Random Notes - A Blog

6 January 2008

Notes from All Over Last spring, Richard Kenyon of Kenyon & Cutler Architects sent a CD of images and other materials for a number of buildings not documented on this site. The data was incorporated almost immediately, but for reasons that are hard to explain, the photos have languished until now. Richard’s traveling gave him the opportunity to visit some far-flung PS buildings, from New Jersey to Alberta.

The most interesting additions to me personally are buildings relatively nearby, in southeastern South Dakota. Most distant in this series is Purcell & Elmslie’s virtually unknown Branson Building, a structure that combines the post-and-lintel arrangement of Winona with the decorated portal of Hector, and, unusually, has its main entrance set on the long face of the building. Archival photos show that it was almost immediately converted from a banking establishment to an insurance office. Next door is an older commercial building that P&E apparently covered in stucco to better coordinate with their new building behind. This view carries Purcell’s annotation, “G.G.E. says Punk but this picture tells the essential story [of] what we were after.” Also in Mitchell is a firehouse with some fine Sullivanesque ornament.

A 75-mile trip southwest would bring us to Lake Andes, seat of Charles Mix County and its William Steele-designed courthouse. Fresh from his “collaboration” with Purcell & Elmslie in the design of the Woodbury County Courthouse (where Steele left the entire design to Elmslie), it’s intriguing to consider how that experience shaped Steele’s work in Lake Andes. I hope to present a photographic comparison of these two buildings on this site later this year.

Following Hwy. 50, which parallels the Missouri River, would bring us to Yankton, with its clutch of late Elmslie buildings for the former Yankton College, now a minimum-security federal prison camp. While GGE designed seven buildings and built five, I (courtesy of Richard Kenyon) only have photos of two, a science hall and a men’s dormitory.

From Yankton it’s only sixty-five miles to Sioux City, where for almost twenty years Steele employed the Prairie idiom for churches, banks, libraries, residences, and commercial buildings. Many remain, though some, like the Livestock Exchange Bank, are gone, and others, like the Williges Store, have been threatened. It's perhaps not surprising that Elmslie and Steele, the two architects who teamed up to design the largest Prairie School building, continued to use this vocabulary well after it had been abandoned by others.