Who's going to Buffalo?

[Matt2]

I see the conference is in-person, in-Buffalo, and open to the public now. Is Buffalo a good location to visit? I can't seen another reason I'd ever travel there.

[Roderick Grant]

Works by H. H. Richardson, Frederick Law Olmsted, McKim, Mead & White, John Selkirk, Adler & Sullivan, Eliel & Eero Saarinen, James Knox Taylor, and more ... all in the delightful city of Buffalo.

[pmahoney]

The website below gives a good summary of properties, searchable by architect. It includes buildings by Daniel Burnham, Cyrus Eidlitz, KPF, J L Silsbee, Rapp& Rapp, Richard Upjohn, and Edward Durell Stone to name a few more:

https://www.buffaloah.com/a/bamar.html

[Craig]

Buffalo gets a bad rap but it is a fairly well-preserved city from its glory days. The downtown neighborhood of Allentown is a charming residential and shopping area filled with Victorian homes and cottages that many cities have lost in failed 1960s urban renewal schemes are desperate to try to re-create. The Albright-Knox art museum, housed in one of the few remaining buildings from the 1901 Pan Am world's fair has a world-class collection of modern art.

The Roycroft Inn and campus, home of the local Arts and Crafts scene, is a nice place to stay or at least dine out on the patio. It's located south, not too far from Buffalo.

The two huge Universities support many intellectual and cultural gatherings and happenings. As long as you are not there in the winter, Buffalo is quite lovely.

[DRN]

I shuffled off to Buffalo several times, in the summer and fall, (not the winter) and always enjoyed the visit. Lots to see, more each time in fact, and plenty of great places to dine and imbibe.

But given the Delta Variant uncertainty with respect to breakthrough infections of the vaccinated, Christine and I will attend the conference virtually again this year. We hope to start doing things and going places once the virus is not so prevalent.

[wjsaia]

Upon visiting in 2017, I found Buffalo to be an extremely agreeable city with memorable architectural and other points of interest. At the earliest opportunity to do so, I registered to attend in person every session and event scheduled for the upcoming conference, including the pre-conference and post-conference tour offerings.

Of particular interest to me personally would be the Sunday trip to the Hagen History Center in Erie, PA to view the newly-reassembled and installed Frank Lloyd Wright/Aaron Green San Francisco Office, in which I worked for nineteen years. The history center has built a new building that includes an exact replica of the second-floor tenant space at 319 Grant Avenue that Aaron Green rented in 1951 upon Wright's inspection and enthusiastic blessing of it. The new space in Erie has been outfitted with the entire original "office" construction that Aaron and a helper fabricated and assembled in 1951 and that Aaron occupied until 1988.

My daughter who is an acute-care nurse practitioner at University of California, San Francisco, Medical Center has just now reported that a fully-vaccinated co-NP of hers went on a family vacation in Maine and that all eleven of eleven fully-vaccinated family members who gathered together became infected with COVID. This gives me pause, and I think I will best reassess in a month from now my initial, impulsive response to attend the Buffalo conference . . .

Bill Schwarz

WJS

[Roderick Grant]

The office for Edgar Kaufmann, Sr. has its own book; the Aaron Green office should have one, too. We all know about it, but there must be details yet to be published?

[Matt2]

I'm also a bit concerned about the new covid variant. I registered knowing that a refund is possible by the end of August if the pandemic takes a sharp turn for the worse. I'm a bit more hesitant about booking hotel and flight as I'm not sure what the refund policy is.

[Rood]

Heck, I'm about to cancel another dental appointment.

[SDR]

Scary, isn't it---yet even this event, a year and a half into the pandemic, was predicted as a possibility---with or without a virus variant; I don't recall. Truly, the failure of American primary and secondary education---perhaps in part as a result of the lack of central planning and national standards ?---has borne its bitter fruit. The massive erosion of trust in government, in science, in journalism in recent years are both symptoms and cause, of a costly and dangerous national malaise . . . not to put too fine a point on it. (They used to blame comic books, in my youth; now I in turn blame violent video games. What it is to become old . . .!)

S

[Roderick Grant]

The opposite is true. Public education fell apart in '65 when the Fed took control. There's no way 330 million citizens can be adequately controlled to their benefit by a single central government. (Ben Franklin warned this would happen: "A republic, if you can keep it.") Control by DC has resulted in inculcation rather than education. It's time to backtrack.

[DRN]

Control? DC? Yes and no....

National requirements for basic skills assessment testing, while well intended, has led at times to “teaching to the test” to the detriment of programming that focuses on critical thinking and informed decision making.

There are significant disparities in the content of school text books, particularly in the subjects of history and social studies, on a state by state basis.

[Roderick Grant]

Public education was inaugurated to teach "3R" basic skills plus - most importantly - civics. That held the Republic together for 189 years, without the need for a single standard imposed by the federal government. When a central government is vested with too much power, it eventually fails. We are watching this happen right now. Our daily lives should not be tied down by what is going on in DC. If California objects to the way Wyoming teaches its youth, tough! But the Fed feeds the schools with money that the states are not wont to spend, requiring them to raise taxes on their citizens.

I suspect Frank Lloyd Wright would be on my side with this argument.

[peterm]

“If California objects to the way Wyoming educates its youth, tough!”

Yeah- the federal government exerted *way* too much power when they enforced school desegregation in southern states, for example. And if Wyoming wants to teach creationism in its public schools, bring it on! If South Carolina chooses to claim in their history classes that Robert E. Lee was an American hero, and that the Civil War should always be called The War of Northern Aggression or The War Between the States, they should, of course, be free to do that.

It was the Federal Govt. which saved the nation from being torn in half by the Confederacy under the banner of “state’s rights” during the Civil War.

(Btw- There’s no way that Mr. Wright would have agreed with you that Donald Trump was a worthy presidential candidate.)

[Roderick Grant]

Typical. Nothing to say, change the subject.