At the turn of the last millennium, a powerful Native American civilization emerged and flourished in the American Midwest. By A.D. 1050 the population of its capital city, Cahokia, was larger than that of London. Without the use of the wheel, beasts of burden, or metallurgy, its technology was of the Stone Age, yet its culture fostered widespread commerce, refined artistic expression, and monumental architecture. The model for this urbane world was nothing less than the cosmos itself. The climax of their ritual center was a four-tiered pyramid covering fourteen acre rising a hundred feet into the sky—the tallest structure in the United States until 1867. This beautifully illustrated book traces the history of this six-square-mile area in the central Mississippi Valley from the Big Bang to the present. Chappell seeks to answer fundamental questions about this unique, yet still relatively unknown space, which was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1982. How did this swampy land become so amenable to human life? Who were the remarkable people who lived here before the Europeans came? Why did the whole civilization disappear so rapidly? What became of the land in the centuries after the Mississippians abandoned it? And finally, what can we learn about ourselves as we look into the changing meaning of Cahokia through the ages? To explore these questions, Chappell probes a wide range of sources, including the work of astronomers, geographers, geologists, anthropologists, and archaeologists. Archival photographs and newspaper accounts, as well as interviews with those who work at the site and Native Americans on their annual pilgrimage to the site, bring the story up to the present. Tying together these many threads, Chappell weaves a rich tale of how different people conferred their values on the same piece of land and how the transformed landscape, in turn, inspired different values in them-cultural, spiritual, agricultural, economic, and humanistic.
In their luminous imagery and broad expressive range, the poems in So Far celebrate nothing less than our capacity to experience life. Set sometimes in the Midwestern prairies, the Great Lakes region, or the deserts of the Southwest, these poems illuminate new dimensions in the universal experiences of birth, love, and death. Politics and relion, architecture and rap mingle easily with myth and literature in ever-widening circles of metaphorical meaning.
The Ten Heavens of My Literary Paradise A deep-time illustration of Franz Kafka's remark that “a book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us,” Sally Chappell's brief book on the connection between her personal growth and the books she has read focuses on ten great novels. Suggesting that fiction has magical powers to carve out new capacities in the psyche, Chappell tells how Miguel Cervantes's Don Quixote helped her dust herself off after defeat; how Herman Melville's Moby Dick prodded her to embark on a large theme; how James Joyce's Ulysses gave her a new security based on the secret strength of the subconscious. Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities and Gregor von Rezzori's An Ermine in Czernopol showed how laughter can make tragedy bearable; Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil and Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian how death and dying can be borne; and Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past how the act of writing itself can open doors into memory. Finally she absorbed the transforming power of Vladimir Nabokov's merger of satire and poetry in Pale Fire and sustained the subversive shock of Jose Saramago's The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. The passages Chappell has chosen from each novel to illuminate this memoir of bibliomania will cause readers to cry, cringe, change their minds, and throw away comforting falsehoods they did not realize they believed in. She takes you by the hand, like Virgil, to give you an earthy view of the outer limits of the human imagination. A primer for re-reading, this short book will provide life-long enrichment. Sally A. Kitt Chappell is Professor Emerita of architectural history at DePaul University in Chicago. Her Architecture and Planning of Graham, Anderson, Probst and White (University of Chicago Press) won the Association of American Publishers' award for the best book in architecture and urban planning of 1992. During sabbaticals she wrote two ground-breaking books on the interplay of landscape and culture, Cahokia: Mirror of the Cosmos, and Chicago's Urban Nature: A Guide to the City's Architecture & Landscape. She has contributed frequently to the Travel Section of The New York Times. An anthology of her writing, Words Work, appeared in 2009. Two of her poetry collections were published recently, Shards in 2011 and So Far in 2013.
Fascinated by change, architectural historians of the modernist generation generally filled their studies with accounts of new developments and innovations. In her book, Sally A. Kitt Chappell focuses instead on the subtler but more pervasive change that took place in the mainstream of American architecture in the period. Graham, Anderson, Probst and White, one of the leading American firms of the turn of the century, transformed traditional canons and made creative adaptations of standard forms to solve some of the largest architectural problems of their times—in railroad stations, civic monuments, banks, offices, and department stores. Chappell's study shows how this firm exemplified the changing urban hierarchy of the American city in the early twentieth century. Their work emerges here as both an index and a reflection of the changing urban values of the twentieth century. Interpreting buildings as cultural artifacts as well as architectural monuments, Chappell illuminates broader aspects of American history, such as the role of public-private collaboration in city making, the image of women reflected in the specially created feminine world of the department store, the emergence of the idea of an urban group in the heyday of soaringly individual skyscrapers, and the new importance of electricity in the social order. It is Chappell's contention that what people cherish and preserve says more about them than what they discard in favor of the new. Working from this premise, she considers the values conserved by architects under the pressures of ever changing demands. Her work enlarges the scope of inquiry to include ordinary buildings as well as major monuments, thus offering a view of American architecture of the period at once more intimate and more substantial than any seen until now. Richly illustrated with photographs and plans, this volume also includes handsome details of such first-rate works as the Thirtieth Street Station in Philadelphia, the Cleveland Terminal Group, and the Wrigley Building in Chicago.
In this paean to life, Sally A. Kitt Chappell celebrates human flesh and its primal connections to our capacity for love, wonder, joy and suffering. Noted for her luminous imagery and expressive range, these poems seem to expand in ever-widening circles of metaphorical meaning.
In these poems Sally A. Kitt Chappell portrays a world where nature, the city and the self meet in astonishing and revealing juxtapositions. Adept in both contemporaryand traditional forms of poetry, her range is global. There is a rubai for a middle-eastern architect, a katauta for an ancient Japanese emperor and a pantoum for a columbine. Alongside are free verses celebrating tall grasss prairies, sonnets of luscious eroticism, and political riffs in current street rap. Underlying every poem is a sensibility which celebrates life while affirming its transcience.
Fascinated by change, architectural historians of the modernist generation generally filled their studies with accounts of new developments and innovations. In her book, Sally A. Kitt Chappell focuses instead on the subtler but more pervasive change that took place in the mainstream of American architecture in the period. Graham, Anderson, Probst and White, one of the leading American firms of the turn of the century, transformed traditional canons and made creative adaptations of standard forms to solve some of the largest architectural problems of their times—in railroad stations, civic monuments, banks, offices, and department stores. Chappell's study shows how this firm exemplified the changing urban hierarchy of the American city in the early twentieth century. Their work emerges here as both an index and a reflection of the changing urban values of the twentieth century. Interpreting buildings as cultural artifacts as well as architectural monuments, Chappell illuminates broader aspects of American history, such as the role of public-private collaboration in city making, the image of women reflected in the specially created feminine world of the department store, the emergence of the idea of an urban group in the heyday of soaringly individual skyscrapers, and the new importance of electricity in the social order. It is Chappell's contention that what people cherish and preserve says more about them than what they discard in favor of the new. Working from this premise, she considers the values conserved by architects under the pressures of ever changing demands. Her work enlarges the scope of inquiry to include ordinary buildings as well as major monuments, thus offering a view of American architecture of the period at once more intimate and more substantial than any seen until now. Richly illustrated with photographs and plans, this volume also includes handsome details of such first-rate works as the Thirtieth Street Station in Philadelphia, the Cleveland Terminal Group, and the Wrigley Building in Chicago.
At the turn of the last millennium, a powerful Native American civilization emerged and flourished in the American Midwest. By A.D. 1050 the population of its capital city, Cahokia, was larger than that of London. Without the use of the wheel, beasts of burden, or metallurgy, its technology was of the Stone Age, yet its culture fostered widespread commerce, refined artistic expression, and monumental architecture. The model for this urbane world was nothing less than the cosmos itself. The climax of their ritual center was a four-tiered pyramid covering fourteen acre rising a hundred feet into the sky—the tallest structure in the United States until 1867. This beautifully illustrated book traces the history of this six-square-mile area in the central Mississippi Valley from the Big Bang to the present. Chappell seeks to answer fundamental questions about this unique, yet still relatively unknown space, which was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1982. How did this swampy land become so amenable to human life? Who were the remarkable people who lived here before the Europeans came? Why did the whole civilization disappear so rapidly? What became of the land in the centuries after the Mississippians abandoned it? And finally, what can we learn about ourselves as we look into the changing meaning of Cahokia through the ages? To explore these questions, Chappell probes a wide range of sources, including the work of astronomers, geographers, geologists, anthropologists, and archaeologists. Archival photographs and newspaper accounts, as well as interviews with those who work at the site and Native Americans on their annual pilgrimage to the site, bring the story up to the present. Tying together these many threads, Chappell weaves a rich tale of how different people conferred their values on the same piece of land and how the transformed landscape, in turn, inspired different values in them-cultural, spiritual, agricultural, economic, and humanistic.
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