Love Letters to Dead Architects: Driving Determination and Damned Dissapointment

My Dearest Fazlur Khan,

They call you “the Einstein of structural engineering” and while it may be true, I find the “Einstein of the human-heart” to be more correct. You understand that the height of a structure is not enough to compel the soul – though it helps – the real influence comes from stepping out of your self and looking through the unengineered eyes of a viewer. Never refusing the question “what was it like the first time I saw it?” and then re-creating that moment again and again. Take the framed tube, take the trussed tube, take the bundle tube, take the X bracing, take the concrete tube, all your creations, in the end they are all just burned rocks. You know that, and you love them, and all of us regardless.

So I guess I just want to say I love you back,

Retly Corm.


“The technical man must not be lost in his own technology; he must be able to appreciate life, and life is art, drama, music, and most importantly, people." Fazlur Khan

Mi Caro, Antionio Sant’Elia,

The say the good die young and I can say that the great die even younger. So how does it feel then, bright star, to be the John Keats of Architecture? Rather than the name writ in water, you wrote your monogram in raw, bare and violent colored materials. Or at least you would have.

This world was too small for you, my love, you who saw the world as the interweaving and overlapping of excitement and prosperity taken to the epic scale. Planes that park in garages, skywalks that are suspended over depths as daring as any tight-rope walker could imagine all nourished in your fertile brain. The future was within your grasp, tragically however, so was the present and it eventually claimed your life.

Now all I can do is sit in your future and sigh about our past.

With Love,

Retly Corm

Hello Bruno Taut.
Again, we find ourselves alone. You for your religious and social leanings, and me, well, me for my own reasons – do you remember not so long ago how it was, the sun would shine, the birds would sing and we would just lay around the garden city waiting for the earth to be engulfed in flames.

All that time, you would have thought we would have been prepared when it eventually happened.

We spent all of our time in brightly colored glass menageries- pushing the boundaries of the material. Back then we thought that the bright yellows and pastel blues and sharp reds of your Weissenhofsiedlung house would protect us. We laughed at the all white entries. But it seems the days of exhibition 19 are over.

I hope you make it out – I’m not sure I will.

Yours Affectionately,

Retly Corm.

Hermann, Hermann, Hermann,

Oh Hermann Finsterlin, what am I going to do with you? Not evil enough to be vilified, not virtuous enough to be deified. The right man? Possibly. The wrong time? Absolutely. You had so much potential:

Your sketches for a glass pavilion are worthy of post-post-modernists, paintings that almost smolder with passion, insightful writings, inspiring music, all of it unique and deeply personal. You are an expressionist thinker somewhere between art nouveau and something else, not defined quite yet.

Hard times became the crux of the problem, I suppose. Who would have seen the World War coming? You staved off the Nazis as long as you could, but you knew that couldn’t last forever. They would have you and your art eventually; and when that happened I was already long, long gone.

I understand, I do, you did what you had to in order for your life’s work to survive, but then the bombing took most of it away anyway – what was it all for Hermann, was it worth it?

-Retly Corm