Being Mindful of Merrifield Hall

When I arrived at UND in 2004, the campus was old. More significant, the community knew its antiquity. (With apologies to A. T. Olmstead). The centerpiece to the old campus was Merrifield Hall. Its wide, double loaded corridors, lined with coat hooks, and paved with terrazzo floors reminded me of a high school. The classrooms featured chalk boards, improvised AV systems barely capable of powerpoint, tall windows clipped by dropped ceilings, and the echoes of generations of students, faculty, and staff reverberating off the hard floors and walls. Merrifield’s auditorium style room had carpeted walls. 

At the end of last academic year, Merrifield Hall started to undergo a major update. This involves not only adapting its interior spaces to the needs of contemporary campus life, but also modifying its venerable facade and breaking up the “Gothic wall” that Merrifield has provided along the west side of UND’s central quad. We can quibble about aesthetics, but I’ve made known my feelings about the alienating impact of relentless Gothic facades. Even as Merrifield Hall has become an icon on our campus, it looked and functioned like any number of early-20th century, small town secondary schools in the region. It was a quintessential example of a modern, double-loaded corridor, wrapped in a mystical, romantic Gothic shell and carried the baggage of its design and its symbolism.

More importantly than this, I wanted to propose a few talking points that might help people engage with the changes to Merrifield in productive and interesting ways. Again, these have less to do with aesthetics and more to do our general attitudes to change on campus.   

1. Good buildings are susceptible to adaptation. We have seen quite a few historic buildings on our campus torn down recently (and more are on the chopping block). Many of these buildings, including my beloved Wesley College buildings, succumbed to obsolesce, budgetary constraints, and changing construction and design priorities. Merrifield Hall can be adapted because its architecture (and presumably its design brief) took pains to ensure that it could be modified to the future needs of campus. Of course, it’s difficult to imagine the architect envisioned the kind or extent of the modifications currently underway, but I like to imagine that those responsible for building Merrifield may have also been surprised that the building had not been updated sooner! Good buildings adapt. 

2. Campuses are always being renewed, updated, and transformed. One of the reasons that recent changes to UND’s campus has brought pain to some members of the campus community is because UND’s campus had not been updated for such a long time. As a result some people came to see UND’s campus as an unchanging space which served as an icon for certain fundamental values and the backdrop for an ever present nostalgia.

It goes without saying that university and college campuses often leverage nostalgia to create a sense of community (especially between current students and alumni), a sense of history, and a sense of seriousness. On the other hand, campuses are beacons of progress. We expect them to embody not only cutting edge research, but also the changing social expectations of our society. Campuses are sandboxes, utopian communities, and places where very little is (or should be) sacred.

Changing an iconic campus building should cause some discomfort, but this kind of discomfort is part of what a campus should provide for both students and faculty. If a place has become sacred to your experiences, then it is possible that you’re missing the point of the university as a progressive force in the contemporary world.  

3. Changing the Narrative I. Some of the complains, of course, come from folks who have become convinced that the changes to UND’s campus reflect the long-term neglect of historic buildings on campus. This seems to some folks to be emblematic of the inability of public institutions to be good custodians of public assets and funds. Of course, this rhetoric is favored by the right as a way to carve away resources from what they see as inherently wasteful public institutions and to funnel these resources to the private sector. 

It is always disappointing to hear this line of reasoning, especially when it’s used to accuse the campus administration of being profligate with public funds in the present or irresponsible in the past. Major construction on UND’s campus invariably prompts public outcry from both the right and the left. The former decrying any public funds spent on public institutions and the latter weaponizing the rhetoric of the right to complain about campus priorities. 

Let’s not do this.

4. Changing the Narrative II: Instead, I’d love to see greater appreciation for the new buildings on campus, the new spaces, and the new campus plan. It’s fine if we don’t love it for aesthetic reasons or even on practical grounds, but I’m pretty comfortable calling bullshit on anyone who sees our campus today as worse than our campus of a decade ago. Whether we liked our campus leaders, approved of their leadership, or even respected their priorities, the campus is better now. 

More to the point, when I walk across campus, through buildings, work in my office, and teach in classrooms, UND no longer feels like a campus that burdened by its own antiquity. It pains me when I hear colleagues complain about changes to campus in part because it so often leans on arguments that our administration (and the structures that support it) is incapable of making good, thoughtful decisions. This, in turn, contributes to a larger view that public institutions — from the post-office to public universities — are inherently broken. I get, of course, that change can be inconvenient, messy, and unpredictable. Construction schedules are dependent on the weather, new buildings are compromises, and “mistakes are made,” but it’s hard for me to stomach the idea that our campus is worse now than two decades ago (or even five years ago). 

Merrifield Hall, in particular, was antiquated, inadequate, and run-down. Its “small town high school charm” had given way to a palpable ambivalence that seemed intent on making the building (and anyone who spent time in it) irrelevant. This is not a desirable outcome. 

5. Joseph Bell DeRemer and the Klan. It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to recognize that UND continues to struggle with issues of race on campus. In fact, the architect of Merrifield Hall, Joseph Bell DeRemer, is part of that problematic legacy. He was a member of the Klan and I suspect that his Klan connections contributed to his commission on the UND campus in the 1920s. I’ve written about this here. 

While looking from traces of Klan ideology in the architecture of Merrifield Hall might be a bit far-fetched (although the connection between UND buildings and resistance to the Klan has been argued), the tensions encouraged the formation of emergence of the Klan in North Dakota left traces on our campus and our state. Modifying Merrifield Hall will do little to nothing to change the past, but lightening Joseph Bell DeRemer’s influence over campus space might just be a kind of institutional “anti-racism.” 

As I’ve noted throughout this post, campuses always have to compromise between nostalgia and progress, putting a bit more progress into the architecture of Merrifield Hall might just soften the nostalgia for a time (and an individual) that brought very little good to our community. 

The Baukol Historic District in Grand Forks

A few years ago my wife, Susie, and I prepared a survey of over 3000 mid-century houses in Grand Forks, North Dakota. As a part of this work, we identified a couple early post-war neighborhoods in Grand Forks that we felt deserved further study. You can read our final report here.

This past year, Susie has been studying the Baukol Subdivision and preparing a National Register of Historic Places nomination for this neighborhood. It was selected because it was well preserved, it was clearly built with returning GIs in mind (that is, the developer built the homes to the standards required for GI bill mortgages), and it was adjacent to the existing Riverside Historic District.  

Susie is presenting her report to the Grand Forks Historic Preservation commission tonight at our open meeting, but because some folks can’t make it to the evening meetings and I know that some Grand Forks natives are aware of this blog, she’s asked me to post a copy of her presentation here.

Check it out: Baukol Historic District, Grand Forks, ND

(Plus, anyone interested in mid-century housing, small town urbanism, [early] Cold War architecture, and the so on might find this short presentation of interest.)  

What Time Is This Place (Part 1)

I have a phobia of reading old books. It’s irrational as most phobia are, but nevertheless guides my actions to an embarrassing extent. As a result, it took a particular nudge from my buddy Kostis Kourelis (and a generous copy of the book) to will myself to read Kevin Lynch’s What Time Is This Place? (MIT 1972). 

This book blew my mind. To make everything about me: this book was like a cross section of my recent interest in time, ruins, urbanism, campus life, and even teaching. It’s like I was simply living in a world sketched out by Kevin Lynch. 

The book in broad strokes is a meditation on time and place. Lynch fearlessly traces the role of time in our daily lives, our building environments, and, as you’d expect, our lived experiences. In particular, Lynch is interested in the experience of time as change.

Here are some running notes chapter to chapter. 

1. Cities Transforming. The first chapter considers change on the level of the city and the way in which people’s experience and idea of the city shaped the transforming of cities. It made me think a good bit about my work on the Grand Forks Historic Preservation Commission and our efforts to document (and in some ways influence) the transformation of the city of Grand Forks. For example, my wife and I produced a massive study of mid-century housing in the city that traced its transformation from a city largely anchored in its pre-war pedestrian plan to one defined by cars, post-war prosperity, and the rise of the suburb. You can read the report here. 

2. The Presence of the Past. This chapter is even more relevant for my wok on the GFHPC. It focuses on the role of ruins and material evidence for the past in creating a sense of presence in a community. This is literally the mission of the Commission, but as Lynch points out, one that is not as straight forward as preservation for the sake of preservation might allow. Over the past five or six years, we’ve talked more and more about the value of attempting to preserve and document buildings and districts not limited to the obvious or even elite building which often carry the burden of the past for a community. Instead, we have shifted at least some of our attention to apartment buildings, schools, commercial spaces, and (if I had my way) neighborhood bars that preserve the workaday landscapes of the city. We’ve also talked more about how to make present a past that has disappeared as a result of the city’s floods, urban renewal, and social change. What do we do to inscribe the memory of these places into the urban fabric?   

3. Alive Now. Lynch’s brilliant contribution to urban planning is that he foregrounded the experience of the city and sought to create urban forms sensitive to the needs of an individual. In this book, he considers time as more than simply made manifest on a collective level (so that everything doesn’t happen at once), but also experienced individually. As readers of this blog might know, I am obsessed with time both personally through my modest collection of watches (or my collection of modest watches) and professionally through my work as an archaeologist. It is hardly surprising that I’ve been fixated on the concept of slow as not only an antidote to the sense of urgency that suffuses so much of our professional life, but also as way to make explicit the tension between clock time and the time of experience. 

4. The Future Preserved. When Kostis sent me this book, he made explicit reference to the world of Sun Ra who has become an obsession for me. For those of you unfamiliar with Sun Ra, he is one of the founders of mid-century Afro-futurism which he expertly grafted to afrocentric views of the Black past (as his name suggests). As Lynch recognizes in this chapter title, there is a crucial need to preserve the past not only as a way to remember past presents, but also to remember past futures. The growing interest in Afrofuturism reveals the potential of past futures to shape present futures and to make us aware of how we have and have not lived up to our aspirations (however well intended). It goes without saying that continued struggle for racial equality offers a sobering context for mid-century Afrofuturism. It is also a good reminder that as much as we cringe or even protest at pseudohistory, pseudoarchaeology, and other “false” views of the past, the line between false pasts and false futures is a fine one indeed and the goals of both projects tend to intersect in the messy politics of hope. 

5. The Time Inside. One of the more fascinating chapters of the book considers how our internal sense of time clashes with external constraints. Anyone whose body resists the tradition of eight continuous hours of sleep is familiar with this feeling. I’ve speculated on this as it applies to the length and rhythm of the academic semester. Lynch clearly recognizes that time is a factor in learning and how and when we learn, remember, and think various not only as individuals but also collectively. Last year, for example, I started to notice how student workloads, commitments, and time often doesn’t serve to advance student learning.  Instead, the time for student learning is a constantly negotiation of space, finances, and other commitments. This is inevitable, of course, but it nevertheless reinforces how the personal time of student experience is not entirely under their own control.  

I’ll come back with Part 2 tomorrow!

Cypriot Churches of the 14th to 16th centuries

Scholars interested in the architectural history of post-Roman Cyprus have been enjoying the immense (and sometimes overwhelming) outpouring of scholarship in their field over the last 20 years. Much of this work has been both high quality in terms of argument, but also (and perhaps as importantly) high production quality with careful illustrations, vivid photographs, and sharp publication standards. It was particularly fun then to have an opportunity to read Thomas Kaffenberger’s recent contribution to this growing body of scholarship. As you’ll likely guess, this was for a review, and below is a draft:

Thomas Kaffenberger’s Tradition and Identity: The Architecture of Greek Churches in Cyprus (14th to 16th century) is a significant contribution to the architectural history of Cyprus. The book consists of two, impressively produced volumes: the first comprises analysis and the second, larger volume, a catalogue of 261 standing and 65 lost Greek churches from the 14th-16th century. The goal of the book was twofold. First, Kaffenberger sought to complicate the designation of the so-called Greek churches from the Late Medieval Cyprus from their historic designation as “francobyzantine.” Instead he sought to locate these buildings within a broader context of identity and exchange between the island’s various communities, religious traditions, and political investments. His second goal was to expand the scope of analysis to include the significant corpus of rural churches into conversation with better known urban churches especially in Famagusta. In general, the author is more successful with the first goal than the second, but this should not detract from the book as a highly significant contribution to the rapidly expanding body of work on Medieval Cypriot architecture.

The book, which is an updated and revised version of the author’s doctoral dissertation (pdf copy here), follows a family patter. The opening chapter unpack the historiography associated with these buildings with particular critical attention on history of the concept of “francobyzantine” architecture on Cyprus. Long associated with the Greek or “indigenous” community on Cyprus who maintained a distinct religious identity in the aftermath of the Second Crusade, Georgios Soteriou introduced the concept to Cypriot architecture in the 1930s. The term assumed the existence of two discrete styles — the Byzantine and the Frankish — with their respective political, cultural, and religious baggage as a precondition for the emergence of a new hybrid style. This invariably led to judgements that the hybrid style was inherently less refined and sophisticated than the pure versions of Crusader or Byzantine architecture. When combined with the 19th century commentators tendency to privilege Frankish Gothic styles on the island, the perceived inferiority of the francobyzantine style reproduced the island’s colonial status both in the Frankish period and in 19th and 20th century.

Kaffenberger distances his analysis from these conventional paradigms which allows him to understand the Greek architecture of Late Medieval Cyprus on its own terms rather than as a hybrid of established style or local imitation. Chapters two, three, four and five trace development of Greek architecture on Cyprus from its Early Christian origins to the 16th century, while avoiding the conventional practice of attributing features to one or another tradition. The result is an intensive and exceptionally well-illustrated analysis of the architecture of Greek churches in Cyprus that architectural historians will find useful and familiar in style and vocabulary. The author focuses heavily on the most elaborate and partly preserved buildings in Famagusta with the 14th-century cathedral of St. George of the Greeks taking particular pride of place. The Greek community in Famagusta constructed this church in the middle years of the 14th century perhaps in response to the return of the Greek bishop to Famagusta after a century of exile on the Karpas Peninsula or to the recovery from the bubonic plague that wracked the Mediterranean in the same decades. Rather than standing as a awkward or tepid version of 13th-century Gothic style typical of the Latin cathedrals of St. Sophia in Nicosia or St. Nicholas in Famagusta, Kaffenberger emphasizes the shared stylistic commitments between it and the contemporary church of Saints Peter and Paul in the same city as well as a number of churches in smaller communities across the island. He continues this approach for churches in the 15th and 16th century and successfully demonstrates that Greek Cypriot church builders and patrons deliberately and presumably strategically combined traditional design elements and Renaissance period innovation in their buildings. The level of technical detail in these chapters is daunting for a non-specialist, but impressive.

Chapter six and seven provide a synthetic analysis which seeks to illuminate the forest from the trees. For his masterful grasp of stylistic matters in chapters two through five, Kaffenberger’s command over the conceptual framework necessary to discuss the complex matters of ethnic, political, and religious identity, tradition, and reception and cultural production feels less secure. The absence of textual sources for the centuries under consideration clearly contributes to Kaffenberger’s tentative conclusions. As a result, his arguments for the genealogy of Medieval Greek church architecture on Cyprus stop short of offering the new ways to understand the broader influence of Frankish and Venetian rule on the Greek communities on Cyprus. Even in cases where it would seem obvious that the patrons and builders of Greek churches sought to evoke ties to the Early Christian or Byzantine past, the authors remains hesitant to recognize these as deliberate efforts ground their authority in a period before the Crusader conquest, for example. That said, Kaffenberger’s sensitive study of architectural relationship between St. George of the Greeks in Famagusta and the adjoining and earlier church of St. Epifanios weaves together insightful analysis of architecture with arguments for the role of building as a site for the veneration of relics whether of Epifanios or some other unknown saint.

In the end, the enduring value of this book will not come from its final two chapters, but from the stylistic analysis and the extensive catalogue that makes up the second volume. The catalogue runs to over 500 pages and includes geographic coordinates, descriptions, chronological information, bibliography, discussion, in some cases, plans, and, often stunning, color photographs of each church and any distinctive features. The quality of the catalogue and the amount of research invested in its production at times significantly exceeds its relevance to Kaffenberger’s arguments despite his efforts to bring rural churches into the larger conversation. That said, the presence of the catalogue will invariably entice other scholars to take these buildings more seriously and to think more seriously about how architecture reflected and shaped identity in late Medieval Cyprus.

Three Things Thursday: Rhys Carpenter, Digital Archaeology, and Work

It’s been a long week and I’m looking at a day filled with meetings, teaching, and other adventures. In light of this, it seems like a good time for a Three Things Thursday.

Thing the First

Last week, while having a conversation with one of my old Greek archaeology buddies, he casually mentioned that Rhys Carpenter had written poetry. I suppose this not a secret to the cognoscenti, but I didn’t know. Of course, I knew Rhys Carpenter as an architect and an archaeologist who had worked at Corinth and contributed in a powerful way not only to the development of a rigorous and diachronic American archaeology in Greece, but also in the systematic study of post-Classical and Byzantine remains. During my first year at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens as an aspiring archaeologist, I enjoyed the Rhys Carpenter fellowship (although I only gradually came to understand how cool a privilege to have his name associated with my career (albeit posthumously) was). 

In any event, a couple books of his poetry, published in the 1910s, is available via the Internet Archive. Check out The Sun-Thief and Other Poems (Oxford 1914) and The Tragedy of Etarre: A Poem (New York 1912)  The poetry falls just shy of feeling stuffy to me, but it is perhaps a bit too formal for contemporary tastes and it is unlikely to appear in a standard 20th century poetry survey course. That said, it does feel palpably modernist in its rather impersonal aspirations to the universal, in this case, cloaked in its Classical allusions and formal structures. Perhaps this style is appropriate for an architect and archaeologist who recognized the value in all periods (and even the beleaguered Byzantine) while still privileging Classical period. My colleague Kostis Kourelis, who introduced me to Carpenter’s poetry, make a similar argument in an article that he wrote several years ago now on the role that the archaeology of the Byzantine period in Greece played on Modernism and the avant garde. You can read it here. 

Carpenter also wrote a travelogue of a trip he took to Central America in the early 20th century. So it appears that his quest for the modern world in antiquity was not limited to areas and cultures traditionally articulated as the antecedent to modern European civilization. 

Early Candle Light (1914)

The low sweet melody of ancient song
Kisses asleep the heavy eyes of grief.
When autumn falls and withers every leaf,
When daylight shrinks and stormy nights grow long,
When winter-wind and winter-cold are strong,
And sorrow holds the weary heart in fief,
The low sweet melody of ancient song
Kisses asleep the heavy eyes of grief.

When golden love lies bound with iron thong,
And noble tales but mock our dull belief,
When mirth has garnered every radiant sheaf
And all the sickly world is harsh and wrong,
The low sweet melody of ancient song
Kisses asleep the heavy eyes of grief.

It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but his invocation of the seasons seemed appropriate today as I look out the basement window of the NDQ offices onto the Collegiate Gothic quad and watch the timeless movement of students against the fading green of summer.

Thing the Second

About 20 (almost 25!) years ago when people talked about “The Digital Archaeology,” I, like many people, assumed that this was simply a temporary trend that traced our collective effort as a field to negotiate technological change. But here we are.

This past week has produced a bumper crop of works on the use of digital technologies in archaeology. These range from field oriented considerations of low-cost and DYI approaches to digital tools. Check out Edouard Masson-MacLean and colleagues’, “Digitally Recording Excavations on a Budget: A (Low-Cost) DIY Approach from Scotland” or in the JFA. For an approach to field recording that is more prog than punk, check out the most recent from the FAIMS team in the same journal: “Deploying an Offline, Multi-User, Mobile System for Digital Recording in the Perachora Peninsula, Greece.”

For a less field oriented perspective, I’m excited to tuck into the recent Debate in Antiquity surrounding John Aycock’s article, “The coming tsunami of digital artefacts” which includes responses from some of my favorite thinkers about the digital tools and practices in archaeology: Sarah and Eric Kansa, Colleen Morgan, and Jeremey Huggett. 

The interplay between increasingly sophisticated perspectives on the theoretical side of digital archaeology and the practical challenges associated with data collection in the field, management during publication and dissemination, and curation après le déluge (as the kids say) continues to be worth watching and a source of inspiration.

Thing the Third

Rebecca Futo Kennedy wrote a blog post this week that really struck a chord. You can read it here. She basically argues that it is hard to get anything done. I can’t help but think of Yogi Berra’s quotable critique of a famous New York City restaurant: “Nobody goes there any more —it’s too crowded.” Despite feeling like I’m working all the time, I never feel like I’m getting anything done.

For a long time, this felt like running on a treadmill, but then I realize that most running (even when it meanders through the local park or streets in my small town) is running on a treadmill. The goal isn’t to get somewhere (or get away from something), but to endure the challenge and maybe improve (or at least hold station!). This isn’t meant to be a critique of Futo-Kennedy’s blog post, but it prompted a personal reflection. I feel like my own happiness is not connected to how much I work. I can write and read and “think” (or whatever passes for thought) day and after day and still wake up excited to do it all again. If I get bored or burned out on one project or task, I can shift my attention to something else: from research to teaching, from reading to writing, from writing to book production, from scholarship to creative work, and so on. 

My happiness and satisfaction with my job has increasingly come to revolve around process. When I’m doing what I’m doing, even if it doesn’t lead immediately to a “deliverable” result, I find that my life settles into a satisfying routine which, almost by its own volition, leads to things that the bean counters (and my colleagues) can discern as results. In other words, not getting things done seems, for me, to result in things that appear as accomplishments for those who care about such things.

This has got me thinking about the strange economy of the work-life balance industry and their occasional argument that working less often results in getting more done. This seems to assume that for most individuals, the product is more important than the process which is only good insofar as it can be minimized. For academics, I’d contend, the process is generally more appealing and satisfying than the product or outcome which tends to be ephemeral and contingent. Process, in contrast, is persistent and even when practices changed, continuously defined by certain disciplines, attitudes, affects, and experiences. Thus, the call for people to rebalance home life over work life as a way to become more efficient in their work misunderstands the appeal of work life and creates a scenario that, at least in some industries (such as academia), is likely to produce greater apathy toward work.

I’ve sometimes wondered whether the rise in rhetoric surrounding “life hacks” designed to make home life more efficient leads people, ironically, to change their attitudes to work. When the alternative to the efficient home is a place where individuals can experience process and certain attitudes toward tasks that bring a kind of satisfaction, efficiency oriented home life with its rhetorical emphasis on outcomes and accomplishments (the tidy lawn, the clean kitchen, the efficiently prepare meal, or the completed home repair) becomes strangely unappealing. I’d rather read another article, write another page, meet with a student, or reflect on a class than mow the lawn, do laundry, or complete some household chore even if these are made more efficient by labor-saving tools or other life hacks.

For me, at least, it’s telling that the most pointless work in my life — walking the dogs, going for a jog, riding my push-bike, or writing my blog — are also times when I think about work the most intently and with the greatest pleasure. I recognize that it is a luxury to have time to do pointless things and to think about my work and practice it in a positive and open way, but perhaps recognizing this privilege is a way toward revising how we think about work itself. Rather than celebrating models of work (and work/home balance) that look to improve the efficiency of our work life, perhaps we should re-examine how our attitudes toward work and expectations of accomplishments, efficiency, and product impact the quality of the work experience for people across society. Maybe the key to doing more is actually thinking about what gets done less. Making a kind of productive inefficiency at work a more appealing alternative to home will do more to address not only concerns of work/home, but also the anxieties that come with feeling like we’re never getting anything done.      

You Can Always Go Back (sort of)

Yesterday, I wandered around the campus of the University of Richmond where I went as an undergraduate. I like to joke that it was at Richmond where I finally figured out how to be a student and that experience was so formative that I’ve not left a university campus since!

In any event, my wander around campus reminded me of the campus’s human scale where so many of the structures face one another to create cosy courtyards and intimate spaces framed by the College Gothic architecture, trees and gardens, and the hills. When I went to college at Richmond, I really needed a place where I felt comfortable and this contributed a good bit to my transformation from a mediocre high school students to a solid university student. I’ve visited a good many college campuses over the past 25 years since I left UR, from the mega-universities of Ohio State and the University of Texas at Austin, to mid-sized schools like the University of North Dakota, tiny liberal arts colleges, and many institutions in between. My return to Richmond’s campus reminded me that the buildings and organization of space contributes to one’s experience of a campus in significant ways. 

One other thing: there was construction and this reminded me that any campus worth its salt is under construction. Just as students change and institutions change, so should campuses (and a campus without construction is a bit of a worry). 

And another: You’ll notice that I include a photo Ryland Hall which was named after former UR first president Robert Ryland who owned enslaved people. There is ongoing debate over the naming of this building and the signs on the construction fence show that this debate is taking place in both formal and informal ways. If it were my decision, I’d change the name of the building (which ranks as among my favorites on campus). That said, I’m not close enough to the UR community to understand the current conversations on campus. The cynic in me sees the re-naming of this building as the ideal opportunity for a wealthy donor to make their mark on campus (and it would fit with the so many of the more recent campus buildings that appear mainly to celebrate the names of wealthy contributors). If I were to think more carefully about this, however, I might prefer a name that celebrates the institution’s history especially as the building will house the core humanities departments. 

It’s difficult to capture this in photographs, but here are few that I took yesterday:

Midcentury Housing in Grand Forks (A Final, Final Report)

As summer comes to a close (a few trees are recognizing the shorter days and starting to hint at their early fall transformations), I’m trying to wrap up a few projects. Yesterday, I posted an almost final draft of my paper on Cyprus in the Long Late Antiquity. 

Today, I wanted to post the very much final version (actually the version that we submitted to the state) of our windshield survey of mid-century housing in Grand Forks, ND. My colleague, Cindy Prescott, once quipped that it was possible to understand the history of 20th-century housing in the US (or at least the Midwest) by driving from downtown Grand Forks to the south. This is indeed the case with each successive neighborhood containing slightly later material, architecture, styles, and arrangements. 

The report was co-authored with Susan Caraher who is Grand Forks’s Historical Preservation Commission Administrator. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, although I think there’s a good bit more to be done with the data that we’ve collected. 

You can download the report here. 

Baptisteries

Over the Easter weekend, I worked a bit a long simmering project on the Early Christian baptisteries of Greece. Since it seems likely that, initially, baptisms occurred primarily during the Easter vigil, it felt appropriate.

The project includes a brief overview of the archaeological and architectural evidence and then a short catalogue of known buildings. At present, we don’t have much to say that would be unfamiliar to folks who have spent some time on these building. At the same time, there are few things that I hadn’t noticed before. My dissertation did not deal with baptisteries specifically as part of my study of Early Christian churches more generally, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, some of the most interesting buildings come from the Dodecanese which were both outside my dissertation’s specific purview and outside the Diocese of Illyricum Orientale. As part of the Diocese of Asia and the Prefecture of the East (at least until the early 6th century), it also seems likely to have enjoyed different liturgical traditions than regions in the Western facing Diocese of Illyricum Orientale.

Here are my random thoughts:

1. Baptisteries of Kos and Rhodes. There are at least eight known Early Christian baptisteries on Kos. This is an impressive total even for this relatively large island. It’s a bit hard to understand why a single place would require so many baptisteries if they all functioned more or less simultaneously and if the tradition was for the bishop to conduct baptisms only once per year. It may be, of course, that multiple bishops—representing multiple variants of Christianity—functioned on the island. It is also possible that not all the churches and baptisteries functioned simultaneously. Rhodes likewise has seven baptisteries which once again suggests either diverse communities or a rite administered by someone other than the bishop.

Considering that both of these islands are near the edge of an ecclesiastical diocese, this would bring them in contact with rites and practices common to both the Aegean (and the West) and the diverse Christianities present in Asia Minor.   

2. Locating the Baptistery. Athanassios Mailis observed in his short article on the baptisteries on Crete that baptisteries in the Dodecanese tended to appear more frequently on the eastern side of the churches. In mainland Greece, however, baptisteries tended to appear as annexes attached to the narthex or atrium. If I had understood this more clearly when I was writing my dissertation, I might have been able to connect this location of the baptisteries themselves to the movement of catechumens during the baptismal rite (or even during the weekly liturgy). If we assume that the narthex and atrium served as buffers between the “profane” space of the outside world and the sacred space of the church’s processional axis as well as staging areas for the various liturgical processions, then the presence of baptisteries adjacent to these liminal zones would reflect the liminal status of participants in the baptismal rites. More over, it might allow for a post-baptismal procession from the baptistery into the church.

The location the baptistery in the eastern part of the church associates the baptistery spatially with the bema and suggests a rite that may do less to emphasize the liminal status of the participants and more to emphasize the liturgical or even sacramental character of baptism and the baptismal font. While it’s hard to necessarily make any particular claims on the basis of the location of the baptistery, it is suggestive that the two regions understood the place of the rite in different ways both ritually and, perhaps, practically.

3. Multiple Fonts. I had always found the two fonts present at the Lechaion baptistery outside of Corinth pretty interesting. It was impossible to know whether the second, smaller font, represented a change in ritual or perhaps a supplement to the more monumental font in the center of the baptistery proper. 

I was struck when I came to realize that on Kos a number of churches have a similar arrangement with a smaller secondary font associated with the larger main font. This suggests to me change in liturgical ritual, perhaps associated with the development of infant baptism. By this logic, the larger central fonts likely reflected the requirements of adult baptism (and the functioning of an adult catechumenate). This, to me, indicates ongoing conversion of adults into the 6th century which is the latest possible date for many of these buildings and the emergence of infant baptism (which would represent second generation Christians) only sometime after this. We can allow, of course, for a certain amount of architectural conservatism in the design of baptisteries, but I still think that appearance of smaller secondary fonts is worthy of note.

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It’s been a pleasure to return to material and ideas that I explored over 20 years ago as I was working on my dissertation. The time away has ensured that the buildings, rituals, places, and arguments are a bit more fresh to me but still oddly familiar. I’m excited to share more about this small project in the coming weeks of Eastertide!     

More on Early Christian Baptisteries from Greece

A couple of weeks ago, I started to write some of a short introduction to the baptisteries of Greece that I’m working on with David Pettegew. I’m assuming writing about the Early Christian architecture of Greece is a bit like riding a bike… That said, right now, it’s a bit of a hodgepodge of random information mostly culled from recent publications. Below, I continue my rambling discussion on the topic that I hope will take shape over the next few weeks!

This will get tightened-up, re-ordered, and expanded over the next month, but I figured that Tsiknopempti was better than almost any time to think about Early Christianity in Greece. The first paragraph is the same as the one that I wrote in my previous post, but then I proceed to talk a bit about trends in the arrangement of baptisteries in Greece before summarizing a case study from a relatively recent article by Athanassios Mailis (which you can read here).

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The study of Early Christian baptisteries in Greece has developed relatively little since I. Volanakes’s 1976 book, The Early Christian Baptisteries of Greece (in Greek). The book offers a systematic survey of known baptisteries and remarks on their form and chronology. The vast majority of 68 structures catalogued by Sebastian Ristow in 1998 also appear in Volanakes and the exceptions, such as the baptisteries associated with J.-P. Sodini’s basilicas at Aliki on Thasos and the German excavations at Demetrias are fairly well known. There are undoubtedly a handful of unpublished or only superficially documented new discoveries over the past 25 years, but these seem unlikely to upset in a significant way how we understand the Early Christian landscape of Greece.

The baptisteries found within the modern boundaries of the nation of Greece produce a fairly inconsistent picture of their arrangement and basic form. We may partly attribute this to the opaque chronology of many of these structures, which we will discuss below. It is also worth noting that the modern nation of Greece includes falls mainly within the prefecture of Illyricum Orientalis which was under the jurisdiction of Rome until the 8th century but some of the Eastern Aegean islands were part of the prefecture of Asia which fell under the jurisdiction of Constantinople. While the liturgical influences of these two ecclesiastical spheres remain obscure in most cases, despite the efforts of Dimitrios Pallas (1979/1980) to associate the Constitutiones Apostolorum with the region, there appear to be traces of both Constantinopolitan and Adriatic influences on the ecclesiastical architecture as well as distinctly local trends. This suggests that the region likely saw a range of inter- and intra-regional liturgical influences and practices that may have shaped the architectural arrangement of the baptisteries and their change over time. Athanasios Mailis’s survey of the baptisteries in Greece noted for example that 50% of the baptisteries from churches in Illyricum Orieantalis (16 of 32) appear as annexes on the western part of the building. For churches in the Aegean islands, in contrast, baptisteries that stood as annexes on the western part of the church account for less than 25% of known examples (6 of 27). Mailis observed that same number of baptisteries arranged around the eastern part of the church represent examples located exclusively on the neighboring islands of Kos and Rhodes. This provides a compelling example of what was likely a regional tradition of architecture that perhaps reflected distinctive theological or liturgical understanding of baptismal practices.

The four known baptisteries with fonts located within the eastern part of church buildings on Crete, at either the north or south end of the aisles, likewise suggest regional practices (Mailis 2006). This rather unusual arrangement of baptisteries on Crete also demonstrates how complicated understanding the chronology, function, and influences of such structures can be. The baptisteries in churches at Panormos,
Vyzari, Archangel Michael Episkope, all have high stylobates which separate the nave from the aisles and this is characteristic of churches from the Aegean and mainland Greece. Mailis suggests that the tripartite organization of the eastern ends of these buildings and the appearance of apses at the eastern end of the nave and aisles at Vyzari suggests eastern liturgical influences perhaps associated with Constantinople or the churches of Cyprus or Asia Minor (Baldini 2013, 36). 

Early Christian Baptisteries of Greece

Over the next five weeks or so I have to go back to some research that I was doing in around 2008 to write a short piece and catalogue of Early Christian baptisteries in Greece. (For some reason this makes me use my Allen Iverson voice: We’re talking about Baptisteries. Not a basilica. Baptisteries). 

Anyway, the start of Lent feels like the right time for me to put some words down on paper that get the ball rolling. My little essay will contribute to a larger project spearheaded by Robin Jensen to bring together descriptions and interpretations of baptisteries from around the ancient world. I’m writing this with David Pettegrew who is writing a short survey of Early Christian archaeology that will complement our Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Archaeology. 

Here goes a very rough first swing:

The study of Early Christian baptisteries in Greece has developed relatively little since I. Volanakes’s 1976 book, The Early Christian Baptisteries of Greece (in Greek). The book offers a systematic survey of known baptisteries and remarks on their form and chronology. The vast majority of 68 structures catalogued by Sebastian Ristow in 1998 also appear in Volanakes and the exceptions, such as the baptisteries associated with J.-P. Sodini’s basilicas at Aliki on Thasos and the German excavations at Demetrias are fairly well known. There are undoubtedly a handful of unpublished or only superficially documented new discoveries over the past 25 years, but these seem unlikely to upset in a significant way how we understand the Early Christian landscape of Greece.

There are four significant challenges facing any study of the Early Christian baptisteries of Greece. The first, and most significant challenge, is that there are very few stratigraphically excavated Early Christian buildings in the region. In fact, most of the churches and baptisteries known from Greece were excavated before the middle of the 20th century through methods designed with a greater interest in exposing the horizontal architecture of the buildings than revealing the vertical stratigraphy associated with their construction. As a result, archaeologists have dated most churches and baptisteries in Greece on the basis of architectural style or mosaic decoration. This tends to provide only the most general chronology for these buildings and rarely allows us to reconstruct or date the changes that took place at these buildings over time. For example, it is clear that the impressive baptistery associated with the Lechaion basilica in Corinth is earlier than the enormous church which stands to its south, but it is unclear how much earlier and impossible to associate it with earlier structures at the site. The two baptisteries associated with Basilica C at Nea Anchialos (Thessalian Thebes) are only circumstantially associated related phases of the basilica. The excavator supposes that the smaller second baptistery is later and reflects a shift from adult to infant baptism in the 6th century AD. 

One consequence of the less than ideal excavation conditions associated with the both churches and baptisteries in Greece is that it remains very difficult to detect development over time. It is clear, for example, that the Lechaion baptistery underwent modification at some point with a smaller font suitable only for affusion installed in the southeastern conch of the octagonal baptistery. It is unclear however whether this font supplemented or replaced the central font in this room and reflected a wholesale change in baptismal ritual or the convenient addition of an alternative to ongoing practice of the earlier rite. It is likewise difficult to understand the chronological relationship between multiple baptisteries in any single community and whether the construction of some of these baptisteries marked earlier structures becoming obsolete or going out of use or changes in baptismal liturgy or the status of various churches.   In effect, archaeologists and architectural historians should treat the existing corpus of baptisteries for Greece, much like the corpus of Early Christian basilicas, provides a chronologically undifferentiated body of evidence which almost certainly combines regional, liturgical, and likely doctrinal variations present in Late Antique Christian communities in the region.  

Among the more interesting features of the Early Christian architectural landscape of Greece is the number of baptisteries associated with major urban centers. Nikopolis, Nea Anchialos (Thessalian Thebes), Argos, Corinth, and Athens all have multiple churches with baptisteries. Conventionally, the bishop was responsible for baptism and the rites occurred once per year as part of the Easter Vigil. Thus multiple baptisteries, assuming that they contemporary, requires some explanation. Of course, it is possible that the annual baptismal rites occurred on a kind of rotation between churches or even that the bishop performed the rites at multiple sites on the same day. Another explanation is that various congregations following various doctrines each had their own baptisteries in Greek cities attended by their own bishop. We have relatively little understanding of doctrinal diversity in Greece during Late Antiquity, but the evidence that we do have suggests that divisive church politics did not spare Greek see any more than any other part of the empire. Finally, it is tempting to imagine that the presence of baptisteries at some sites maybe have had a connection to pilgrimage and so-called “ad sanctos” baptismal practice in which pilgrims traveled to particular sites to receive baptism. The connection between the basilica at Lechaion, for example, and the martyrdom of Leonidas and his seven companions may provide an explanation for the elaborate character of the baptistery at that site. St. Leonidas and seven women were drowned off the coast of Corinth and, according to a 13th century martyrology, while being drowned celebrated his imminent martyrdom by comparing it to a second baptism. While it seems unlikely that the Lechaion baptistery performed second baptisms, which would be a distinctly heterodox practice at a site likely associated with an effort to promote imperial orthodoxy in a see situated at the eastern edge of western ecclesiastical control, it may suggest that the site was a popular destination for “ad sanctos” rites.

The large number of baptisteries in Greece especially in urban areas have also taken on particularly significant for scholars who seek to use baptisteries as a way to asses the nature or rate of conversion in Greece. Recent scholarship has suggested that large-scale Christianization in Greece occurred rather late and the proliferation of baptisteries in urban areas was a response to the need for mass baptisms during the Easter vigil. Putting aside the role of the bishop in baptism, this is not necessarily an implausible scenario, but the lack of chronological control over the dates of the baptisteries (and their destruction) in Greece makes it hard to align with existing evidence.

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This is a start. I promised myself to spend time today on my book project and this is all the time that I can allot for this today, but stay