“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

-Former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel

Floods alter reality and create unimaginable situations, structures, and images. Floods can turn roofs into porches, streets into rivers, cities into swamps and yards into swimming pools. Often it takes a crisis, such as a flood, to bring out the best in people. Not strictly in the form of heroism or generosity, but also through adrenaline-fueled ingenuity.

While conventional flood mitigation involves sand bags and metal flood barriers, home made levees were employed to keep the water out of yards and homes when the rivers began to rise near Vicksburg, Mississippi. Using nature against itself, the homeowners appropriated land art as preservationist functionalism. Born out of crisis, the levees alter our understanding of the water’s relationship to the land. Floating like small barges, these temporary islands appear scaleless against the vast flood, the rescued homes standing fortress-like inside the earthen mounds.

While some of the makeshift dams gave way during the flood, vanishing into the murky waters, the surviving mounds will also, in time, disappear into the landscape. Much like the earthworks projects of 1970s land artists, their existence will persist only in photographs; amazing remnants of a terrible disaster.

My interest in Stanley Tigerman’s 1978 collage of the sinking of Mies van der Rohe’s Crown Hall has nothing to do with Mies’ architectural reign over Chicago, the complexities of an academic rivalry between IIT and UIC, or postmodernism as an attack on modernism. It has everything to do with the shadowy foreground of the scene, and its mysterious man in a boat. Who was this man and what were his intentions?

At first glance, the man in the boat appears to be the lone survivor of a tragic accident. An accident which risked endangering, or perhaps even pushing to the verge of extinction, “glass box” architecture. The man’s survival is significant, as it means that the traditions of the glass box might be triumphantly carried on to future generations. This type of happily-ever-after scenario would best be played out on the big screen, to some sort of heroic Hollywood soundtrack; credits rolling, sobs of joy from the audience. The man in the boat was a hero.

Alternatively, is it possible the man in the boat intentionally sank Crown Hall? It would not be that hard, after all. A broken window or two would do the trick. While the first scenario portrays architecture as an innocent victim, the latter labels it as a threat. Glass boxes are not for everyone. I can picture the man’s face now: slowly, confidently paddling away from his kill, never looking back. The man in the boat was not a hero; he was a villain.

But, alas… more

Matt Shaw

John Stoughton