Vermont Public
Radio Commentary
by Chester H. Liebs
© 2002 by Chester H.
Liebs, Aired 3/20/02
Made possible by:
The Alma Gibbs Donchian Foundation and the Preservation Trust of
Vermont
Clicking on
Memory Icons
Computers let me quickly write and polish my work, but there’s
another reason I like them. They remind me that the world around
us is also a screen filled with icons. If you click your eyes on
them, files will open up inside your head.
For example, a couple of years ago I clicked my eyes on an
unusual storefront in Bennington. Its two large plate-glass
windows angled inward like a funnel to attract my eye to the
shop’s narrow entrance. What a clever way to lure customers
in!
Also, the plate glass had chic, seamless corners, and the store’s
name was done up in elegant metal letters. Here, on a main
street in Vermont, I had discovered a rare surviving example of
a kind of high-fashion shop-front that was the rage in cities
like New York and Chicago in the “roaring twenties.” Its
date-stone even read 1929. Unfortunately, when I saw what was
once Feinberg’s Department Store, it was empty and covered
with “for sale” signs. I wonder what’s happened to it.
Click, click - and the mouse inside my head now highlights a
factory building that looks like a tic-tac-toe grid of brown
concrete beams filled with large metal windows with lots of
little glass panes. With its strong concrete skeleton, and skin
of glass, this aging structure must have been quite special.
Concrete was used by the Romans and was reborn in the early
twentieth century for building everything from bridges to
industrial structures. The building I was looking at reminded me
of a concrete and glass factory in Highland Park, Michigan,
built by architect Albert Kahn in 1910. It’s where Henry Ford
revolutionized automobile mass-production, and it’s now a
National Historic Landmark. You’ve probably seen it in old
film-clips showing workers attaching motors and bodies to Model
T Ford frames whizzing down an assembly line.
Highly influential European architect Le Corbusier called such
buildings, in his 1923 manifesto “Towards a New Architecture,”
harbingers of an age where beauty and function would be joined
as one - words that helped, for better or worse, to change
architectural practice around the world. It’s amazing that all
this can be conjured up by a nearly forgotten structure in
Rutland, built in 1911 by M.C. Tuttle for the Rutland Fire Clay
Company.
Vermont’s a treasure trove of similar icons. They not only
connect to personal memories and local history, but are gateways
to places and ideas from the rest of the world. It’s time for
me to shut down my mental computer, but you can power up yours
any time and see what you can find.
This is Chester Liebs.
Chester Liebs is Professor Emeritus of History and Historic
Preservation at UVM and Visiting Professor in Architectural
Conservation at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and
Music.
