ROUGH DRAFT

	"In the discussion section for week 9 of this course you
considered Henry-Russell Hitchcock's and Philip Johnson's three-element
characterization of International Style architecture [architecture as
volume; regularity; avoidance of applied decoration] and their casting of
Wright's relation to this movement. Using the headquarters that Wright
designed for the Johnson Wax Company in Racine, Wisconsin as your primary
example, discuss Wright's use of International principles. In what ways do
you think the Johnson Wax Company Headquarters should be considered part
of the International Style as it is defined by Hitchcock and Johnson? In
what ways should it not? 
	Your essay should be 5-6 pages. Due Tuesday in lecture."


	Thesis: The Johsnon Wax Building is a building, and thus we may
ask, in what style is it a building?
	The International Style, that's a good one. Style, international
by definition is what you get if you have a bunch of people from different
countries completing a style internationally. Frank Lloyd Wright, father
of modern architecture: Have an international style, they said to him, and
he said no thanks. Got one.
	The Johsnon Wax Building, situated in the decrepit jowls of
Racine, Illinois has little choice but to be part of the International
Style. Does it care, the Johsnon Wax Building? You could destroy all of
human civilization (maybe you think you couldn't, but you probably haven't
put your mind to it yet) and if somehow the Johsnon Wax Building survived,
and one Antipodean blind from birth who crawled into a tiny sailboat and
got blown to Raceen, Illinois, not expecting to find the single remaining
monument to human intelligence, found it... he would know it was a
building, right? Simple. This is simple.
	Nuh-uh, nuh-uh-uh says Frank Lloyd Wright, father of modern
architecture. The brotherhood of architects has known since time
immemorial that people are stupid. We control their destiny, says the
brotherhood. When they enter a building, they feel what we want them to
feel. They see what we want them to see. Experience of space inalterable,
like if you don't even know it's there--suppose you've got this really bad
classical building, and everyone who goes into it feels malaise like they
were being crushed under the heel of the Wholly Roman Empire. But they no
architects, nuh-uh. So you see? Of course. Handshakes all around for the
brotherhood of architects. Rah!
	The Antipodean finds the Johsnon Wax Building and walks inside,
see. Never heard of it before, but he walks around. Knows it's a building
but what kind? Never heard of architecture either, just figures people
throw buildings together any way it's convenient. (Do they? Discuss.) In
the grip of Johsnon Wax Building's International Style, he... he... or is
it International, in fact? Begging the question; that's never good. 
	Back up. The Antipodean wades and walks to a different building,
okay? The Villa Savoye, for instance. And, the architect's creed says, he
promptly notices that architecture is conceived as volume. He doesn't feel
like he notices it, but it's all over him. The experience of entering a
building is not personal, it is a reaction to the architect's skill; the
best architects never make their craftsmanship obvious. Written on his
face: I know that architecture is now conceived as volume. His face
doesn't notice either. Now he wants to be part of the machine, society as
an efficient whole. Bad timing on his part, if you think about it, because
until recently he could have done so. In the grip of the International
Style he comes closer to fitting in seamlessly. Step one of the
architect's plan, over with. What about external decoration? That's a
tough one. Blind since birth. So he doesn't notice. Wait, no! Who else is
in this scene, forgotten? A hint: she never gets the good lines.
	It's Nature! She's got it written on her face too, that
architecture is conceived as volume. She leaps ahead in her notes and
finds out about absence of external decoration and regularity. The answer:
wind. 
	(Wind is old, you say. Right. You don't get old without learning
a few tricks. See if wind can get what it wants from the International
Style without the International Style knowing.)
	Wind blows regularly and without eddies, whorls or vortices
through the International Style in Plato's heaven, and through its earthly
avatars including the Villa Savoye, right now. External decoration just
breaks it up, puffs of wind roiling off on errands that are not meant to
be completed. The wind gathers strength and blows with constant force
through the open spaces of the Villa Savoye. Nature is thinking ahead. 
Force is mass times acceleration, which sounds too much like mass equals
architecture for the International Style. The International Style gets
edgy and reduces the Villa Savoye to a featureless cube. 
	So it's time to think about the Johsnon Wax Building. How is it,
under Hitchock and Johsnon's conception of the International Style, part
of the International Style? The Antipodean goes inside and sees dendriform
columns. Clearly, the utter masslessness of the columns, an infinitesimal
pillar that flaps out to become flat area at its top--that defines volume. 
These ugly corridors of pirate tubing, they're... uh... lumpy and
polygonal. Like being inside a test tube, thinks the Antipodean. He's not
trained in modern architecture, but he's starting to pick it up. It's
written on his face that it's like being inside a test tube. That one's
easy; he marks it down on his score card. 
	The best architects never make their craftsmanship obvious.
	Next, regularity. With regularity, the thing is, it's all the
same. The Antipodean thinks about checking every column to make sure
they're all equally spaced. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven.
Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen.
Seventeen. Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty. Twenty-one. Twenty-two.
Twenty-three. Twenty-four. Twenty-five. Twenty-six. Twenty-six.
Twenty-seven. Twenty-eight. Twenty-nine. Thirty. Thirty-one. Thirty-two.
Thirty-three. Thirty-four. Thirty-five. Thirty-six. Thirty-seven.
Thirty-eight. Where are the rest?
	Well, the Antipodean doesn't shy away from the truth: Regularity
of dendriform columns. Regularity of research tower. Regularity of
pirate's tubing. How long can you, you gonna keep doing that thing? You
gonna keep thinking inna face of anniversary that we donnotice? Been in
fifty buildings in my time, says the old man, and I pay a lotta tension to
how it's built. Betcha everybody does. Thinkasecond, thinkasecond. Go inna
the basement and sunly you know whass like to be part of the plumbing.
Servant spaces, my granddad's old drinkin' pal Frankie Lloyd Wright
calledem. Think. Oh yeah, foot traffic like I been turning every this way
and that way, and don't notice? Jerks, architects are. I'm just tryna buy
some groceries and this arch is in my face; don't help me. Ika make it to
thcar on my own. I needed a han last year and so my old biness partner
Mister P. Lo-Ti hopped a plane from, wherezat, Antipathy?  Some city in
California, I guess, other side of the country. S'what he said. But I can
tell he's not from there originally. He's, you know. International. 

							    Alison Mandel
			Class: Frank Lloyd Wright And Modern Architecture
						        Section: MWF 11am

	The Johsnon Wax Building is a Wax Building. Moreover, it is the
Johsnon one. My thesis is that it has various features in common with the
International Style, and yet it is not wholly of that style. How can a
building be of a style and not of a style? Many interesting and various
aspects of modern architecture combine to symbolize the architectural
nature of this building, which is the topic of my thesis. I hope to show
that this is true, using examples and reference to the life of its
architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, who was the father of modern architecture,
a school of architecture that involved the Johsnon Wax Building.
	The Johsnon Wax Building features a total lack of superfluous
external ornamentation. For one, it has no external ornamentation. 
Moreover, even if it does have some it was minimized by Frank Lloyd
Wright, father of modern architecture, who insisted that the building's
name not be plastered on the outside wall in large gaudy letters, because
the best architects never make their craftsmanship obvious. In conclusion,
the Johsnon Wax Building has some, but not much, superfluous external
ornamentation. 
	Thus, we have seen that the Johsnon Wax Building is Johsnon and
Wax, but most of all it is a Building. As shown above, it has features of
the International Style. Thank you.

	The old man gets agitated. Go to that museum in New York City!
Think those fancy-pants art folks don't notice they're being swept along
like maybe every building they've ever seen was just like that?
Architecture can't change human nature, the old man says. He's sober now.
Go into any building and you'll see! Does good architecture prevent bad
furniture? Does good architecture make leftovers taste any better? Does
good architecture prevent the company from being wiped out in a market
fluctuation? Does good architecture sell newspapers? Does good
architecture stop small animals from biting? Bah.
	Does good architecture do anything about the way I went to work
every single day for ten years to create more consumer products and
breathe noxious chemicals that burned my insides so I'm like an old man at
53? Does good architecture do anything about the irrational fear that
sets in when you're working late and could swear you hear footsteps where
there isn't any floor? Did good architecture keep my grandfather from
hating my mother, and did good architecture keep my mother from hating me?
Did good architecture keep Frank Lloyd Wright from dying just like
everyone else?
	Bah!

	You didn't really put your mind to it. Whole cities survived, and
your understandable reluctance to use nuclear weapons meant there was no
electro-magnetic pulse. So contrary to all the cold war Armageddon
scenarios, those featureless boxes on every desk in the world kept zipping
along, rows and columns of indistinguishable microchips inside pushing
numbers mutely through silicon pathways, or gallium arsenide, or whatever
the kids are into today. Soon everything will be normal again.
	The Antipodean has a feel for this building now. It seems somewhat
friendly despite the broken glass and the wind that whips through its
hallways. How long should he stay? You and I don't need him for
demonstration purposes anymore, at least not right now, but if
civilization is going to live on past its apparent demise, there will have
to be culture. The Antipodean wouldn't have risked coming here if he
didn't think the end had come and gone, but by the time he was close, too
close to turn back, he started hearing the occasional human shout; barely
perceptible whirr in the distance; Dopplerized hum of mechanical
transport. Nothing to stop for, as the Antipodean is a man of great
resolution once he starts something, but it was there. They will need
books, for one thing, and the Antipodean has decided to write one about
the Johsnon Wax Building. One chapter will focus on the question of its
relationship to the International Style, but only for sentimental reasons.

	Vision is one thing, and can come to anyone in a moment of luck no
matter how severe their circumstances may seem. But the bulldog element of
genius is to have tenacity in places where the slightest show of
resistance seems futile. This essay's thesis is false, in that the Johsnon
Wax Building is not a building; it is two. At night and now during the day
too, invisible elevators run, seemingly solid walls become hallways inside
and all the space you thought looked missing between those irregular
parts, that nearly-symmetric floor plan... that space lights up.
	Frankie Lloydie Wrightie, father of modern architecture, carefully
checks the lenses and the accumulators each day at dusk when he wakes up. 
Various shapes of far more significance to the impersonal forces of nature
than to any human can be used in conjunction with concepts from the modern
science of optics to distill a drug that stops the aging of the human
body, effective for upwards of 200 years on a person with the necessary
fortitude. The process is difficult and not a little tedious; making the
antiagathic involves a series of several intermediary steps whose
byproducts have exactly the opposite effect from the desired one, and
Wright is proud to never have spilled any on himself as he goes to throw
them out. To be effective, the shapes in question have to be very large,
but the best architects never make their craftsmanship obvious.

- Cambridge, May 1997

My last semester of college, I had a short paper to write in my architecture class. I had put off doing it until after the deadline; when the grad student leading the section informed me that a mere two days' lateness meant I would get an F on it no matter what, my motivation for dispatching it at all quickly plummeted even farther.

It came down to me, four hours before the final exam, pounding this out. Feeling perverse and annoyed at that point, I decided to make it the worst paper I possibly could, but then quickly worried that if it didn't fulfill the assignment clearly, it would be thrown out entirely. So there's some tension there. Anyway, I laid the factual errors on much more heavily at the beginning. After a few paragraphs, trying to think of something else that an F student might do, I figured that abandoning impersonal argument for a narrative "you do this, then you do this, then you do this" kind of thing was substantially awful. It just went from there.

I printed it out (with forbidden single-spacing) in the computer lab on the back of someone else's discarded Hemingway paper, wrote "ROUGH DRAFT" in pencil at the top and turned it in. I noticed after the fact that there was some wind in the story, making "Rough Draft" as good a title as any.

There are bits I'd do differently now, but since I barely even admitted to myself at the time that I was writing something like a story, as opposed to a travesty, that's not surprising. For several years I was more proud of it than of most of the serious academic work I did in college. I definitely had that weird just-wrote-something exultation at the time, though I mistook it mostly for the love of sassing authority. Then I rediscovered the joy of improvisatory writing in a situation that didn't stem from me being lazy and eventually remembered this bit of anticipatory plagiarism.