Week 13 Observations

Week Thirteen: The Grand Finale, the Big Shebang, the Last Hurrah, the Final Throes, the Encore, the Homecoming, The Reckoning, the Return, the Revelations, whatever name you wish to apply, this tour lived up to the hype.  In the biggest showdown of 2015, Professor Hinders' ARCH 199 class took on the daunting task of touring small town America.  We all hopped on the big white bus and ventured off campus into the vast corn desert that envelopes the oasis that is UIUC.  This tour peered into the essence of the soul a fledgling architecture student seeking to spread their wings and sour amongst the of the Frank Lloyd Wrights and the Thomas Wrens and the Howard Roarks of the world.

Base camp was established at the monument to rural America as we know it: Casey's General Store.  The cultural significance of this twenty-four hour shrine to franchised capitalism cannot be understated.  Its pizzas drip with the sweet nectar of triple-pasteurized faux-dairy goodness and provide sweet refuge for the weary travelers beset by the humid realities of the Illinois summer.  Unfortunately this was not our destination, and we set out into the great unknown of Philo, Illinois.

What is beauty?  Philo attempts to answer this question with its neatly organized one mile by one mile grid system.  A wondrous water tower rises above the lower echelons as a beacon of hope in the otherwise lifeless expanse of central Illinois.  It harkens to the wayward soul and from its gullet flows the economic wellbeing of Philo.  The town otherwise consists of neatly organized rows of houses, a somewhat more lively two-block "downtown," and a catholic school for the local population.

It surprised me to learn of the high concentration of Catholics, as I had come to assume that all of Illinois outside of Chicago was populated by German Lutherans, but maybe I adopted this narrow-minded view because I spend so much time around German Lutherans.  We learned that it was more likely that German Catholics found use for the land where others couldn't with their masterful swamp-draining techniques, as the land that Philo now occupies was once nothing but acre upon acre of swamp land.

Those times were now long gone, however.  In its place stood the bustling farming community of Philo, which had grown so prosperous, in fact, that it got its own suburb, shocking as that may be.  For those with the dough to fund it, a small offshoot from Philo provided the stereotypical four-bedroom, two-bath one-acre plots of land and curvy roads that have come to represent the suburbs.  This was more up my alley, as it is houses like this that I have called home for most of my life.  I was just a bit surprised to find them all here.

Returning to Philo's cemetery, we were able to come to a rest atop a slight hill.  It was from this hill that we could see the simplistic yet beautiful landscape of Farmtown, USA.  The various other farming communities of the area were visible from here as well, and it was quite interesting to see the delicate framework that laced through rural Illinois.

To close out our final tour and our time in Philo, we stopped by the local watering hole and got to feast on finger foods while we reminisced on the glorious semester that was Spring 2015.  I'm not sure if I've completed this too late or not, but if you see this, I want to thank you for making such a fun and informative class, Professor Hinders.