air mindedness
STEPHANIE WHITE; proposed by David Murray, and help from a host of Hemingways: Mistaya Hemingway, Enid Palmer and Guy Palmer drawings of a very young architect
all images courtesy of Mistaya Hemingway
Peter Hemingway was an architect in Edmonton, Alberta, well-known, well-awarded, a personality about town, political, outspoken, a fine architect. Born in 1929, he grew up in Minster-on-Sea on the Isle of Sheppey where the Thames meets the English Channel: for centuries the front line against invasion. The Second World War was no exception, Sheppey’s north and east coastline bristled with fortified beaches and anti-aircraft installations, with a second line set back from the coast. As it flanked the route for aircraft flying up the Thames to bomb London, it was so strategically important that the island’s children were evacuated in 1940. Peter and his sister Enid were sent to Yorkshire, where he was so unhappy that he was sent back to Minster. Was he homesick? Something tells me no. Missing the war, the excitement, the urgency of being part of something so huge – it must have rankled.
This file of drawings done by Peter Hemingway when he was 11 or 12 is from Hemingway’s archives, held by his daughter Mistaya. Are drawings play? They are undoubtedly something children do from a very early age. Is drawing different from playing with toys? Hand to eye coordination is being learned, refined, imagined. But that is neither interesting nor informative for this little book of drawings of WWII aircraft, carefully drafted, coloured and labelled in irreverent verse. History is written magisterially, in text, by historians who paint enormous histories that document events, dates, places, protagonists, victims, economies and aftermaths. The study of material culture finds smaller stories in smaller objects; it fills in the human daily lived life on the ground which often goes unnoticed by events, politics and ideology, yet contributes to them. As On Site review is interested in architecture as material culture, it is a simple thing for research purposes to flip this to material culture as architecture , and then one must ask, what kind of architecture are we looking at?
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on site review 44 : play ©
Mistaya Hemingway
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