From Our Authors | April 03, 2023

Recently, TMR interns Annalisa Geger and Kaitlyn Jensen interviewed Molly Wright Steenson about her fascinating and wide-ranging essay “A Series of Tubes,” detailing the author’s personal and professional curiosity about pneumatic tubes technology. The essay first appeared in TMR 43:4. You can read it here.

Annalisa Geger & Kaitlyn Jensen: You mention your fascination with pneumatic tubes while in Paris, when you were researching them in archives. How and when did you first become interested in pneumatic tubes?

Molly Wright Steenson: When I was in grad school for architectural history in 2008, I wanted to write a paper about a nineteenth-century historical topic about communication networks. I had written one paper about the central Paris post office (the Hôtel des Postes, now an extraordinary hotel that opened in 2022) and the ways that it processed mail. This was why I was doing archival research at the Cité de l’architecture et du Patrimoine. One day, my friend Alexis told me about pneumatic postal networks in Europe, and it was so wonderfully impossible that I was immediately hooked. 

AG & KJ: In the essay, you include flashbacks to your childhood, when you recall seeing pneumatic tubes used in a bank drive-through. You integrate personal and technical material very effectively. Is that typical in your other writing?

MWS: Some of this is a response to my time doing a PhD in architecture, where writing was expected to be more formal in a way that didn’t feel like my voice. After I defended my dissertation, I’ve actively tried to write in a more vivid, personal voice. For “A Series of Tubes,” I wanted to bring together a number of snippets into the same plane as the pneumatic tubes, including the Diebold patent and the drawing, the way the artifacts look, the memories we all seem to have of the bank drive-through. I also wanted to capture what it was like to be scared in the early years of my career at Netscape. I was influenced by the book Networking the World, 1794-2000 by Armand Matellard that flattened communications histories. But all communication histories are personal, somehow, so I wanted to write myself into them too. Finally, I developed the piece in Meghan O’Gieblynn’s awesome writing workshop on creative-form nonfiction and was influenced as well by her prose and thoughtfulness.

AG & KJ: As the essay points out, we are still dependent on pneumatic tube technology today almost as much as we were in the nineteenth century. Since tubes “endure for what we can’t digitize,” do you see pneumatics going anywhere anytime soon?

MWS: Pneumatic tubes do go anywhere and everywhere. And while they’re very good for fast passage in hospitals and for moving Roosevelt Island’s garbage, they play a role in our memory and in our imagination. Yvonne Lee Schulz’s sculpture “Thoughts” in the European Patent Office is an analog of those aspects of memory and imagination—it’s a series of tubes, and you can see the canisters move through them. Tubes and thought.

AG & KJ: How did your job as a web architect during the early growth of the Internet influence your views on technology? And how did it inspire you (or did it?) to write this essay?

 MWS: It had a huge influence on my writing because of the possibilities of hypertext and of publishing something instantaneously that people could see all over the world. While I know how to write sequential, straight-line narratives, with this essay I wanted to take parts of things and put them together. It’s also how my own, vivid memory works—a set of impressions from different things and times.

AG & KJ: You’re working on a documentary/performance project with a musician known as Pneumatic Tubes. Can you tell us more?  And when might readers be able to see the documentary?

 MWS: I love talking about this wonderful technology and its history even more than I enjoy writing about it. Over the last fourteen years, I’ve given talks about pneumatic-tube postal services in a variety of venues and formats, including a 5 minute Ignite talk at the Emerging Technology conference in 2009 that got an ovation, at the Smithsonian in 2014, and as a keynote talk for 1500 software developers in 2019. 

It got me thinking: What would it be like to focus on the performance aspect? So now I’m working on a live lecture-performance-documentary about pneumatic tubes that will involve live music, imagery, and story. I had wondered  if it might be possible to do something that breaks traditional formats in the same way that my essay in TMR does. Can those jumps be created or experienced live? I am influenced here in particular by the 1988 avant-garde jazz album/performance piece “Der Mann im Fahrstuhl” by Heiner Goebbels and Heiner Müller, about a man having a crisis in an elevator as he ascends to meet with his boss, whom he calls “Nummer Eins (Number One).” The musicians include Arto Lindsay and Don Cherry. I’m also inspired by Sam Green’s work, such as his collaboration with the band Yo La Tengo and his live documentary, The Love Song Of R. Buckminster Fuller.

This is where my musical collaborator comes into the picture. When I found Pneumatic Tubes’s album Music from Treetop last spring in Chicago at Reckless Records, I couldn’t quite believe it. Someone else liked pneumatic tubes enough to name their musical project after them! And then it turned out that the album is gorgeous, enveloping, ambient. I emailed the musician behind the project, Jesse Chandler (who also plays in the bands Midlake and Mercury Rev) and asked if he would be interested in collaborating. He said yes, and we’ve been working on the collaboration since the fall. We will also weave in the visual work of Christian Svanes Kolding as well as the poetry and vocal work of Justin Hopper. We look forward to performing it this late spring and summer.

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Molly Wright Steenson is a writer, historian, and designer. Until June 2023, she is Vice Provost for Faculty at Carnegie Mellon University and a tenured associate professor in the School of Design. She holds a PhD in architecture from Princeton University and a Master’s in environmental design from the Yale School of Architecture. She’s the author of Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape (MIT Press, 2017) and coedited  Bauhaus Futures (MIT Press, 2019). As of July 2023, she will be the president and CEO of the American Swedish Institute  in Minneapolis, a ninety-three-year-old museum and cultural institution.

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Kaitlyn Jensen is a 2023 spring intern at the Missouri Review. She is a sophomore at the University of Missouri-Columbia, where she is majoring in English.

Annalisa Geger is a 2023 spring intern at the Missouri Review. She is a senior at the University of Missouri-Columbia, where she is majoring in philosophy and minoring in English.