SAH at Seventy-Five

Abstract

This year, we celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH). In the summer of 1940, a group of scholars founded the American Society of Architectural Historians “with the aim of providing a useful forum and of facilitating enjoyable contacts for all those whose special interest is the history of architecture.”1 The impetus for the society’s founding emerged during a series of lectures and “inspection trips” held at the Harvard University summer session, in which over twenty teachers and students of architectural history participated, according to President Turpin Bannister’s report in the first issue of the JASAH (the predecessor to JSAH ).2 The society’s purpose soon extended beyond the useful and enjoyable to encompass research and its dissemination, teaching, exchange of ideas about architectural history, historic preservation of important architecture, visits to significant architectural sites, and cooperation with other learned societies.3 From its start, SAH has been a forum for architectural history defined broadly. One of the first papers given at an SAH meeting, and the first article published in JASAH , was not a study of a singular monument or a great architect, but an investigation of the effect of the Roman brick industry on Roman architecture.4 When the society was founded, its membership was projected to include teachers in professional schools of architecture and collegiate or university departments of art or archaeology, advanced students in the history of architecture, architects, those interested in the preservation of historic architectural monuments, local historians and antiquaries, and laypersons interested in architectural history.5 For its time, the society’s mission was inclusive and diverse (Figure 1). Figure 1 American Society of Architectural Historians tour to Providence, Rhode Island, July 1941 (photo: University of Florida Archives). The society’s origins at an elite university located …