Text from Pub­lic Spirit Show­cases

Ter­ence Gower

 

 

THE HIR­SH­HORN TOWN PRO­JECT: 1955

 

Early Schemes 

 

In 1955, Joseph Hir­sh­horn de­cided to build a model town ad­ja­cent to his new min­ing op­er­a­tions in On­tario. He searched for an ar­chi­tect who shared his aes­thetic in­ter­ests, fi­nally set­tling on Philip John­son, a ris­ing star with many high-pro­file

clients. At this point in his ca­reer John­son was closely im­i­tat­ing Lud­wig Mies van der Rohe, whose work he val­ued for its sim­ple beauty and air of so­phis­ti­cated moder­nity. This is pre­cisely the look that Hir­sh­horn wanted for his new town. John­son was hired as prin­ci­pal de­signer and given cre­ative con­trol over the town pro­ject, while John B. Parkin As­so­ci­ates of Toronto were hired as the lo­cal firm.

 

These un­dated early schemes trace the evo­lu­tion of the ar­chi­tect-client di­a­logue on work­ers’ hous­ing. The com­pact city core, sit­u­ated around what John­son de­scribed as an “Ital­ian pi­azza,” is con­sis­tent through­out all the schemes, but the con­fig­u­ra­tion of the town’s res­i­den­tial

zone changes from sub­ur­ban-style sin­gle fam­ily houses on small plots (top) to du­plexes (above) and then a quad­ran­gle of twelve-fam­ily apart­ment blocks (be­low). An­other early ar­chi­tect’s model (bot­tom) shows the cen­tral pi­azza dom­i­nated by a com­i­cally en­larged ver­sion of Marino Marini’s 1953 Horse and Rider.

 

1a. Un­dated Plan for Hir­sh­horn, On­tario. Philip John­son Pa­pers (PJ 11.11.60), Mu­seum of Mod­ern Art Archives, New York, New York

 

1b. Un­dated Plan for Hir­sh­horn, On­tario. Philip John­son Pa­pers, The Getty Re­search In­sti­tute, Los An­ge­les, Cal­i­for­nia

 

1c. Un­dated Plan for Hir­sh­horn, On­tario (fac­sim­ile). John B. Parkin Fonds,

Cana­dian Ar­chi­tec­tural Archives, Cal­gary, Al­berta

 

1d. Pho­to­graph of Model (Early Scheme) for Hir­sh­horn, On­tario. Joseph H. Hir­sh­horn Pa­pers, Smith­son­ian In­sti­tu­tion Archives, Wash­ing­ton, DC

 

 

First Pri­or­ity: Hous­ing 

 

Build­ing a new town

of­fered an op­por­tu­nity to en­gage in the “so­cial en­gi­neer­ing” at the heart of Mod­ernist ur­ban­ism in the 1950s, with hous­ing, health care, and ed­u­ca­tion in­cor­po­rated at the ear­li­est stages of the pro­ject. At the top of the plan­ners’ list was col­lec­tive work­ers’ hous­ing to serve Joseph Hir­sh­horn’s newly opened ura­nium mines. In the let­ter at right John B. Parkin writes to in­form Franc Joubin (Hir­sh­horn’s min­ing as­so­ci­ate) of a forth­com­ing plan­ning ap­pli­ca­tion that will stress the ur­gency of hous­ing con­struc­tion. In twen­ti­eth-cen­tury Canada, the set­tle­ments that arose around min­ing or lum­ber op­er­a­tions were of­ten hap­haz­ard af­fairs, where work­ers lived in ran­dom group­ings of trail­ers. These were im­pro­vised—and of­ten some­what law­less—com­mu­ni­ties with min­i­mal in­fra­struc­ture and a tran­sient, take-the-money-and-run spirit re­call­ing the gold rush.

 

Hir­sh­horn, On­tario’s pub­lic hous­ing pro­gram is par­tic­u­larly re­mark­able in this light. The hous­ing units are de­tailed in Philip John­son’s site plan, el­e­va­tion, and floor plan (left) for eight twelve-fam­ily apart­ment build­ings. These were, in fact, the only fully de­vel­oped plans made for Hir­sh­horn, On­tario, be­fore the pro­ject was aban­doned, though the build­ing site was cleared and ready for con­struc­tion. Ed­u­ca­tion also ap­pears on the agenda at this stage: Parkin, in his let­ter, rec­om­mends tem­po­rary school­rooms in the apart­ment build­ings’ base­ments.

 

1e. Site Plan for Hir­sh­horn, On­tario, Apart­ment Build­ings. Philip John­son Pa­pers, The Getty Re­search In­sti­tute, Los An­ge­les, Cal­i­for­nia

 

1f. Plan and El­e­va­tions for Hir­sh­horn, On­tario Apart­ment Build­ings (fac­sim­i­les). Philip John­son Pa­pers, The Getty Re­search In­sti­tute, Los An­ge­les, Cal­i­for­nia

 

1g. (Right) Mem­o­ran­dum to Mr. Franc R. Joubin from John B. Parkin, July 20, 1955. John B. Parkin Fonds, Cana­dian Ar­chi­tec­tural Archives, Cal­gary, Al­berta

 

 

The Brief: A Plan­ning Pro­posal for Hir­sh­horn, On­tario

 

The key doc­u­ment for Hir­sh­horn’s town pro­ject, a pro­posal to the On­tario Min­is­ter of Mu­nic­i­pal Af­fairs, con­sists of an eight-page writ­ten de­scrip­tion, a pho­to­graph of the model of the town, and a land-use plan. Joseph Hir­sh­horn was clearly try­ing to keep his pro­posal low-key and prac­ti­cal when pre­sent­ing it to the gov­ern­ment. For in­stance, while he avoids men­tion­ing the fu­ture town’s ex­ten­sive cul­tural fa­cil­i­ties in the pro­posal, in con­trast, his state­ments to the press at this time were ex­cla­ma­tions about the cen­tral role of beauty and cul­ture. But at one point in the brief Hir­sh­horn sum­ma­rizes his utopian vi­sion with the phrase “…this town will be planned to­wards happy liv­ing….”

 

The land use plan in­cluded with the brief de­tails the re­la­tion­ship be­tween the city cen­ter, res­i­den­tial sec­tor, and fu­ture in­dus­trial zone to the east. As he men­tions in the Other In­dus­tries sec­tion, Hir­sh­horn was adamant that the town at­tract out­side man­u­fac­tur­ing or pro­cess­ing plants to these large in­dus­trial al­lot­ments, an ef­fort to al­lay fears of con­cen­tra­tion of power unique to the one-in­dus­try town. Yet Philip John­son’s model makes ap­par­ent the dom­i­nant force in the town—the min­ing com­pany housed in the ten-story of­fice tower in the cen­tral plaza.

 

The town cen­ter plan, be­low right, demon­strates the ax­ial sym­me­try of which the ar­chi­tect was so fond. John­son re­port­edly based

his de­sign on his no­tion of “The Pro­ces­sional”—the se­ries of sym­met­ri­cal vis­tas and com­po­si­tions a vis­i­tor en­coun­ters strolling through the Re­nais­sance towns of Italy. Yet, at the same time, John­son in­cor­po­rated a nod to his mas­ter, Mies van der Rohe, in the lay­out of the cen­tral plaza, where the of­fice tower and mu­seum are placed off axis and per­pen­dic­u­lar to one an­other.

 

1h. Pho­to­graph of Fi­nal Model for Hir­sh­horn, On­tario. Joseph H. Hir­sh­horn Pa­pers, Smith­son­ian In­sti­tu­tion Archives, Wash­ing­ton, DC

 

1i., j., k., l. Se­lec­tions from the Eight-Page Doc­u­ment: A Brief Sub­mit­ted to the Ho­n­ourable W.A. Good­fel­low,

Min­is­ter of Mu­nic­i­pal Af­fairs, Province of On­tario, Re. Pro­posed Town of Hir­sh­horn, On­tario, July 1955. Joseph H. Hir­sh­horn Pa­pers, Smith­son­ian In­sti­tu­tion Archives, Wash­ing­ton, DC

 

 

1m. (Above) Land Use Plan for Hir­sh­horn, On­tario. Joseph H. Hir­sh­horn Pa­pers, Smith­son­ian In­sti­tu­tion Archives, Wash­ing­ton, DC

 

1n. (Left) 2008 Topo­graphic Sur­vey Map Show­ing Lo­ca­tion of Hir­sh­horn Town-Site in Red. (Map No. 2017360051200—de­tail). On­tario Min­istry of Nat­ural Re­sources, Toronto

 

1o. (Right) Map from the Eight-Page Doc­u­ment: A Brief Sub­mit­ted to the Ho­n­ourable W.A. Good­fel­low, Min­is­ter of Mu­nic­i­pal Af­fairs, Province of On­tario, Re. Pro­posed Town of Hir­sh­horn, On­tario, July 1955. Joseph H. Hir­sh­horn Pa­pers, Smith­son­ian In­sti­tu­tion Archives, Wash­ing­ton, DC

 

1p. (Be­low) Town Cen­ter Plan for Hir­sh­horn, On­tario. Philip John­son Pa­pers, The Getty Re­search In­sti­tute, Los An­ge­les, Cal­i­for­nia

 

 

The Pub­lic­ity Drive 

 

Nu­mer­ous ar­ti­cles were pub­lished about the Hir­sh­horn town pro­ject thanks to  a com­pre­hen­sive pub­lic re­la­tions cam­paign. This let­ter (right) be­tween the col­lab­o­rat­ing ar­chi­tects sheds light on the pub­lic re­la­tions strat­egy, in which the model of the town played a lead­ing role. It was used in photo op­por­tu­ni­ties with the founder, the ar­chi­tect, and even for­mer US Sec­re­tary of State Dean Ache­son (above right), who vis­ited to see his old friend Joseph Hir­sh­horn’s en­deavor and to “do a lit­tle fish­ing.” The lead­ing story in the fol­low­ing week’s Toronto Fi­nan­cial Post (above) and the Mon­treal Star ar­ti­cle pub­lished the same day (right) give a clear pic­ture of how the founder of Hir­sh­horn, On­tario, in­tended the town to look and func­tion. Hir­sh­horn lists many de­tails, such as the spa­cious streets, the preser­va­tion

of the site’s ex­ist­ing trees, and a print­ing plant for a lo­cal news­pa­per, while re­peat­edly em­pha­siz­ing the cen­tral role of cul­ture and aes­thet­ics. The cen­ter­piece of the pro­ject was to be an art cen­ter (“Art Cen­tre Counts Most”, Fi­nan­cial Post) de­signed to house Hir­sh­horn’s art col­lec­tion.

 

Un­for­tu­nately it was the founder’s ag­gres­sive press strat­egy, at least partly, that led to the pro­ject’s ter­mi­na­tion. Hir­sh­horn’s bold pro­nounce­ments, when they ap­peared in print, dis­turbed both nearby com­mu­ni­ties and gov­ern­ment au­thor­i­ties, who were given the im­pres­sion that the plan was rush­ing ahead with­out the req­ui­site round of ne­go­ti­a­tions and ap­provals.

 

Hir­sh­horn was very dis­ap­pointed when the pro­ject was can­celled. He could not un­der­stand why Canada did not want to re­ceive his gift of the “most beau­ti­ful town” and his fa­mous art col­lec­tion. How­ever, some years later, Hir­sh­horn was able to ex­er­cise his gen­eros­ity with the gift of a com­mu­nity cen­ter for El­liott Lake, a nearby town.

 

1q. Let­ter from John P. Parkin to Philip John­son, July 21, 1955. John B. Parkin Fonds, Cana­dian Ar­chi­tec­tural Archives, Cal­gary, Al­berta

 

1r. The Globe and Mail (Toronto), July 30, 1955. Joseph H. Hir­sh­horn Pa­pers, Smith­son­ian In­sti­tu­tion Archives, Wash­ing­ton, DC 

 

1s. The Fi­nan­cial Post (Toronto)(July 30, 1955) (fac­sim­ile from mi­cro­fiche). News­pa­per Col­lec­tion, Li­brary of Con­gress, Wash­ing­ton, DC

 

1t. The Mon­treal Star, July 30, 1955 (fac­sim­ile from mi­cro­fiche). News­pa­per Col­lec­tion, Li­brary of Con­gress, Wash­ing­ton, DC

 

 

 

URA­NIUM IN CANADA: BE­FORE 1955 AND AF­TER

 

The Great Cana­dian Ura­nium Rush

 

Ura­nium is used to sus­tain nu­clear chain re­ac­tions and is a key el­e­ment in both the atomic bomb and the re­ac­tors used in power plants. As the Atomic Age dawned in the early 1950s, de­mand for this el­e­ment spurred a stam­pede rem­i­nis­cent of the gold rushes of the 1800s. The deep wilder­ness of lo­ca­tions like North­ern Saskatchewan was in­vaded by scores of prospec­tors. Fam­i­lies even turned their sum­mer va­ca­tions into prospect­ing trips, equipped with mo­tor homes and Geiger coun­ters.

 

It was in this fever­ish cli­mate that Joseph Hir­sh­horn re­ceived a vague tip about a ura­nium cache in West­ern On­tario. When a few tests turned up gold, so to speak, a mas­sive,

se­cret “stak­ing bee” was or­ga­nized in which Hir­sh­horn claimed enough ura­nium-rich ter­ri­tory to yield 150 mil­lion tons of ore. The stake was so large and un­prece­dented that Hir­sh­horn be­came known as the “Ura­nium King.” These pho­tographs (above) show Hir­sh­horn’s men prospect­ing with Geiger coun­ters dur­ing the Blind River Stak­ing Bee. The group was made up of both prospec­tors and lawyers, the lat­ter sent to reg­is­ter the claims. The stak­ing was con­ducted in se­crecy to avoid a rush of prospec­tors, yet press re­ports were leaked (above left).

 

2a. Col­liers Mag­a­zine (Oc­to­ber 2, 1953). Artist’s Col­lec­tion

 

2b.

Fi­nan­cial Post (Au­gust 1, 1953) (fac­sim­ile) Joseph H. Hir­sh­horn Pa­pers, Smith­son­ian In­sti­tu­tion Archives, Wash­ing­ton, DC

 

2c., d., e. Prospect­ing Pho­tos: Blind River Stak­ing Bee. Joseph H. Hir­sh­horn Pa­pers, Smith­son­ian In­sti­tu­tion Archives, Wash­ing­ton, DC

 

 

Sink­ing Mines

 

Joseph Hir­sh­horn’s ura­nium stakes in West­ern On­tario cov­ered an area roughly the size of Man­hat­tan. The claims, mea­sur­ing forty acres each,

are vis­i­ble in the map at top.  Hir­sh­horn made his dis­cov­ery af­ter an­a­lyz­ing lo­cal hearsay, con­sult­ing with the best ge­ol­o­gists, and learn­ing that non-ra­dioac­tive residue on the earth’s sur­face could be a sign of much richer de­posits be­low. Ex­ploit­ing the claims shown on this map en­tailed drilling mine shafts as deep as 1,000 feet. The pho­to­graph be­low, pub­lished by LIFE, shows three of the re­ported sev­enty-two en­gi­neers em­ployed in the de­sign and de­vel­op­ment of the new ura­nium mines work­ing on an ex­trac­tion strat­egy for the es­ti­mated 1,500 tons of ore col­lected daily. The Pronto Mine (shown in the snap­shots at left and whose lo­ca­tion is also vis­i­ble on claim #23526) was the first shaft to be opened. A ju­bi­lant Joseph Hir­sh­horn started the mine’s power sup­ply in the au­tumn of 1953 (lower left).

Once the op­er­a­tion was un­der­way, Hir­sh­horn en­tered the mine (above) to view the ura­nium peb­bles that would make him rich. In these early days, ura­nium was ex­tracted in the same way as other min­er­als, as shown in this pe­riod film still (above left). The dan­gers of close con­tact with this ra­dioac­tive el­e­ment were only dis­cov­ered later.

 

2f. Claim Map of Pronto and Pa­ter Ura­nium Mines. John B. Parkin Fonds,

Cana­dian Ar­chi­tec­tural Archives, Cal­gary, Al­berta

 

2g. Still from The Birth of a Great Ura­nium Area, A Tech­ni­cal Mine Con­sul­tants and Cana­dian Tele­vi­sion

Film Pro­duc­tion. 16mm Film. Hir­sh­horn Mu­seum and Sculp­ture Gar­den Archives, Wash­ing­ton, DC

 

2h. Joseph Hir­sh­horn Vis­it­ing Pronto Mine. Joseph H. Hir­sh­horn Pa­pers, Smith­son­ian In­sti­tu­tion Archives, Wash­ing­ton, DC, Record Unit 7449

 

2i. Pronto Hoist Build­ing. Joseph H. Hir­sh­horn Pa­pers, Smith­son­ian In­sti­tu­tion Archives, Wash­ing­ton, DC, Record Unit 7449

 

2j. Pronto Mine. Joseph H. Hir­sh­horn Pa­pers, Smith­son­ian In­sti­tu­tion Archives, Wash­ing­ton, DC, Record Unit 7449

 

2k. Joseph Hir­sh­horn Start­ing Pronto Mine Power Sup­ply. Joseph H. Hir­sh­horn Pa­pers, Smith­son­ian In­sti­tu­tion Archives, Wash­ing­ton, DC, Record Unit 7449

 

2l. Three-Di­men­sional Model. LIFE (Au­gust 1, 1955) (fac­sim­ile). Joseph H. Hir­sh­horn Pa­pers, Smith­son­ian In­sti­tu­tion Archives, Wash­ing­ton, DC, Record Unit 7449

 

 

Fi­nanc­ing 

 

The Man­hat­tan Pro­ject, a multi-gov­ern­ment ef­fort to de­velop the atomic bomb, re­quired large quan­ti­ties of ura­nium at a time when war-time dan­gers of ship­ping the min­eral from es­tab­lished sup­pli­ers in the Czech Re­pub­lic and Bel­gian Congo were at their height. Thus, the search for safer sources of ura­nium in coun­tries such as Canada be­gan in earnest in the early 1940s. The Cana­dian gov­ern­ment es­tab­lished it­self as ex­clu­sive bro­ker to lo­cal ura­nium pro­duc­ers, sell­ing the el­e­ment only to “an uniden­ti­fied cus­tomer.” For rea­sons of both se­cu­rity and profit, the prac­tice con­tin­ued in Hir­sh­horn’s day. When he made his ura­nium dis­cov­ery, the Cana­dian gov­ern­ment im­me­di­ately placed an or­der worth $207 mil­lion. But the min­eral had to be ex­tracted and processed, which would take at least two years and cost mil­lions of dol­lars.

 

As the pro­ject’s de­vel­oper and di­rec­tor, fundrais­ing be­came Hir­sh­horn’s most ur­gent task. He is­sued stock with names such as Peach Ura­nium (which rose from $1.50 to $145 a share), sought out­side in­vestors, and fi­nally sold the ma­jor­ity of his own stake to Rio Tinto of Lon­don, part of the Roth­schild fi­nan­cial group. The deal funded the con­struc­tion of the drilling and pro­cess­ing op­er­a­tion, which pro­duced its first ship­ment of ura­nium right on sched­ule in Sep­tem­ber 1955. This sale also made Hir­sh­horn a sub­stan­tial profit. The min­ing mag­nate was cel­e­brated in the fi­nan­cial press (For­tune Mag­a­zine, bot­tom) and wel­comed to the New York Stock Ex­change, where his ura­nium stock had made many in­vestors rich (above). The cold,

con­de­scend­ing treat­ment he had ear­lier suf­fered from the Toronto fi­nan­cial com­mu­nity was at least partly as­suaged by a glow­ing fea­ture in Canada’s na­tional mag­a­zine, Maclean’s (be­low). His as­so­ci­a­tion with Rio Tinto ended in 1960, when he sold the last of his shares, then “took the money and bought art.”

 

2m. Amer­i­can Stock Ex­change Pres­i­dent’s Re­port, 1956–57. Joseph H. Hir­sh­horn Pa­pers, Smith­son­ian In­sti­tu­tion Archives, Wash­ing­ton, DC

 

2n. (Right) Maclean’s Mag­a­zine, Oc­to­ber 29, 1955 (fac­sim­ile). Joseph H. Hir­sh­horn Pa­pers, Smith­son­ian In­sti­tu­tion Archives, Wash­ing­ton, DC

 

2o. Joseph Hir­sh­horn at New York Stock Ex­change Read­ing Al­gom List­ing. Joseph H. Hir­sh­horn Pa­pers, Smith­son­ian In­sti­tu­tion Archives, Wash­ing­ton, DC

 

2p. For­tune (No­vem­ber 1956). Artist’s Col­lec­tion

 

 

The Af­ter­math

 

When Joseph Hir­sh­horn made his ura­nium dis­cov­ery in 1953, the dan­gers posed by this el­e­ment were largely un­known. Since then, ura­nium has come to be as­so­ci­ated

with a range of con­cerns, in­clud­ing the en­vi­ron­men­tal dam­age caused by ex­trac­tion and pro­cess­ing, health dan­gers posed by ex­po­sure to ra­di­a­tion, and ura­nium’s cen­tral role in fu­el­ing the Cold War arms race.

 

To cel­e­brate the first ship­ments of ura­nium from Hir­sh­horn’s mines in 1955, in­vestors were given tiny glass viles of yel­low­cake, a ura­nium con­cen­trate. Forty years later, one of those viles, now cracked, was dis­cov­ered by Hir­sh­horn’s widow in his desk drawer. What had seemed in the 1950s like a harm­less sou­venir led to a team of spe­cial­ists in Haz-Mat suits evac­u­at­ing Ms. Hir­sh­horn’s Florida neigh­bor­hood. A 1979 let­ter from Stew­art Udall (the ac­tivist lawyer and for­mer Sec­re­tary of the In­te­rior

un­der Pres­i­dent Kennedy) to Joseph Hir­sh­horn at­tempts to de­ter­mine if Hir­sh­horn and his as­so­ci­ates knew about the health haz­ards of ura­nium ex­po­sure and whether they were tak­ing the pre­cau­tions to min­i­mize those risks with ad­e­quate ven­ti­la­tion. Udall, a na­tive of Ari­zona, was then work­ing on a case against the US gov­ern­ment for en­dan­ger­ing the lives of Navajo min­ers in the Ari­zona mines, opened as early as 1949. Ac­cord­ing to the re­ply of Hir­sh­horn’s as­so­ci­ate, Franc R. Joubin, by 1954, in Canada at least, ven­ti­la­tion was in place when the first min­ers went into Hir­sh­horn’s mines. This had be­come com­mon prac­tice in all forms of min­ing, due to the dan­gers of sil­i­co­sis and other lung ail­ments.

 

The en­vi­ron­men­tal ef­fects of ura­nium min­ing were much slower to be dis­cov­ered. Cana­dian artist Robert del Tredici started doc­u­ment­ing the hu­man and en­vi­ron­men­tal ef­fects of the Cold War arms in­dus­try in the late 1970s. Del Tredici’s book At Work in the Fields of the Bomb is a chill­ing doc­u­ment of the day-to-day pro­ce­dures of an in­dus­try whose ul­ti­mate end is the fa­cil­i­ta­tion of mass hu­man de­struc­tion. Many of those op­er­a­tions oc­cur near the site of Hir­sh­horn’s pro­posed town. One pho­to­graph shows an im­por­tant pro­cess­ing plant for yel­low­cake just down the road from Joseph Hir­sh­horn’s pri­vate villa. In an­other del Tredici pho­to­graph, Stan­rock Tail­ings Wall, taken just a few miles from the Hir­sh­horn town site, forty-three years af­ter Hir­sh­horn’s first ura­nium claim was reg­is­tered, a mas­sive wall of ra­dioac­tive

mine waste forms a back­drop for a bleak and poi­soned land­scape. In a sin­gle pho­to­graph, the artist has man­aged to tell the story of the ura­nium in­dus­try’s vast eco­log­i­cal tragedy.

 

Hir­sh­horn’s ura­nium min­ing pro­jects pro­pelled the Cold War arms race. This is an eth­i­cal grey area, where di­rect lines of cause and ef­fect are hard to trace. Yet the arms build-up and doc­trines such as Mu­tual As­sured De­struc­tion were defin­ing psy­cho­log­i­cal events of the Cold War era. While Hir­sh­horn, On­tario, was be­ing planned to house the work­ers at the sup­ply side of the arms race, other planned towns were be­ing de­signed for its re­ceiv­ing end. Clarence Stein planned a se­ries

of satel­lite towns around Wash­ing­ton, DC, to house fed­eral gov­ern­ment work­ers safely out­side an in­ner “dan­ger zone” (the zone af­fected by a nu­clear blast). Stein was the au­thor of To­wards New Towns for Amer­ica, a pub­li­ca­tion at the heart of the New Towns Move­ment in the 1950s, and a likely ref­er­ence for the ar­chi­tects of Hir­sh­horn, On­tario. The New Towns Move­ment points to one of the great ironies of the Atomic Age: these utopian schemes, with the best in­ten­tions and with their un­prece­dented so­cial in­fra­struc­ture, were be­ing built in the cli­mate of un­cer­tainty cre­ated by the specter of nu­clear war. Two gen­er­a­tions grew up with the ter­ror of Mu­tu­ally As­sured De­struc­tion, yet it is still eas­ier to quan­tify the health and en­vi­ron­men­tal fall­out of the nu­clear arms race than to gauge its psy­cho­log­i­cal ef­fect.

 

2q. Let­ter from Stew­art Udall to Joseph Hir­sh­horn (and Verso), Jan­u­ary 19, 1979.

Joseph H. Hir­sh­horn Pa­pers, Smith­son­ian In­sti­tu­tion Archives, Wash­ing­ton, DC

 

2r. Robert del Tredici. Stan­rock Tail­ings Wall. Ex­hi­bi­tion Print.

Artist’s Pho­to­graph Cap­tion: The wall of white sand in the back of the trees is made up of ra­dioac­tive mill wastes from ura­nium min­ing in the El­liot Lake re­gion of On­tario. More than 100 mil­lion tons of these tail­ings have been de­posited di­rectly into the en­vi­ron­ment. Some of them have been car­ried by the Ser­pent River

Sys­tem into the Great lakes. The ra­dioac­tive piles are un­marked and are not vis­i­ble from the road. They will re­main haz­ardous for hun­dreds of thou­sands of years. Stan­rock Mine, El­liot Lake, On­tario, Canada. Au­gust 25th, 1986

 

2s. Let­ter from Franc R. Joubin to Stew­art Udall, March 5, 1979. Joseph H. Hir­sh­horn Pa­pers, Smith­son­ian In­sti­tu­tion Archives, Wash­ing­ton, DC

 

 

 

THE HIR­SH­HORN COL­LEC­TION IN 1955

 

A Col­lec­tion for Hir­sh­horn, On­tario

 

A close look at Joseph Hir­sh­horn’s art col­lec­tion in 1955 re­veals a num­ber of in­ter­est­ing nar­ra­tives and con­nec­tions. It is un­likely Hir­sh­horn ac­quired these works for their place within art his­tory, the way con­tem­po­rary col­lec­tions are of­ten formed. Sources close to Hir­sh­horn re­call that he col­lected art in­tu­itively, fol­low­ing a “gut feel­ing,” and that he dis­cov­ered new work through re­fer­rals from artists and art deal­ers. He de­scribed the charge he would get from a work as go­ing “straight to the heart,” as if he were per­ceiv­ing a kind of en­ergy em­a­nat­ing from the piece. When he had this sen­sa­tion, Hir­sh­horn would in­vest heav­ily in the artist’s work, of­ten pur­chas­ing many of the works

on dis­play in an ex­hi­bi­tion or in the artist’s stu­dio. Hir­sh­horn made many early “dis­cov­er­ies” of artists who later en­tered the Mod­ernist can­non, such as Joseph Al­bers and Jean-Paul Ri­opelle. Oth­ers, in­clud­ing Irene Rice Pereira and Va­clav Vyt­lacil, have be­come less promi­nent and are now pri­mar­ily known to art his­to­ri­ans.

 

Hir­sh­horn be­gan col­lect­ing art se­ri­ously in the late 1930s, con­cen­trat­ing on such fig­u­ra­tive painters as Raphael Soyer, Philip Ever­good and Louis Eil­shemius. He started to ac­quire ab­stract and sur­re­al­ist work by the late 1940s. By 1955, Hir­sh­horn ap­pears to have earned a rep­u­ta­tion for col­lect­ing more cut­ting-edge ab­stract art. Franc R. Joubin—Hir­sh­horn’s prin­ci­pal ura­nium

min­ing as­so­ci­ate—de­scribed the col­lec­tion in his au­to­bi­og­ra­phy, Not for Gold Alone:

 

The great ma­jor­ity of Hir­sh­horn’s col­lec­tion to which I was ex­posed were works from 1945 to 1955 in the ab­stract ex­pres­sion­ist mode. At first, I was not at ease in this near-to­tal sat­u­ra­tion with ab­stract mod­erns.

 

Joubin’s state­ment is the de­par­ture point for this analy­sis of the Hir­sh­horn col­lec­tion as it ap­peared in 1955. This pre­sen­ta­tion in­cludes the works dis­played in this show­case as well as the vir­tual ex­hi­bi­tion Ab­stract Art from the Hir­sh­horn Col­lec­tion shown in the video.

 

The Hir­sh­horn col­lec­tion in 1955 rep­re­sents the bridge be­tween the pre-war Eu­ro­pean avant-garde (de Stijl, Con­struc­tivism, Bauhaus, Sur­re­al­ism) and the art of post-war Amer­ica. This mi­gra­tion of ideas started when Amer­i­can artists such as Michael Loew, George L. K. Mor­ris, and Va­clav Vyt­lacil (3b) vis­ited Eu­rope in the 1920s and 1930s to study with in­no­va­tors like Fer­nand Léger and Hans Hoff­man. But the real im­mi­gra­tion of ideas oc­curred in the 1930s when these Eu­ro­pean “mas­ters” be­gan to flee Eu­rope and es­tab­lish their stu­dios in the US. A num­ber of artists ar­riv­ing from Eu­rope had left be­hind in­flu­en­tial po­si­tions (most no­tably in the Dessau Bauhaus) and nat­u­rally sought new teach­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties. Joseph Al­bers, Hans Hoff­man, and Las­zlo Mo­holy Nagy be­came art pro­fes­sors at Black Moun­tain

Col­lege in North Car­olina, The Art Stu­dents’ League in New York, and The New Bauhaus in Chicago, re­spec­tively. The Hir­sh­horn col­lec­tion is es­pe­cially strong on works by the for­mer stu­dents of Hoff­man, who taught gen­er­a­tions of ab­stract artists. These in­clude Irene Rice Pereira (3c), Bur­goyne Diller (3e), Al­bert Swinden (3f), and Jack Tworkov.

 

Oth­ers im­mi­grated much younger, such as Jimmy Ernst, who with his artis­tic pedi­gree (he was the son of sur­re­al­ist Max Ernst) soon de­vel­oped a fol­low­ing af­ter he came to New York in 1938. Still other artists, like Vic­tor Vas­sarely (3d) and Maria-He­lena Vieira da Silva, chose to re­main in Eu­rope, while Cana­dian Jean-Paul Ri­opelle moved to France in the

late 1940s. Hir­sh­horn ac­quired some of their work dur­ing post-war vis­its to Paris gal­leries, but these Eu­ro­pean artists were also show­ing and sell­ing their work in New York, which, by the 1940s, had be­come a global cen­ter of the art mar­ket. Hir­sh­horn made many of his dis­cov­er­ies and pur­chases of in­ter­na­tional artists at New York gal­leries like ACA or André Em­merich.

 

Joseph Hir­sh­horn pur­chased many works by Joseph Al­bers, who had both taught at the Bauhaus and was a cen­tral fig­ure within the Amer­i­can move­ment of Geo­met­ric Ab­strac­tion (Study for Struc­tural Con­stel­la­tion, 1954; above, 3a). The move­ment’s fol­low­ing gen­er­a­tion is rep­re­sented here by Bur­goyne Diller (903-47

, 1947(above, 3e) and Al­bert Swinden (Study Af­ter Tri­an­gu­lar Move­ment, 1950; above right, 3f), whose gouaches on pa­per demon­strate an in­tu­itive free­dom—a kind of “loos­en­ing up”—in con­trast to Al­bers’ strictly an­a­lyt­i­cal lin­ear study.

 

The Hir­sh­horn col­lec­tion in 1955 in­cluded many late sur­re­al­ist works in which fig­u­ra­tion is al­most com­pletely bro­ken down.  Jimmy Ernst (Ab­strac­tion, 1952;  above, 3h) placed ab­stract com­po­si­tions against lay­ered back­grounds that gave a sense of pic­to­r­ial depth, while the Por­tuguese painter Maria-He­lena Vieira da Silva cre­ated swirling,  faintly nat­u­ral­is­tic forms (Un­ti­tled, 1955; above, 3g). The Amer­i­can artist Man Ray pro­gressed from sur­re­al­is­tic

still lives to a to­tal break­down of rec­og­niz­able sub­ject mat­ter. Hir­sh­horn started col­lect­ing Man Ray’s elab­o­rate shaped can­vases, which re­sem­ble paint­ings of ab­stract sculp­tures, in the late 1940s (Shake­spearean Equa­tion: King Lear, 1948; above, 3i, and Shake­spearean Equa­tion: Mea­sure for Mea­sure, 1948; above, 3j).

 

Other artists work­ing be­fore 1955 moved be­yond geom­e­try and the pic­to­r­ial field to work with paint and can­vas in new ways. The best known of these—like Jack­son Pol­lock—were work­ing un­der the um­brella of the New York School. But Jean-Paul Ri­opelle was si­mul­ta­ne­ously pro­duc­ing can­vases in Mon­treal and Paris in which paint was pre­sented solely for its phys­i­cal prop­er­ties of

color and tex­ture (Ab­strac­tion, 1952; above, 3k). Spa­tial Con­cept, 1951 (above, 3l) by Lu­cio Fontana, is a study for his fa­mous slash paint­ings in which the artist cre­ates com­po­si­tions in real space by cut­ting and punch­ing the can­vas.

 

The works on view here and in the ac­com­pa­ny­ing video were col­lected by Joseph Hir­sh­horn be­fore 1955. If a Hir­sh­horn Mu­seum had been built in On­tario, as in­tended, in that year, these paint­ings and draw­ings could have been in­cluded in its in­au­gural ex­hi­bi­tion. The group as a whole tells a fas­ci­nat­ing story of artis­tic progress dur­ing this time. Like Philip John­son’s de­sign for the 1955 Hir­sh­horn Mu­seum, this se­lec­tion bears traces of the artis­tic break­throughs

of the pre-war Eu­ro­pean avant-garde, and shows signs of a transat­lantic di­a­logue and de­bate still fresh in the mod­ernism of mid-twen­ti­eth-cen­tury Amer­ica.

 

 

 

3a. Josef Al­bers (Amer­i­can, b. Bot­trop, Ger­many, 1888–1976), Study For Struc­tural Con­stel­la­tion: D-40A, 1954, ink on pa­per. The Joseph H. Hir­sh­horn Be­quest, 1981 (86.45)

 

3b. Va­clav Vyt­lacil (Amer­i­can, b. New York, New York, 1892–1984), Con­struc­tion,

1938–39, oil paint, tem­pera, graphite, and crayon on wood door with brads and nails. The Joseph H. Hir­sh­horn Be­quest, 1981 (86.5319)

 

3c. Irene Rice Pereira (Amer­i­can, b. Chelsea, Mass­a­chu­setts, 1907–1971[check­ing on dates]), Bright Depths, 1950, oil paint on can­vas. Gift of the Joseph H. Hir­sh­horn Foun­da­tion, 1966 (66.3995)

 

3d. Vic­tor Vasarely (French, b. Pécs, Hun­gary, 1908–1997), Min­danao, 1953, oil paint on pa­per­board mounted on can­vas. The Joseph H. Hir­sh­horn Be­quest, 1981 (86.5264)

 

3e.

Bur­goyne Diller (Amer­i­can, b. New York, New York, 1906–1965), 903-47, 1947, crayon and graphite on pa­per. The Joseph H. Hir­sh­horn Be­quest, 1981 (86.1448)

 

3f. Al­bert Swinden (Amer­i­can, b. Birm­ing­ham, Eng­land, 1899–1961), Study Af­ter Tri­an­gu­lar Move­ment, 1950, wa­ter­color, gouache, and col­ored pen­cil on pa­per. Gift of Joseph H. Hir­sh­horn, 1966 (66.4861)

 

3g. Maria-He­lena Vieira da Silva (French, b. Lis­bon, Por­tu­gal, 1908–1992), Un­ti­tled, 1955, wa­ter­color on pa­per. Gift of Joseph H. Hir­sh­horn, 1966 (66.5425)

 

3h. Jimmy Ernst (Amer­i­can, b. Cologne, Ger­many, 1920–1984), Ab­strac­tion, 1952, gouache on pa­per. Gift of the Joseph H. Hir­sh­horn Foun­da­tion, 1966 (66.1795)

 

3i. Man Ray (Amer­i­can, b. Philadel­phia, Penn­syl­va­nia, 1890–1976), Shake­spearean Equa­tion: King Lear, 1948, oil paint on can­vas. Gift of Joseph H. Hir­sh­horn, 1972 (72.185)

 

3j. Man Ray (Amer­i­can, b. Philadel­phia, Penn­syl­va­nia, 1890–1976), Shake­spearean Equa­tion: Mea­sure For Mea­sure, 1948, oil paint on can­vas. Gift of Joseph H. Hir­sh­horn, 1972 (72.186)

 

3k. Jean-Paul Ri­opelle (Cana­dian, b. Mon­treal, 1923–2002), Ab­strac­tion, c. 1952, oil paint on can­vas. Gift of Joseph H. Hir­sh­horn, 1966 (66.4263)

 

3l. Lu­cio Fontana (Ital­ian, b. Rosario, Ar­gentina, 1899–1968), Spa­tial Con­cept, 1951, ink on pa­per. The Joseph H. Hir­sh­horn Be­quest, 1981 (86.1855)

 

 

 

THE HIR­SH­HORN GUEST­HOUSE: 1955

 

The Site

 

Be­fore Joseph Hir­sh­horn de­vel­oped his plan for Hir­sh­horn, On­tario—his utopian town of cul­ture—he started to build a house in the area for him­self and his fam­ily. This was the first pro­ject he of­fered New York ar­chi­tect Philip John­son, with the town com­mis­sion soon to fol­low. The se­lec­tion of the site and the con­struc­tion and fur­nish­ing of the house was de­scribed by Hir­sh­horn’s wife of the time, Lilly Har­mon, in her au­to­bi­og­ra­phy, Free­hand:

 

“I think we should have a house in Blind River,” says Joe. “I bought one hun­dred and forty acres there on Lake Huron. It’s called Boot­leg­ger’s Bay. It used to be a spot to run liquor over to the States dur­ing pro­hi­bi­tion.”

 

The aer­ial pho­to­graph above shows the site of the house, known as The Hir­sh­horn Guest­house (it was planned as an an­nex to a much larger house). The site is also shown in the three small pho­tographs, above right. Though this pic­turesque stretch of Lake Huron was al­ready dot­ted with the sum­mer homes of Cana­dian and Amer­i­can va­ca­tion­ers, the Hir­sh­horn Guest­house site had been cleared for use as a garbage dump. Har­mon de­scribes sit­ing the house:

 

In snow up to our knees and sur­rounded by wolf tracks, we choose a site for the mod­est house. The grand main one Philip John­son en­vi­sions as be­ing nearer to the lake and hav­ing ceil­ings twenty feet high.

 

4a. Aer­ial Pho­to­graph of Boot­leg­ger’s Bay, Lake Huron, On­tario. Joseph H. Hir­sh­horn Pa­pers, Smith­son­ian In­sti­tu­tion Archives, Wash­ing­ton, DC

 

4b., c., d. Hir­sh­horn Guest­house Site Pho­tographs. Joseph H. Hir­sh­horn Pa­pers, Smith­son­ian In­sti­tu­tion Archives, Wash­ing­ton, DC

 

 

Con­struc­tion

 

Joseph Hir­sh­horn

wanted the Guest­house built in record time. To ex­pe­dite this process, Philip John­son sug­gested us­ing one of his ear­lier plans, cre­ated for a de­vel­op­ment in Wis­con­sin. The form of the house changed lit­tle from this ini­tial blue­print, be­low left, with a “U” arrange­ment around a pro­tected ter­race. But it seems John­son’s spec­u­la­tive de­sign was not com­modi­ous enough, judg­ing from the much larger liv­ing room in the fi­nal plan pub­lished in Cana­dian Art, be­low right. The re­design of the house started with the ex­as­per­ated-sound­ing notes (“Very in­ad­e­quate!”) made on the blue­print by John­son’s col­lab­o­rat­ing firm, John B. Parkin As­so­ci­ates of Toronto. As is com­mon, a Cana­dian firm was hired to man­age per­mit ap­pli­ca­tions and con­struc­tion, in this case for both the house and town pro­jects. Hir­sh­horn is seen

in the pho­to­graph at left chat­ting with a con­trac­tor: the house is still un­der con­struc­tion, but the fur­ni­ture has al­ready ar­rived from New York. Lilly Har­mon writes:

 

Armed with blue­prints, Philip John­son and I go to Knoll As­so­ci­ates in New York and choose rugs, chairs, ta­bles, beds, and all ma­te­r­ial for the new house in Blind River. It takes two hours and is to­tally pain­less. Three months from the snowy Feb­ru­ary in which we had cho­sen the site with wolf tracks all around us, the house at Boot­leg­ger’s Bay is fin­ished.

 

A cu­rios­ity of mod­ern de­sign in the bush coun­try, the new house looks naked on the cleared

land. The con­trac­tor stands proudly by as Ann, the girls, and I en­ter.

 

Al­though prin­ci­pal con­struc­tion took three months, the let­ter from the Cana­dian firm dis­played be­low shows that dec­o­rat­ing and out­fit­ting took much longer. Writ­ten ap­prox­i­mately eight months af­ter com­ple­tion, a few sen­tences stand out among ba­nal pro­vi­sions like garage drainage: The ex­as­per­ated tone re­turns here in the crit­i­cism of both the dec­o­ra­tor (“cheesy” door han­dles) and the client, who is de­scribed as hav­ing given the con­trac­tor “quite a ride.”

 

4e. Blue­print for Hir­sh­horn Guest­house (fac­sim­ile). John B. Parkin Fonds,

Cana­dian Ar­chi­tec­tural Archives, Cal­gary, Al­berta

 

4f. Joseph Hir­sh­horn at Hir­sh­horn Guest­house Build­ing Site. Joseph H. Hir­sh­horn Pa­pers, Smith­son­ian In­sti­tu­tion Archives, Wash­ing­ton, DC

 

4g. Let­ter to Max Miller, Feb­ru­ary 27, 1956. John B. Parkin Fonds, Cana­dian Ar­chi­tec­tural Archives, Cal­gary, Al­berta

 

 

Mod­ern Liv­ing

 

The fin­ished house was a vi­sion of so­phis­ti­cated moder­nity, neatly sit­u­ated in the wilder­ness. It was care­fully pho­tographed (above left) and then pub­lished in a num­ber of pe­ri­od­i­cals over the next sev­eral years. On Au­gust 1, 1955, LIFE pub­lished a pho­to­graphic jour­nal of the re­gion af­fected by Hir­sh­horn’s ura­nium dis­cov­ery (above). The ar­ti­cle con­trasted the typ­i­cally bru­tal—even vi­o­lent—boom-town cul­ture of the min­ers with the “re­sort”-like en­vi­ron­ment en­joyed by the own­ers and man­agers. This op­u­lent lifestyle is doc­u­mented by the snap­shot, be­low, of Hir­sh­horn and his as­so­ci­ates re­lax­ing on the Guest­house ter­race, as well as LIFE’s un­pub­lished pho­to­graph of Hir­sh­horn, Lilly Har­mon, and their daugh­ters on the same ter­race (right). Har­mon writes:

 

Af­ter the ar­ti­cle on Blind River ap­pears in Life mag­a­zine, com­plete with shots of Joe and me at our house at Boot­leg­ger’s Bay, I worry that the pic­tures seem like a blue­print for may­hem. Some­one may try to kid­nap the chil­dren. Wan­der­ing tourists peer into the house, every room of which has floor-to-ceil­ing glass slid­ing doors. A large truck, look­ing like some­thing out of Grapes of Wrath ap­pears on our lawn with a whole fam­ily and their chil­dren perched on top of the chairs and house­hold pos­ses­sions. They have heard in Ohio that this is a great bo­nanza and they have pulled up stakes to come to Canada.

 

It is this any­thing-goes dis­or­der—where an itin­er­ant fam­ily

shows up on the lawn of a mil­lion­aire—that Joseph Hir­sh­horn was at­tempt­ing to coun­ter­act with his per­fectly planned ur­ban en­vi­ron­ment. In Hir­sh­horn, On­tario, these fam­i­lies would be given a place to live, in clean, or­derly pub­lic hous­ing units with their own large glass win­dows. But un­like the in­te­grated, class­less so­cial utopias imag­ined ear­lier in the twen­ti­eth cen­tury, these new units would be built far away from the glass-walled vil­las of Boot­leg­ger’s Bay.

 

4h. Hir­sh­horn Guest­house (Gar­den View), 1955. John B. Parkin Fonds, Cana­dian Ar­chi­tec­tural Archives, Cal­gary, Al­berta

 

4i. Hir­sh­horn Guest­house

(En­try View), 1955. John B. Parkin Fonds, Cana­dian Ar­chi­tec­tural Archives, Cal­gary, Al­berta

 

4j. Cana­dian Art (No­vem­ber 1960) (fac­sim­ile). Artist’s Col­lec­tion

 

4k. LIFE (Au­gust 1, 1955). Artist’s Col­lec­tion

 

4l. Joseph Hir­sh­horn and As­so­ci­ates at Guest­house, 1955. Joseph H. Hir­sh­horn Pa­pers, Smith­son­ian In­sti­tu­tion Archives, Wash­ing­ton, DC

 

4m. Joseph Hir­sh­horn,

Lilly Har­mon and daugh­ters at Guest­house, 1955. Joseph H. Hir­sh­horn Pa­pers, Smith­son­ian In­sti­tu­tion Archives, Wash­ing­ton, DC