Thread by @cinemashoebox

north carolina!? i hardly know 'er!

can you believe this is still happening? could your grin be any more fixed, your eyes any more glazed over, your tolerance for repititive jokes about round barns any more exhausted? nevertheless!

NC has 2,992 NRHPs - the most of any state i have left to do. we're back here, of course, to the coast and to the colonial USA, and still very much in the South. but beyond that i don't know what to expect, so let's find out

off to a (non-sarcastic) good start with the listing of a former synthetic textile plant taken over by the US military in WW2 for aircraft and missle production. Albert Kahn oversaw a new building here, one of the last before his death in 1943. impossible to find photos, though.

into it. bonus points for just allowing a buggy to gradually melt into the ground out front

enjoy a relaxing, healthful soak at

St Thomas' Episcopal Church, the oldest in the state: 1734. The beauty of slight imperfections of brickwork and tiny flourishes of decoration.

charming small moderne hospital! except it was replaced in 2001 with uhhhhhhh this

o m i n o u s

candidate for weirdest single listing name

sad to say this historic boathouse was destroyed by a hurricane a couple of years ago, depriving the people who choose the generic log-in screen for your windows laptop of further opportunities along these lines

hey hey hey we're in Asheville already. this is the only part of North Carolina i have personally been to. it rocked

Asheville is an extremely lovely small city in the west of the state, up in the mountains, full of hippies and fun stuff like this:

this kind of jazziness is most on show in Douglas Ellington's 1928 City Hall, which is a symbol of the city but i honestly rather dislike. something about the gemoetry and the disjointed detailing doesn't work for me

also downtown is a highly unexpected Spanish-style basilica because why not?

actually the reason why is that Spanish-American architect-engineer Rafael Guastavino retired to Asheville after a fruitful career in NYC, and built it in 1905. the dome uses his famous Guastavino tiles, as also in several major NYC projects (here under the Queensboro Bridge)

the tiles have huge structural integrity: they're an evolution of traditional Catalan vaulting methods from Guastavino's home. he was particularly pleased with the tiled dome of the Asheville basilica, so much so that he is buried here

Asheville's other unexpectedly chunky church is this one, the Cathedral of All Souls by Richard Holman Hunt (1896), a kind of hyper-muscular cottage of a church. weird, possibly not very successful, but interesting. much more so than Hunt's *real* reason for being in Asheville...

...yep, it's Biltmore. sigh.

here it is, Biltmore Estate, the largest private house in the US, built by Hunt for railway baron George Washington Vanderbilt II between 1889 and 1895, the ultimate symbol of the Gilded Age, yadda yadda yadda. there isn't very much interesting to say about Biltmore anymore?

no expense was spared and it's rich in detail, drawing specifically on the great French chateaux along the Loire. something this big and elaborate and artificial is almost inevitably going to contain good bits and also almost inevitably going to be a bit dead on arrival overall.

anyway yeah. i actually went to Asheville mostly to see Biltmore and then found that it was too much of a pain to get there from the town without a car and ended up just being in the town listening to bluegrass and looking at pottery instead. never saw it.

+++exceptionally heavy-handed counterpoint alert+++

also just outside Asheville, though, is a fascinating kind of anti-Biltmore, the Studies Building of Black Mountain College. behold:

Black Mountain College was an experimental university in the hills outside Asheville from 1933 to 1957, where many incredibly influential modern thinkers ended up working for a time (often as refugees from the Nazis). it began life renting this building for a while (booooooo):

but as it began to take off - with designers, thinkers and refugee Bauhausniks like Gropius, Breuer and Josef & Anni Albers now showing up there - the opportunity arose to make for Black Mountain a building worthy of its faculty and its ambitions:

...which never happened. that's Breuer and Gropius' design for ann unfolding lakeside complex that would have been a genuinely landmark building, but in the end the money was never forthcoming. RIP

what we got instead was an intriguing fragment that says more about method and community, but that's really what the college was about. ultimately, architect and professor (and the guy who got Gropius over to the USA) A. Lawrence Kocher designed a building with multiple spokes:

He then got the faculty and students to collaborate and build one of the spokes as a teaching/learning experience, hoping to expand to more in time. expansion never did happen, and the college ran out of money and closed in the late 50s, but its existence was hugely influential.

nor is that building - now the HQ of a Christian boys' summer camp, which, ok - the only influential bit of collaborative student-teacher building to happen on campus there: Black Mountain was also where faculty member Buckminster Fuller assembled his first domes.

nor was Black Mountain College just about design and architecture: John Cage taught there, and staged his first happening there. Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly studied art there. a whole school of avant garde poetry got going there.

anyway in conclusion stan Black Mountain College, not Biltmore

now entering my 5th calendar year of doing these. what is life

i'm actually in the US right now too. my perception of objective reality has melded entirely with these threads such that i experience walking down the street as scrolling down a list of NRHPs. send help

sadly i am * not* in North Carolina so am missing out on delights such as *checks notes* Big Shed

lmaooooo WHAT?

"The Edgar Allan Poe House is a historic home located at Lenoir, Caldwell County, North Carolina USA. It was built by a businessman named Edgar Allan Poe, not the famous writer. Lenoir's Poe was a prominent citizen, a builder and an early mayor of Lenoir.

i hope they don't tell visiting Goths that it's not *the* Edgar Allan Poe until the very end of the tour

now THIS is a house worth of Edgar Allan Poe (the writer, not the famous resident of Lenoir, North Carolina)

good weird vibe from Portsmouth, a town on one of the barrier islands along the coast that went from being a major colonial port to total abandonment in 1971 after hurricanes and changing tidal patterns had made it unviable. it's still ...sort of... possible to drive out there.

everything out there is still very well-maintained which makes it all even deliciously weirder