The living room of the Prindle House
Living room of the Prindle House, with interior design by John S. Bradstreet in the early 1900s.
In the early 1900s, when John S. Bradstreet installed his Japanese-inspired designs in the Duluth mansion of the Prindle family, there were still caribou roaming the North Shore of Lake Superior and wolves at the edge of town. Indeed, in his white suits and and ties fashioned from upholstery fabric, Bradstreet took pride in expanding the tastes of the old Northwest, as the region was still known. The enormous wooden workspace behind the couch is a so-called partner desk, with drawers on both sides — the original co-working space. Another high-concept desk in the collection could function this way, but the real benefit of officing in the Duluth room, of course, is that you could swing around to the couch for a break by the fireplace. Or, if you’re co-parenting while co-working, your kid could be banging out the Frozen 2 soundtrack on the piano until you jump out that window onto the fake Superior shoreline below.
A closer look at the desk in the Prindle House living room, as it appeared before coming to Mia in 1982.
The Studio of Gratifying Discourse
The Studio of Gratifying Discourse, from 1797, in the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
If you were a Chinese scholar at the dawn of the 19th century, when this library was built, you would have been vaguely aware that the world was becoming a powder keg, from the pressures of poverty and imperial ambition — the way that a sunbather on the beach is aware of the tide moving in. But you would have sat here, at the wooden desk, contemplating the wild shapes of the tai-hu stones in the rock garden outside and writing poems about chrysanthemums. You would have turned your feelings about nature and the meaning of things over and over in your mind until they were smoothed by the effort of self-examination. And then you would have put ink to paper, expressing yourself in the great tradition of literati, and it wouldn’t have mattered if the result was very good or not — it was the expression that mattered. That was the work of the literati, nice work if you can get it.
Pages: 1 · 2
