Writing + Research

Building a Knowledge Base: the Disappearing Jewish Art of Spanier Arbeit

This ongoing project seeks to record the history of Spanier Arbeit, a lace technique specific to the Ashkenazi-Jewish community; to fill the gaps in the existing scholarship, deepen the understanding of the craft’s origins beyond the myths, and explore the specifics of modern day usage.

Lecturer and Panel Guest: Making Lace: Global Networks, Bard Graduate Center
A research symposium on historical and contemporary lacemaking traditions around the world
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Panel Guest: New York Textile Month 2022

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Spanier arbeit atarah on a tallit (detail), likely from Poland (late 1800s or early 1900s). Collection of Yeshiva University Museum, New York. Gift of the family of Daniel D. Riedler. Courtesy Yeshiva University Museum. Photo: Lily Homer.

Essay: Thank You for Joining Me and What Are We Doing Here?, Plates Journal, 2022
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Interview: Searching for Spanier Arbeit, Protocols Magazine

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“I find a tension between this being an exclusive, religious technique, and this being a decorative garment covering. Is it sacred and controlled or is it a lucrative trade subject to changing styles and market demand?”

Long-form Architectural Critique

Study of Writers Theatre, Studio Gang Architects, Glencoe, Illinois
In Focus
Text

The second-floor canopy walk is structured by great timber trusses with a lighter wood lattice hung in tension. Photo: Steve Hall © Hedrich Blessing. Source Link

In my review essay of Writers Theatre in Glencoe, Illinois, by Studio Gang Architects, I will explore the prominent use of cedar as a visual driver for the project, and unpack how this use aligns with the history of logging and handcraft in midwestern architecture. Opened in 2016, Writers Theatre consists of various materially and spatially distinct structures – a lobby, concession stand, library, rehearsal space, and green room, among others - clustered around the central 250-seat theater, which is crowned by a 360 degree nest-like, cedar-enclosed walkway.

The emphasis of wood as a material has precedent in American history, particularly in the midwest, as the geographic cornerstone of the early logging industry and the birthplace of the American Arts & Crafts movement. These moments reified American desires to be free from the influence of Europe and to pursue an independent project of modernization, involving isolationism, regionalism, and expansionism. Architecture and architectural discourse are cultural practices that work to define context and create meaning. By using wood––particularly wood that is hand selected, refined, and assembled by skilled craftspeople––a wealthy, majority-white suburb of Chicago echoes the midwestern appeal to the handmade and its sovereign proprietors, and uses this legacy to frame its own identity.

Research DiaryWhat new or established ideologies does the use of cedar prop up, erase, or produce? Through photos, interviews, essays, articles, and site visits, I will attempt to unpack the role of cedar in Writers Theatre and present it as a keen architect of the society it emerges from.

Photos/renderings/blueprints: How do the building’s materials function together? How do the cedar trestles operate? How is the project presented as a model of sustainable design (viewpoint, editing, lighting)? How does it refer to the most famous styles of residential architecture in the area - Prairie, Keck, Arts & Crafts (materiality, height, patterning, and process)?

Videos: In one video, founder and principle architect Jeanne Gang says, “It made sense to make a building using wood”. The interviews and production scenes center environmental sustainability and expert handicraft. What ideologies are Studio Gang relying on (environmentalism, individualism, paternalism)? In another video, the language they use for the building is largely about closeness, warmth, staying true to the original organization, and “intimacy” (the most-used descriptor of the project). What facet of the project’s projected ideology is this set of descriptors reflective of/encouraging to?

Visits: I grew up in Glencoe, Illinois, but have not lived there in 15 years. In researching this review essay, I have been taking walks around this vaguely familiar neighborhood meandering the theatre grounds, viewing it from as many angles as I can, seeing how it interacts with its immediate environment (the shops on one side, the parks I played in so often flanking two more, and a private home on the fourth). These visits help me understand the theatre’s interaction with Glencoe, generate meaningful context, and reveal how the project works to enforce and produce the desires/values of the town.

Videos

Video by Spirit of Space

Video by A As Architecture - Discover Architecture

BooklistWright, Herbert. “All the Wood’s a Stage.” Blueprint no. 345 (2016): 146-59.
Why wood?
This article in Blueprint is about the use of timber in Writers Theatre, and the use of wood in contemporary architecture more broadly. It is about the challenges of using wood, the benefits of it, and why Gang selected a material that the United States uses infrequently in trendy buildings. I’m unpacking the use of timber specifically in suburban Chicago. To do this, I want to see what Studio Gang sees as the appealing aspects of timber, perhaps revealing the trends and movements that they as a studio want to be associated with, or that Glencoe aligns with. Interestingly, this article attributes the rise in wood use in contemporary architecture to European and Asian trends, which may well be the places that Gang wanted to hitch on to when she chose timber. As well, Gang refers to wood as an ancient material, which it no doubt is, and that it has an appealing “rustic” feeling – this assessment is important to my exploration into the American fixation with the handmade. Yet these reasons don’t consider the long-established use of wood in Chicago’s suburbs. I find this all the more fascinating. Wright says, “it tells the whole of the USA that timber is back,” as if we’d lost it. Had we?

Brooks, H. Allen. “Chicago Architecture: Its Debt to the Arts and Crafts.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 30, no. 4 (1971): 312–17. https://doi.org/10.2307/988704.
What is the legacy of the Arts & Crafts movement in the Midwest?
Brook’s essay approaches this topic in a way I find helpful. He looks at the original British movement, and the motivations for that, to its shift and emergence in the United States, and the different motivations for that translation. He discusses many of the underlying desires of the American Arts & Crafts branch, who exactly rallied for its success, and where it found supporters. He asserts that it is less a category of style than a set of ideas. I can use this analysis to examine my own historical moment more than 100 years later. If we are still using the vocabulary and approach of the movement, we are still implicated in its legacy.

McGuirk, Justin. “Craft Fetishism: From objects to things.” Disegno (2012). http://justinmcguirk.com/craft-fetishism-objects-things
What of our obsession with the handmade?
Is this all directly beholden to John Ruskin – and what are the implications of a moral attachment to craftsmanship? McGuirk approaches the issue of the handmade versus industrial object in a similar way to how I want to approach craftsmanship in architecture. He breaches various fields – fashion, media, food, personal hygiene – in his dive into the DIY aesthetic, connecting them to a broader fetishization with the handmade. The rejection of the globalized product in favor of the local, independent thing connects in part to Western desire for independence.

Herring, Scott. "REGIONAL MODERNISM: A REINTRODUCTION." Modern Fiction Studies 55, no. 1 (2009): 1-10. www.jstor.org/stable/26286964.
What does Writers Theatre profess about the 21st attitude toward regional design?
This article explores the issues of regionalism/anti-internationalism/American exceptionalism in design. On the one hand, regional modernism is present in the project––inventing new use for an old material, emphasizing local handiwork, using timber as structure––but the international influence is also present, and that, too, has much precedent in Midwestern design. Scott Herring’s article lays out some of the history of regional modernism and its internationalist counterpart. There is the issue of Glencoe distinguishing itself materially from the metropolis (Chicago) nearby, and of its desire to connect with global design trends like eco-design, existing simultaneously.

Marsh, Margaret S. Suburban Lives. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990, pp 67-89.
What does the project site in a high-income suburb bring to the ideological mix?
Dr. Margaret Marsh’s books gets at a set of ideologies related to suburbanization. In the early 1900s, the desires to re-center an expansionist emphasis on landscape and nature, and to stress domesticity as a democratic ideal, actualized. The “new suburban domestic ideal” (Marsh, 83) emphasized the family unit and its conservative social values, diverting urban individualism and shoring up nativism.

Bronaugh, White. “North American Forests in the Age of Man.” American Forests. April 12, 2012. https://www.americanforests.org/magazine/article/north-american-forests-in-the-age-of-man/.
What does the American history of logging mean for Writers Theatre?
This article is a critical look at the history of man and forest on the land we call America. It delves into settler colonial exploitation of native land, and how that approach held on through the Industrial Revolution, to present day It has led to massive deforestation and environmental degradation. The American logging industry is one of the biggest in the world. I can use this history to build context around the use of wood in contemporary architecture, and how it is born from the past.

Simpson, J.P., and Edmund L.C. Swan. “Improvements in the Lumber Industry.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 193, no. 1 (September 1937): 110–19. doi:10.1177/000271623719300112.
And the labor history of that industry?
This essay is a critical look at labor in the American logging industry. I want to involve the social history of the industry along with the environmental and economic, since that is also part of the historical context that I intend to build around Writers Theatre. After all, Studio Gang hired craftspeople and builders to construct the innovative timber trusses, and those workers make up a big part of the story of this theatre. I’ve had trouble accessing this journal article fully but can see the full first page. I’d like to use this source specifically to explore the labor history of the American Lumber industry, and I’m on the hunt for another similar one that could be just as helpful, since I likely cannot use this exact one.

Building Context: Cedar in the Suburban MidwestA Review Essay of Writers Theatre (2016) in Glencoe, Illinois by Studio Gang Architects

Can a material be an expression of cultural values? Can the use of wood in architecture reveal more about the location of the project than simply the type of tree that grows nearby? After diving into the history of artisan woodwork in the Midwest, I am most convinced that it in fact can. Writers Theatre, a playhouse opened in 2016 by Studio Gang in a small, upper class Chicago suburb and the case study of this essay, reveals how architecture can re-inscribe long-established values and cultivate the identity of its location. I will explore the use of cedar in the construction of Writers Theatre in the hopes of coming to some understanding of how the building operates sociologically as a producer of the culture that commissioned it.

Can a material be an expression of cultural values? Can the use of wood in architecture reveal more about the location of the project than simply the type of tree that grows nearby? After diving into the history of artisan woodwork in the Midwest, I am most convinced that it in fact can. Writers Theatre, a playhouse opened in 2016 by Studio Gang in a small, upper class Chicago suburb and the case study of this essay, reveals how architecture can re-inscribe long-established values and cultivate the identity of its location. I will explore the use of cedar in the construction of Writers Theatre in the hopes of coming to some understanding of how the building operates sociologically as a producer of the culture that commissioned it.
Download the full essay.

Figure 1. [Materially and spatially distinct structures], Steve Hall, Glencoe, Illinois, photograph, Hedrich Blessing.