Charles Town (later Charleston) for the families of the Church of England and named St. Philip1. By 1727, the town had outgrown the original building and a larger space replaced it, however, in 1835 it was destroyed in a fire. In 1751, once again the congregation outgrew the church and the General Assembly authorized a new church to be built on the old site and re-sanctified it St. Michael’s.2 The cornerstone was laid in 1752 and the church opened for worship in 1761. St. Michael reflects a fusion of both Andrea Palladio and Sir Christopher Wren and is reminiscent of St. Martin-in-the Fields (1721-26) by James Gibbs (1682-1754).
 Figure 3 By the early eighteenth century, St. Martin-in-the-Fields (figure 3) was a rambling, shapeless building, which the parishioners were not proud of, in need of a long overdue rehabilitation. The congregation’s intention wanted to remake the church as one of London’s most fashionable places of worship.3 Through an Act of Parliament, the worshippers appointed Commissioners to execute the project. On August 17, 1720, led by Sir Christopher Wren, Gibbs took the Commissioners on a tour of parish churches.4 In November of that year, King James II appointed Gibbs surveyor and on March 19, 1722 the Bishop of Salisbury laid the foundation stone on behalf of the King. St. Martin was one of three churches begun and completed within five years of each other with variations on the same design. St. Martin shared with the Oxford Chapel (St. Peter’s, Vere Street) in London and the church of All Hallows in Derby, now a cathedral of being from the architectural ancestry.5 Work on St. Martin began in 1721 and its consecration in 1726 marked the completion of the trio.
 Figure 4 These were not Gibbs’ first forays into ecclesiastical design. In 1713 Gibbs was recommended by the Earl Oxford to take over surveyorship from William Dickinson under The New Churches Act. Gibbs was formally appointed and begun St. Mary-le-Strand in 1714. St. Mary was Gibbs’ first known buildings. His efforts at St. Mary casts doubt that this was his first serious effort at being known as a church architect. Contemporary with St. Mary were Gibbs’ drawings at Oxford included two separate designs for a church supposedly on Great George Street.6 This suggests that Gibbs beginning to consider ecclesiastic work. If this is true, then the drawings were intended for St. George, Hanover Square (figure 4). Therefore the drawings would have been made as early as 1711 when Parliament passed an Act for building of fifty new churches in the cities of Westminster and London.7 However, the problem with this theory is according to church’s official website, the architect of record was John James, Christopher Wren’s assistant. Further, construction is contemporary with that of St. Martin and Old North Church in Boston. Nonetheless, whatever disappointment Gibbs may have harbored over being passed over for the St. George’s commission was assuaged by his success with the previously mentioned churches.
The most significant aspect of St. Martin is that it became the pattern for which all Anglican churches were modeled.8 Its design became the model for rendering the Anglican liturgy. The design had more universal application than any of the work by Hawksmoor or Thomas Archer and was easy to reproduce either in parts or as a whole. For example, if should an architect be called upon to build a church in the English countryside but instructed to keep the tower, he could use the chancel and nave of St. Martin as his model. However, if finances were an issue, then the steeple could be copied as embellishment for many other churches. Further, its London location insured that the church attracted the widest attention from visiting architects.
 Figure 5 The concept for St. Martin is based in Roman antiquity, specifically, the Pantheon. The Pantheon was a building that Gibbs would have been familiar with from his time in Rome as a student at the Accademia di S. Luca. If we look at plate eight of Book of Architecture (figure 5) we see one of the first plans of St. Martin. Originally, Gibbs designed St. Martin as a spacious circular space, recalling the great Roman building. The ground plan presents a circular space with a Roman portico on the west side with a tapering steeple, a u-shaped altar niche on the north side, and a circular colonnade in the interior. A later version, illustrated in plate thirteen (figure 6), presents a similar plan but the altar side is a larger rectangular space instead of u-shaped. The first plan was approved by the Commissioners but later rejected on the grounds of expense. The planning is suitable to the rites of an “auditory”9 church, in line with Anglican liturgy, which placed emphasis on the spoken word rather than visual experience of the Catholic Church.
 Figure 6
When completed, St Martin-in-the-Fields, though built by James Gibbs, was a fusion of the classicism of Andrea Palladio and Sir Christopher Wren. The church is composed of a long rectangular box containing the auditorium; down the length is a colonnade of Classical orders supporting the side galleries and a longitude vault in the ceiling.10 On the exterior the spire follows the Wrenian language of freely composed Classical elements. However the relationship between the tower and the auditorium presents a new invention inspired by Palladianism11. While Wren and Nicholas Hawksmoor, Wren’s pupil, followed Gothic form by placing the tower on the outside, on the hand, Gibbs placed the spire inside on the west end so that it grew out of the church.12 This new arrangement combined familiar tradition with new tastes and became the prototype for subsequent Anglican churches for the next century. When colonists saw the engravings in Book of Architecture (1728), they widely adapted the plan.
At the time of St. Martin’s construction, English architecture was under going a major shift in form. This change reflected the newly acquired personal freedoms in England and its emergence as a world power. During the first half of the eighteenth century, under the reign of Queen Anne and George I of Hanover, England enjoyed unparalleled social stability. During this era, power moved down the social ranks and there was a growth in personal freedoms, earning England the admiration of social reformers on the continent.13 Also, England became a world power with colonial mercantile enterprises in North America, parts of Asia, and Africa and through its defeat of Louis XIV at the beginning of the century.14 In the 1720s and 1730s, before the last gasp of the English Baroque as seen the work of Hawksmoor and John Vanbrugh could make its way across the Atlantic or find its way down to the buildings of the middle classes, the tastemakers abruptly changed directions. Anglo Palladians, the new arbiters of taste,15 attacked the more flamboyant Baroque, opting for more austere Classical designs in the manner of Palladio and his English progenitor Inigo Jones.16 So what accounted for the dramatic change?
Other than general European cultural changes, the fate of the English Baroque got caught up with English politics. James II was quite determined to return Catholicism and rebuild an absolutist monarchy one hundred years after the Restoration. As a result, a political party with Puritan sympathies arose in opposition of what it perceived as the “…evil trinity of Catholicism, James’ Stuart dynasty, and absolutism.”17 This party, known as the Whigs, looked for a new national style devoid of any of these associations, finding it in the work Palladio and Jones. The irony is the austere Classicism was the preferred visual vocabulary of James I, the founder of the Stuart dynasty. Regardless, the Whigs argued its merits on the grounds of “its objective truth and freedom from individual fancy.”18 The clean lines and proportions suited the period because it was a style with clear rules.
While the variations of the work of James Gibbs could be found in every part of the British Empire from the mother country to South Africa and Australia, important examples of the transmission of his work are in the North American colonies. Gibbs became known in the American colonies through one of his associates John Smibert.19 In 1728, Smibert accompanied George Berkeley, the future Bishop of Cloyne, for the proposed launching of a college in Bermuda. When the plans fell through, Smibert remained in America, settling in Boston, Massachusetts where he worked until his death in 1751. After Gibbs’ death, his close confidant Cosmo Alexander also migrated to America where he possibly could have kept Gibbs’ name in the forefront as an architect worth imitating.20 However the most important factor in keeping James Gibbs’ name on tip of the colonists’ tongues were Book of Architecture (1728) and the equally influential Rules for Drawing.
 Figure 7 Book of Architecture (figure 7) became the pattern book from which colonists could select plans, elevations, and details for their houses and churches. This allowed the colonists to reproduce the social conventions of eighteenth century England in the vernacular form. More important, Book of Architecture is the ancestor of Asher Benjamin’s books The Country Builder’s Assistant (1797), The American Builder’s Companion (1806-27), and The Rudiment of Architecture (1814). Here, too, the ability of individuals, settlers on the American western frontier, to replicate the norms of the society they left but in a more rudimentary fashion. While Book of Architecture offers descriptive illustrations, Benjamin’s books provided instructions on how to replicate the Gibbsian and Federalist designs. Both Book of Architecture and the Benjamin books were factors in preventing new communities from creating separate identities from the motherlands.21 They slavish attempts to recreate the place they left prevented the colonists in the eighteenth century and the Western settlers in the nineteenth century from establishing a special place with characteristics unique to the land.22
Copies of Book of Architecture began circulating through the colonies a few years after its publication. Together with other books on architecture and construction, Gibbs’ book became part of a growing library available to builders. Further, architects, including John Ariss, went to England to study up close the work of the master. Ariss visited England around 1750. John Ariss was primarily known for his residential work but also took on ecclesiastic commissions. Ariss was born in Albany Virginia around 1725 and traveled to England in his twenties.23 Upon his return, he took up residence at Bushfield in Westmoreland County Virginia, placing an advertisement in the Maryland Gazette announcing, “lately from Britain,”24 and he could produce buildings “either of the ancient [Baroque?] or modern [Pallaidian?] order of Gibbs’ architect.”25 Ariss’ residential work tended to follow Palladian motifs with their lower roof pitches, quoins, rustication, and the frequent introduction of the Serliana.26 Most of all, they aimed for greater axial emphasis with a central pavilion with a crowning temple façade prominently visible on the front elevation.27 This style was less pretentious than their English counterparts because it made less use of stone (owing to a lack of material availability and skilled masons) and exterior pilasters.28 One example of his work is Mount Airy in Richmond County, Virginia (1758-62 figure 8).
 Figure 8 Mount Airy is a virtual reproduction of the typical Gibbs façade. It is entirely possible that Ariss was referring to plate fifty-eight (figure 9) of the Gibbs book for the main building. It mimics the tonal values of a Gibbs drawing with different colored stone and borrows the plan with outbuildings from another Gibbs plate.29 This plan was widely copied throughout the south because of its coherent organization. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, Vassall (Longfellow) House (1759) presents a good example of Gibbs being translated into more vernacular form. Instead of brick masonry, as at Mount Airy, the unknown architect translates a Gibbs façade into clapboard. The characteristic pedimented central pavilion gains more emphasis with pilasters on either side. The pilasters reappear at the corners unifying the front elevation of the house and continuing the Baroque preference for elaborate decoration instead of Palladian purity.30 The Baroque feeling continues with the use of broken entablatures over the pilasters and the way the windows and cornices crowd each other.31
 Figure 9
The preference for the currant fashion of architecture was a reflection of the growing wealth of the southern colonies. Domestic architecture began as crude one-room cabins whose sole purpose was fulfill the basic need of shelter. This later evolved into brick farmhouses but the image of the Neo-Classical plantation that has come down through time was a nineteenth century invention. The early Virginians had no quarrels with the king, country, or church. The colonists originated from Kent, Surrey, Middlesex, the Cotswold Hills, and East Anglia and consisted of a diverse group of peers, artisans, merchants, and professional men.32 Since they were mainly men of means, they could afford to acquire books such as Gibbs’ tome and hire builders to recreate what they saw. More so, the one-crop economy and the introduction of slave labor meant that the Southern colonies developed an aristocratic class. As such, they began to take on the trappings of the landed aristocracy in the mother country.
The impact of James Gibbs’ visual vocabulary is seen in churches along the east coast. This is evident in churches from South Carolina through the New England states. Colonies such as Massachusetts and South Carolina were declared crown colonies 1691 and 1719, respectively, and as such Anglicanism became the primary religion. Therefore, the churches built in these colonies reflected the liturgical requirements of a liturgy where preaching played a central role. In Anglican rites, the central focus is on the pulpit from which the clergy delivered the weekly sermons. The pulpit were often reading desks combined with clerk chairs into triple deckers placed at the center of the nave.33 The pulpit is placed in the center of the nave closer to the East blocking the view of the altar to a certain extent. However, this was less disruptive to the congregation and clergy because the nave and chancel were often considered two separate spaces. Extant examples of this arrangement are seen in later examples such as King’s Norton, Leicester (1757-75) and St. John’s Chichester (1812-13).34 Further, variations of this arrangement were used in the installation of a tall pulpit at East Burleigh, Devon placed above the Communion table and at St. Leeds (1793) or placing it behind the altar with a clerk’s desk facing the front row at All Saints Newcastle 1786-96.
Further, the Anglican churches and the Puritan Meetinghouses closely resembled one another. Both employed the same domestic metaphor, carried through to the design of the building as well as size, material, and decoration. In particular, the Anglican churches, especially of the Virginia, claimed the church as the domain of the elite. These were often state-run churches where the elite sat closer to the altar or in private galleries secluded from the rest of the parishioners35. We can find a parallel to the seating arrangement of the Meetinghouses in New England where Puritan elite sat in private boxes on the main floor while the lower ranks sat in the galleries above. This type of arrangement often paralleled New England town planning where the homes of the well to do were often sited near the church and the more common folks were placed further and further away from the center of town, the church. The point of this layout was that the wealthy were blessed by the divine, and therefore more holy.
In terms of liturgical accoutrements, the textiles, communion tables and silver all replicated items that could be found in colonial mansions. As means of reinforcing the connection between the wealthy and church/meetinghouse the donors would have their names or coats of arms engraved on the items that were supposedly Christ’s household furnishings.36 The connection between the ritual sphere and the domestic sphere of the Virginia upper classes drove home the point that the social order was divinely ordained. This metaphor had biblical origins, alluded to by seventeenth century Massachusetts diarist Samuel Sewall who wrote, “House not made with hands, which God for many Thousands of year has been storing the richest furniture…[a]. Magnificent Convenient Palace, everyway fitted and furnished.”37 The Mormons subsequently use this metaphor in the nineteenth century who fitted their temples in the same fashion as the most elegant houses.
To conclude, the architecture of James Gibbs had impact beyond England thanks to the dissemination of Book of Architecture. This text allowed colonists all over the British Empire to imitate the social conventions of the motherland in the vernacular. We have examples in the work of John Ariss at Mount Airy and the houses of worship throughout the East Coast. Also, Book of Architecture was the inspiration for Asher Benjamin’s series of books and the planning of communities across the American West. The lasting impact of James Gibbs’ work is it became a style that could be easily adapted to suit different locales and symbol for a church and country.
Bibliography
Gerlenter, Mark, A History of American Architecture: Buildings in Their Cultural and Technological Context, Hanover and London, University Press of New England, 1999
Gibbs, James, Book of Architecture, Mineola, Dover Publications, 1728, 2008
Little, Bryan, The Life and Work of James Gibbs 1682-1754, London, England, B.T. Batsford LTD, 1955
Morris, Morris Early American Architecture From The First Colonial Settlements to The National Period, Toronto, Ontario, Oxford University Press, 1952, 352 http://books.google.com (Accessed November 24, 2010)
Stillman, Damie “Church Architecture in Neo-classical England,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 38, No. 2 May, 1979, pp 103-119, http://www.jstor.org (Accessed October 28, 2010)
Upton, Dell Architecture in the United States, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998
Internet Sources
St. Michael’s: An Historical Overview, http://www.stmicaelschurch.net/about-us/history, (accessed November 10, 2010)
The Reverend Prebendary William Atkins, MA, FSA, Rector of St. George’s (1955-2000), http://www.stgeorgeshanoversquare.org/history, (accessed November 4, 2010)
Images
James Gibbs indianetzone.com
St. Michael Charleston, South Carolina fineartamerica.com
St. Martin-in-the-Field barnubu.co.uk
Mount Airy viriginiaplaces.org
Book of Architecture tower.com
St. George Hanover Square stgeorgeshanoversquare.org
Plates 8, 13, 58 Book of Architecture
 Figure 1 The architecture of James Gibbs (figure 1) came to represent both church and country. His work was widely disseminated thanks to copies of his text Book of Architecture published in 1728. The book provided a catalog of plans, sections, elevations, and details that could be copied in parts in whole. Gibbs’ architecture represented a social convention that was brought to the British colonies in North America and replicated in the vernacular. We have examples of this at St. Michael Church in Charleston, South Carolina and Mount Airy by John Ariss in Richmond County, Virginia. Book of Architecture is also the ancestor of Asher Benjamin’s books The Country Builder’s Assistant, The American Builder’s Companion, and The Rudiment of Architecture, which enabled the settlers American West to replicate familiar architecture in remote places. The goal of this paper is an analysis of how Gibbs’ visual vocabulary is translated in North America. As part of this, the paper will look at his work in England, specifically St. Martin-in-the-Field, and how his book came to North America. We begin this examination with St. Michael Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
 Figure 2 St. Michael Church in Charleston, South Carolina (1752-61, figure 2), built in the 1680s, was the site of the first Anglican Church south of Virginia. Originally a small wooden church, it was erected for the new town of Charles Town (later Charleston) for the families of the Church of England and named St. Philip1. By 1727, the town had outgrown the original building and a larger space replaced it, however, in 1835 it was destroyed in a fire. In 1751, once again the congregation outgrew the church and the General Assembly authorized a new church to be built on the old site and re-sanctified it St. Michael’s.2 The cornerstone was laid in 1752 and the church opened for worship in 1761. St. Michael reflects a fusion of both Andrea Palladio and Sir Christopher Wren and is reminiscent of St. Martin-in-the Fields (1721-26) by James Gibbs (1682-1754).
 Figure 3 By the early eighteenth century, St. Martin-in-the-Fields (figure 3) was a rambling, shapeless building, which the parishioners were not proud of, in need of a long overdue rehabilitation. The congregation’s intention wanted to remake the church as one of London’s most fashionable places of worship.3 Through an Act of Parliament, the worshippers appointed Commissioners to execute the project. On August 17, 1720, led by Sir Christopher Wren, Gibbs took the Commissioners on a tour of parish churches.4 In November of that year, King James II appointed Gibbs surveyor and on March 19, 1722 the Bishop of Salisbury laid the foundation stone on behalf of the King. St. Martin was one of three churches begun and completed within five years of each other with variations on the same design. St. Martin shared with the Oxford Chapel (St. Peter’s, Vere Street) in London and the church of All Hallows in Derby, now a cathedral of being from the architectural ancestry.5 Work on St. Martin began in 1721 and its consecration in 1726 marked the completion of the trio.
 Figure 4 These were not Gibbs’ first forays into ecclesiastical design. In 1713 Gibbs was recommended by the Earl Oxford to take over surveyorship from William Dickinson under The New Churches Act. Gibbs was formally appointed and begun St. Mary-le-Strand in 1714. St. Mary was Gibbs’ first known buildings. His efforts at St. Mary casts doubt that this was his first serious effort at being known as a church architect. Contemporary with St. Mary were Gibbs’ drawings at Oxford included two separate designs for a church supposedly on Great George Street.6 This suggests that Gibbs beginning to consider ecclesiastic work. If this is true, then the drawings were intended for St. George, Hanover Square (figure 4). Therefore the drawings would have been made as early as 1711 when Parliament passed an Act for building of fifty new churches in the cities of Westminster and London.7 However, the problem with this theory is according to church’s official website, the architect of record was John James, Christopher Wren’s assistant. Further, construction is contemporary with that of St. Martin and Old North Church in Boston. Nonetheless, whatever disappointment Gibbs may have harbored over being passed over for the St. George’s commission was assuaged by his success with the previously mentioned churches.
The most significant aspect of St. Martin is that it became the pattern for which all Anglican churches were modeled.8 Its design became the model for rendering the Anglican liturgy. The design had more universal application than any of the work by Hawksmoor or Thomas Archer and was easy to reproduce either in parts or as a whole. For example, if should an architect be called upon to build a church in the English countryside but instructed to keep the tower, he could use the chancel and nave of St. Martin as his model. However, if finances were an issue, then the steeple could be copied as embellishment for many other churches. Further, its London location insured that the church attracted the widest attention from visiting architects.
 Figure 5 The concept for St. Martin is based in Roman antiquity, specifically, the Pantheon. The Pantheon was a building that Gibbs would have been familiar with from his time in Rome as a student at the Accademia di S. Luca. If we look at plate eight of Book of Architecture (figure 5) we see one of the first plans of St. Martin. Originally, Gibbs designed St. Martin as a spacious circular space, recalling the great Roman building. The ground plan presents a circular space with a Roman portico on the west side with a tapering steeple, a u-shaped altar niche on the north side, and a circular colonnade in the interior. A later version, illustrated in plate thirteen (figure 6), presents a similar plan but the altar side is a larger rectangular space instead of u-shaped. The first plan was approved by the Commissioners but later rejected on the grounds of expense. The planning is suitable to the rites of an “auditory”9 church, in line with Anglican liturgy, which placed emphasis on the spoken word rather than visual experience of the Catholic Church.
 Figure 6
When completed, St Martin-in-the-Fields, though built by James Gibbs, was a fusion of the classicism of Andrea Palladio and Sir Christopher Wren. The church is composed of a long rectangular box containing the auditorium; down the length is a colonnade of Classical orders supporting the side galleries and a longitude vault in the ceiling.10 On the exterior the spire follows the Wrenian language of freely composed Classical elements. However the relationship between the tower and the auditorium presents a new invention inspired by Palladianism11. While Wren and Nicholas Hawksmoor, Wren’s pupil, followed Gothic form by placing the tower on the outside, on the hand, Gibbs placed the spire inside on the west end so that it grew out of the church.12 This new arrangement combined familiar tradition with new tastes and became the prototype for subsequent Anglican churches for the next century. When colonists saw the engravings in Book of Architecture (1728), they widely adapted the plan.
At the time of St. Martin’s construction, English architecture was under going a major shift in form. This change reflected the newly acquired personal freedoms in England and its emergence as a world power. During the first half of the eighteenth century, under the reign of Queen Anne and George I of Hanover, England enjoyed unparalleled social stability. During this era, power moved down the social ranks and there was a growth in personal freedoms, earning England the admiration of social reformers on the continent.13 Also, England became a world power with colonial mercantile enterprises in North America, parts of Asia, and Africa and through its defeat of Louis XIV at the beginning of the century.14 In the 1720s and 1730s, before the last gasp of the English Baroque as seen the work of Hawksmoor and John Vanbrugh could make its way across the Atlantic or find its way down to the buildings of the middle classes, the tastemakers abruptly changed directions. Anglo Palladians, the new arbiters of taste,15 attacked the more flamboyant Baroque, opting for more austere Classical designs in the manner of Palladio and his English progenitor Inigo Jones.16 So what accounted for the dramatic change?
Other than general European cultural changes, the fate of the English Baroque got caught up with English politics. James II was quite determined to return Catholicism and rebuild an absolutist monarchy one hundred years after the Restoration. As a result, a political party with Puritan sympathies arose in opposition of what it perceived as the “…evil trinity of Catholicism, James’ Stuart dynasty, and absolutism.”17 This party, known as the Whigs, looked for a new national style devoid of any of these associations, finding it in the work Palladio and Jones. The irony is the austere Classicism was the preferred visual vocabulary of James I, the founder of the Stuart dynasty. Regardless, the Whigs argued its merits on the grounds of “its objective truth and freedom from individual fancy.”18 The clean lines and proportions suited the period because it was a style with clear rules.
While the variations of the work of James Gibbs could be found in every part of the British Empire from the mother country to South Africa and Australia, important examples of the transmission of his work are in the North American colonies. Gibbs became known in the American colonies through one of his associates John Smibert.19 In 1728, Smibert accompanied George Berkeley, the future Bishop of Cloyne, for the proposed launching of a college in Bermuda. When the plans fell through, Smibert remained in America, settling in Boston, Massachusetts where he worked until his death in 1751. After Gibbs’ death, his close confidant Cosmo Alexander also migrated to America where he possibly could have kept Gibbs’ name in the forefront as an architect worth imitating.20 However the most important factor in keeping James Gibbs’ name on tip of the colonists’ tongues were Book of Architecture (1728) and the equally influential Rules for Drawing.
 Figure 7 Book of Architecture (figure 7) became the pattern book from which colonists could select plans, elevations, and details for their houses and churches. This allowed the colonists to reproduce the social conventions of eighteenth century England in the vernacular form. More important, Book of Architecture is the ancestor of Asher Benjamin’s books The Country Builder’s Assistant (1797), The American Builder’s Companion (1806-27), and The Rudiment of Architecture (1814). Here, too, the ability of individuals, settlers on the American western frontier, to replicate the norms of the society they left but in a more rudimentary fashion. While Book of Architecture offers descriptive illustrations, Benjamin’s books provided instructions on how to replicate the Gibbsian and Federalist designs. Both Book of Architecture and the Benjamin books were factors in preventing new communities from creating separate identities from the motherlands.21 They slavish attempts to recreate the place they left prevented the colonists in the eighteenth century and the Western settlers in the nineteenth century from establishing a special place with characteristics unique to the land.22
Copies of Book of Architecture began circulating through the colonies a few years after its publication. Together with other books on architecture and construction, Gibbs’ book became part of a growing library available to builders. Further, architects, including John Ariss, went to England to study up close the work of the master. Ariss visited England around 1750. John Ariss was primarily known for his residential work but also took on ecclesiastic commissions. Ariss was born in Albany Virginia around 1725 and traveled to England in his twenties.23 Upon his return, he took up residence at Bushfield in Westmoreland County Virginia, placing an advertisement in the Maryland Gazette announcing, “lately from Britain,”24 and he could produce buildings “either of the ancient [Baroque?] or modern [Pallaidian?] order of Gibbs’ architect.”25 Ariss’ residential work tended to follow Palladian motifs with their lower roof pitches, quoins, rustication, and the frequent introduction of the Serliana.26 Most of all, they aimed for greater axial emphasis with a central pavilion with a crowning temple façade prominently visible on the front elevation.27 This style was less pretentious than their English counterparts because it made less use of stone (owing to a lack of material availability and skilled masons) and exterior pilasters.28 One example of his work is Mount Airy in Richmond County, Virginia (1758-62 figure 8).
 Figure 8 Mount Airy is a virtual reproduction of the typical Gibbs façade. It is entirely possible that Ariss was referring to plate fifty-eight (figure 9) of the Gibbs book for the main building. It mimics the tonal values of a Gibbs drawing with different colored stone and borrows the plan with outbuildings from another Gibbs plate.29 This plan was widely copied throughout the south because of its coherent organization. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, Vassall (Longfellow) House (1759) presents a good example of Gibbs being translated into more vernacular form. Instead of brick masonry, as at Mount Airy, the unknown architect translates a Gibbs façade into clapboard. The characteristic pedimented central pavilion gains more emphasis with pilasters on either side. The pilasters reappear at the corners unifying the front elevation of the house and continuing the Baroque preference for elaborate decoration instead of Palladian purity.30 The Baroque feeling continues with the use of broken entablatures over the pilasters and the way the windows and cornices crowd each other.31
 Figure 9
The preference for the currant fashion of architecture was a reflection of the growing wealth of the southern colonies. Domestic architecture began as crude one-room cabins whose sole purpose was fulfill the basic need of shelter. This later evolved into brick farmhouses but the image of the Neo-Classical plantation that has come down through time was a nineteenth century invention. The early Virginians had no quarrels with the king, country, or church. The colonists originated from Kent, Surrey, Middlesex, the Cotswold Hills, and East Anglia and consisted of a diverse group of peers, artisans, merchants, and professional men.32 Since they were mainly men of means, they could afford to acquire books such as Gibbs’ tome and hire builders to recreate what they saw. More so, the one-crop economy and the introduction of slave labor meant that the Southern colonies developed an aristocratic class. As such, they began to take on the trappings of the landed aristocracy in the mother country.
The impact of James Gibbs’ visual vocabulary is seen in churches along the east coast. This is evident in churches from South Carolina through the New England states. Colonies such as Massachusetts and South Carolina were declared crown colonies 1691 and 1719, respectively, and as such Anglicanism became the primary religion. Therefore, the churches built in these colonies reflected the liturgical requirements of a liturgy where preaching played a central role. In Anglican rites, the central focus is on the pulpit from which the clergy delivered the weekly sermons. The pulpit were often reading desks combined with clerk chairs into triple deckers placed at the center of the nave.33 The pulpit is placed in the center of the nave closer to the East blocking the view of the altar to a certain extent. However, this was less disruptive to the congregation and clergy because the nave and chancel were often considered two separate spaces. Extant examples of this arrangement are seen in later examples such as King’s Norton, Leicester (1757-75) and St. John’s Chichester (1812-13).34 Further, variations of this arrangement were used in the installation of a tall pulpit at East Burleigh, Devon placed above the Communion table and at St. Leeds (1793) or placing it behind the altar with a clerk’s desk facing the front row at All Saints Newcastle 1786-96.
Further, the Anglican churches and the Puritan Meetinghouses closely resembled one another. Both employed the same domestic metaphor, carried through to the design of the building as well as size, material, and decoration. In particular, the Anglican churches, especially of the Virginia, claimed the church as the domain of the elite. These were often state-run churches where the elite sat closer to the altar or in private galleries secluded from the rest of the parishioners35. We can find a parallel to the seating arrangement of the Meetinghouses in New England where Puritan elite sat in private boxes on the main floor while the lower ranks sat in the galleries above. This type of arrangement often paralleled New England town planning where the homes of the well to do were often sited near the church and the more common folks were placed further and further away from the center of town, the church. The point of this layout was that the wealthy were blessed by the divine, and therefore more holy.
In terms of liturgical accoutrements, the textiles, communion tables and silver all replicated items that could be found in colonial mansions. As means of reinforcing the connection between the wealthy and church/meetinghouse the donors would have their names or coats of arms engraved on the items that were supposedly Christ’s household furnishings.36 The connection between the ritual sphere and the domestic sphere of the Virginia upper classes drove home the point that the social order was divinely ordained. This metaphor had biblical origins, alluded to by seventeenth century Massachusetts diarist Samuel Sewall who wrote, “House not made with hands, which God for many Thousands of year has been storing the richest furniture…[a]. Magnificent Convenient Palace, everyway fitted and furnished.”37 The Mormons subsequently use this metaphor in the nineteenth century who fitted their temples in the same fashion as the most elegant houses.
To conclude, the architecture of James Gibbs had impact beyond England thanks to the dissemination of Book of Architecture. This text allowed colonists all over the British Empire to imitate the social conventions of the motherland in the vernacular. We have examples in the work of John Ariss at Mount Airy and the houses of worship throughout the East Coast. Also, Book of Architecture was the inspiration for Asher Benjamin’s series of books and the planning of communities across the American West. The lasting impact of James Gibbs’ work is it became a style that could be easily adapted to suit different locales and symbol for a church and country.
Bibliography
Gerlenter, Mark, A History of American Architecture: Buildings in Their Cultural and Technological Context, Hanover and London, University Press of New England, 1999
Gibbs, James, Book of Architecture, Mineola, Dover Publications, 1728, 2008
Little, Bryan, The Life and Work of James Gibbs 1682-1754, London, England, B.T. Batsford LTD, 1955
Morris, Morris Early American Architecture From The First Colonial Settlements to The National Period, Toronto, Ontario, Oxford University Press, 1952, 352 http://books.google.com (Accessed November 24, 2010)
Stillman, Damie “Church Architecture in Neo-classical England,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 38, No. 2 May, 1979, pp 103-119, http://www.jstor.org (Accessed October 28, 2010)
Upton, Dell Architecture in the United States, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998
Internet Sources
St. Michael’s: An Historical Overview, http://www.stmicaelschurch.net/about-us/history, (accessed November 10, 2010)
The Reverend Prebendary William Atkins, MA, FSA, Rector of St. George’s (1955-2000), http://www.stgeorgeshanoversquare.org/history, (accessed November 4, 2010)
Images
James Gibbs indianetzone.com
St. Michael Charleston, South Carolina fineartamerica.com
St. Martin-in-the-Field barnubu.co.uk
Mount Airy viriginiaplaces.org
Book of Architecture tower.com
St. George Hanover Square stgeorgeshanoversquare.org
Plates 8, 13, 58 Book of Architecture
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Things are picking up
Yes dear readers I have returned from the ether. Having gone back to work has kept me hopping all day. However, this new job is not so cumbersome that I can't take a few minutes and catch up on my reading.
So when we last left Mikael Blomqvist and company, things were plodding along. Mr. Blomqvist has since served his sentence for libel thereby paying his debt to society. Imagine that, a country where you can actually go to jail for libel. He has since returned from his "three month uneventful holiday" to investigating the disappearance of Harriet Vanger. Simultaneously, our girl Lisbeth is still in the depth of guardianship, having fallen and taken her revenge on a real sleaze bag of a guardian.
Now things are starting to pick up. In combing through the Hedeby newspaper's photographic archives, our hero makes a startling discovery, which confirms his theory. Blomqvist believes that the key to Harriet's disappearance lay in something that was going that day. Lo and behold, he stumbled on to something. In reviewing the images for a Children's Day parade, Blomqvist discovers pictures of Harriet with a frightened look on her face. Aha, the key to our mystery. Just what that thing is has yet to be discovered. Like Christie's Poirot,Blomqvist is meticulously combing through the evidence searching for and finding hidden clues. I'll have to keep reading to find out.
Stay Tuned.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Hip Deep Into the Story
So I'm now hip into the The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and I must say things are getting interesting. There seems to be a connection to Harriet Vanger's disappearance and one of her uncle's connections to Swedish Nazis. Yes Swedish Nazis did exist and you can google this if you want. What that connection is will hopefully be revealed in the third part. In the meantime we have a parallel development. It would seem that our
girlLisbeth has a new guardian to look after her affairs. After all, being so sullen and occasionally prone to bursts of violence, in the cause of defending herself, has rendered her by the state mentally incompetent. Therefore, she must have someone to look manage her life. This new guardian, it would seem, has a sadistic streak which he expressed by raping Lisbeth twice before she exacted a measure of punishment in the form of blackmail. So who's the crazy one now?
In the meantime, our hero, Mikael Blomkvist (soon to be played on the big screen by Daniel Craig making the price of a ticket worth it) has been getting comfortable in exile. He has managed to ingratiate himself among the locals of Hedeby and begin a clandestine affair with Cecila Vanger, the head mistress of the local school. All the while, under the cover of writing Henrik Vanger's biography, Blomkvist has been investigating the mysterious Harriet and slowly assembling the suspects. Like Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot, he methodically reviews the evidence, examining each piece with exacting detail. It'll be interesting to see how this all plays out.
A bit of a side note. Stieg Larsson seemed to be a bit obsessed with consumerism because of blatant use of product placement. It would seem that every chapter or two has a reference to an electronic product (Apple), a grocery chain (Konsum), or some other product. Just a thought.
Stay Tuned,
Lenore
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Some Thoughts
Some thoughts and observations inspired by The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Author Steig Larsson provides amusing insight into the Swedish mindset regarding certain behaviors. For example, in doctors and social workers' descriptions of Lisbeth Salander's refusals to answer any of their question, the author uses words like
shyor
retarded. One supposes that if one were asked rather personal questions about one's sex life or finances by strangers who seem to have made up their minds about you, one would decline to answer also. In describing members of the Vanger family's racist, fascist political leanings the phrase
politically insaneis used. I suppose from this we can begin to make assumptions about the Swedes and the way they deal with what may or may not be considered deviant behavior. In the case of Lisbeth Salander's evaluations, we can say that the social workers, doctors, and advocates have either made up their minds about or they have not tried to find a way to talk to her. As to the fascist leanings of the members of the Vanger family, it almost sounds like the Swedes put their collective heads in the sand and write some one off as insane.
Another observation is related to the prologue. In the prologue of the book, Henrik Vanger receives and exotic pressed and framed flower for his birthday. To the reader this may seem like an unrelated episode, yet later in part one of the story, it is explained that the flower has significance. Without giving too much away, let's just say it's a clue to the mysterious disappearance of Harriet Vanger.
Stay tuned
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
How much of this is necessary?
In The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo author Steig Larsson goes into detail about the main characters' biographical histories. We learn that Mikael Blomkvist grew up in a fairly middle class stable household in contrast to Lisbeth Salander's dysfunctional upbringing. Henrik Vanger is descended from a Dutch family that settled in Sweden in the twelfth century and has a branch in America. So I ask why is it necessary to into such depth about their backgrounds? In the case of Vanger, it might be necessary only if to produce a list of suspects in the mysterious disappearance of Vanger's niece Harriet, which Blomkvist does. However, I'm not so sure about Larsson's reasons for detailing Blomkvist's or Salander's life history. Perhaps it is to provide some sort of empathy for the character or to assist any actor taking on those roles for the film version. Perhaps in later chapters we'll find out why.
As a side note I did get the kindle edition of The Thousand Autumns of jacob de Zoet, which I'll be tackling next.
Stayed tuned
Thursday, July 15, 2010
First Impressions
Well I finally completed the first part of theThe Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by the late Stieg Larson. I must say this book reminds me a bit of the work by American mystery writers Dashiel Hammet and Raymond Chandler. The resemblance is in the way Larson, a former journalist, structures his syntax; using on the minimum required words to convey thoughts, dialogs, and descriptions. This is something that can be appreciated by a reader who does not take to flowery prose and necessary for a mystery novel. A mystery novel that gets too caught up in descriptive phrasing detracts from the story at hand. In this case, a murder mystery with far reaching consequences. I won't give away too much of the plot, I'll you the reader figure it out for yourself but I will say this, in part one the reader is not only introduced to the main characters, Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander, but also get a keen sense of their back story. It'll be fascinating to see how this story develops. Like any good mystery novel there are the usual plot twists, which not doubt make for a great ride.
The novel takes place in modern day Sweden and centers around disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist, who has been fined and sentenced to jail for libel. He is commissioned by industrialist Henrik Vanger to investigate the disappearance/apparent murder of his beloved niece Harriet. Meanwhile, the reader is introduced to Lisbeth Salander, a computer hacker and investigator for a security company. She is asked to investigate Blomkvist for Vanger by Vanger's attorney Frode. What ensues will be subject for the next blog.
Stay tuned.
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