Brisbane's Colonial Cottage Architecture

It's always fun to see how people in warm climates deal with "winter" weather. I was actually impressed by how reasonable the inhabitants of Brisbane, Australia were in July. No ridiculously large scarves or warm coats, like you might see in LA in 50 degree weather. The architecture, however, was a different story. Brisbane has a great collection of Victorian cottages that were clearly built by people who showed up in summer and couldn't imagine it would ever get cold. One of which was the very cute guest house where I stayed:









Some of the porches were clearly glassed in or boarded up for winter.

















But others retained their wide open aspect, with nice deep verandas to enjoy the hilltop views.

New Orleans: Arts Warehouse District

Between the Garden District and the French Quarter lies downtown and an area cunningly named the Arts Warehouse District, with, you guessed it, old warehouses, art galleries, and museums. In general New Orleans feels like a cross between downtown Manhattan and Charleston, South Carolina. I hope some of these bring that across . . .

New Orleans: French Quarter

The French Quarter really is as amazing as everyone says. Every where you go you see incredible architecture, hear live music, and can get a drink to go from the bar. Remember you can click on the pictures below to get a larger view.

New Orleans: The Garden District

I recently jumped at the chance to attend a conference in New Orleans over Easter weekend. I began my three day visit in the Garden District and immediately wanted to move there. Some highlights:

A Captain's Desk

On a recent trip home, my father proudly showed me one of our family's more infamous heirlooms, which had recently come down to him. Known amongst the relatives as the "Captain's Desk," it was built for my great-great-great-great-grandfather, Ebenezer Cooley (really, shouldn't everyone have someone named Ebenezer in their family tree?).


He was born in 1768 in Sunderland Massachusetts, but lived most of his life in Norwich, Connecticut, where he died in 1838. Good ol' Eb really was a captain with a ship of his own that he used to ship goods to and from the West Indies. So he likely imported his own exotic hardwood up to Connecticut and had a local joiner make him a desk.


Of course, what most excited my dad about the desk was its "secret" drawer. As in many desks of the period, the small central door opens onto an arched cavity, but the decorative bit of woodwork at the top of the archway is actually a drawer that can be pulled forward.



What my dad didn't know is that once you take that drawer out, you can also pull out the side walls of the cavity. Each "wall" is actually a thin wooden box with about an inch-wide hollow slot. It was pretty great to see the look on my parents' faces when I revealed this extra layer of secret compartmentation to them. I guess I really am learning something about antiques!

Chipstone House

Taking a class in another department is always valuable, not only because you get to work on something totally different, but also because it inevitably makes you appreciate your own department all the more. This is being brought home to me again this semester, now that I'm taking a class taught by a folklorist in the Landscape Architecture department on "Cultural Landscape History, Theory, and Preservation." I was sort of hoping for a class about the history of landscape design, featuring the likes of Capability Brown and Frederick Law Olmstead, but mostly what we talk about is the preservation of historic buildings, because for better or worse that's what our preservation programs privilege.


But at least that means I can do a project on architecture, which I get to talk about but rarely. The working title of my final paper is Curating the Cultural Landscape: Chipstone House as Historical Property and it will examine Chipstone House, a 1949 neo-colonial mansion and its surrounding grounds, located in the Milwaukee suburb of Fox Point. The first question I want to raise relates to the discipline of landscape studies, and asks how J.B. Jackson’s definition of landscape as a collection of defined spaces relates landscape to other types of collecting and curatorial practices. J.B. Jackson is a seminal figure for the study of vernacular landscapes, but it feels like his groundbreaking ideas haven't sufficiently carried over to curatorial practice. This is particularly pertinent to Chipstone House since it is now the headquarters of the Chipstone Foundation, which curates the collection of early-American decorative arts begun by the house’s original owners, Stanley and Polly Stone. If we take Jackson's point that the interior and exterior landscapes of Chipstone House are collections, then how have they been curated? And how do these landscape curatorial practices relate to those used to curate what is better known as the “Chipstone Collection” of decorative arts?


My secondary point is about the role historicism played in the cultural landscape of Chipstone House. It was designed by Andrew Hepburn, an architect whose firm had been charged with restoring Colonial Williamsburg, and it's more or less a domestic version of Williamsburg's Governors Palace (above). Chipstone House clearly relates to a wider American interest in an idealized colonial past, but what I want to suggest is that Chipstone’s emulation of the historical properties in Williamsburg constructs history itself as property, as cultural capital or a commodity that can be bought and displayed.

Keramic Art of Japan

Last year I came across this book Keramic Art of Japan in our art library, and I've been more or less obsessed with it ever since. It was published in England in 1875, and it's basically an illustrated catalog of Japanese ceramics in various public and private collections. But the illustrations! In addition to photographs and photolithographs, it has the most extraordinary chromolithographs I've ever seen in person. They were done by a French firm and each image required a whole series of hand-drawn lithographic stones, one for each color and shade. They are so detailed, so colorful, so three-dimensional and yet so flat: their quality is almost magical.


This semester I'm finally getting to indulge my interest in Keramic Art of Japn by using it as the object of my final project for my class on "Dimensions of Material Culture." This will force me to look at the book as a material object: its size, bindings, printing, typography, etc., everything that isn't its text or its images. As an added bonus, I'm also giving a preliminary presentation on Keramic Art at a research colloquium on "Photography and the Technologies of Empire and Race" that's part of a Visual Culture Center conference here at UW-Madison. So I'll get to talk both about how all the images (even the chromolithographs) make use of photography, and how the book relates to England's imperialist attitudes towards Japan in the late-nineteenth century.


It's these later aspects--how the book uses mimetic technologies like photography and chromolithography, and how the book relates to Japonisme as a colonial discourse--that make me interested in using Keramic Art of Japan as a focus for my MA paper next semester. Specifically I want to compare what's going on in Keramic Art with the ways in which Japanese people were mimetically copied and mimicked by the English in popular illustrations and plays like Gilbert & Sullivan's The Mikado (as I discussed in my presentation for UCLA's Graduate Symposium on the Remnant). I have a hunch that one of the reasons Japonisme is under theorized in the scholarly literature is that Japonisme is thought to have been about decorative arts rather than figural representations. Even in my own department, with its emphases on material and visual culture, vases and parasols just don't register as having the same political consequences as images of people. Leaving aside that this plays right into nineteenth-century ideas of Japanese art as "merely" decorative, I hope that by looking at representations of Japanese people and objects in tandem I can demonstrate how they were unforunately equated.