Editors' Introduction Mark Reinberger and Vandana Baweja This, the thirty-first, volume of Arris celebrates the inclusion of a variety of voices to represent our firm commitment to diversity—both in our field and in the membership of the Southeast Society of Architectural Historians (SESAH). The six articles herein examine a wide range of themes and viewpoints, apparent both in the backgrounds of the authors and in their approaches to their topic. The book reviews follow suit, with eight books reviewed that range from the history of the architectural profession to natural and cultural geography. The ordering of articles and reviews simply follows chronology, but the range of subjects and sources of inspiration is what distinguishes this collection. The volume begins with a slice of the history of preservation, the story of a single historic building in Natchez, Mississippi, with the voice of a professional and academic preservationist, Paul Hardin Kapp of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. It continues a recent and expanding tradition in SESAH and Arris of embracing preservation as a vital part of the organization and the field. It also celebrates Natchez, where the next SESAH annual meeting will be held. Then follows an article by Mary Springer, an assistant professor of art history at Jacksonville State University, Alabama, which examines the history and meaning of the Cathedral of Learning, a remarkable tall building at the University of Pittsburgh of the 1920s. Another young scholar, Priya Jain, originally from New Delhi, India and now at Texas A&M, produced our third article, a rarity in Arris in that it deals with an South Asian architectural history topic in a global context—the planning of early technical universities in India in the 1950s. The articles by Mary Springer and Priya Jain illuminate the relationship between town and gown in two very different time periods and cultures, which enriches our understanding of architectural history in relationship to globalization. Adjacent to these younger scholars of architectural history, we place Robert Craig, emeritus faculty of Georgia Tech, a fully established scholar and one of the founders of SESAH. Craig returns to the subject of one of his many books, Principia College near St. Louis (one of his many almamaters), and examines its architecture after Bernard Maybeck. The inclusion of this essay continues a new tradition, begun in the Arris Volume 30, of contributions by senior SESAH scholars. The final full article rings with the voice of a practicing and teaching architect, Michael Grogan of Kansas State, who has an abiding love for pure modernism that is evident in his analysis of Mies van der Rohe's Houston Museum of Art. However, the issue is not quite finished because through a multi-disciplinary collaborative effort, a trio of authors—Danielle Willkens, a practicing architect, preservationist, and architectural historian; Heather M. Haley, a doctoral candidate in history at Auburn University, who focuses on twentieth-century American social, military history, and public history; and Junshan Liu, an associate professor at the McWhorter School of Building Science at Auburn University, who works on the applications of Building Information Modeling (BIM), LiDAR, photogrammetry and UAS in construction management—bring us home in a substantial research note with yet another modality, that of computer technology, to demonstrate the remarkable powers of new digital techniques, which can aid in the documentation, restoration, reconstruction, and interpretation of historic structures and sites. Wilkins, Haley, and Liu have written a field note on the Selma Railroad Depot, which has played a pivotal role in the history of Civil Rights in that Alabama city. Along with the diversity of voices comes a wide array of visual images, always a goal of Arris. Among too many to list appear vintage Ezra Stoller photographs; schematic new axonometric analysis figures; drawings from archives in India, Pittsburgh, and elsewhere; Historic American Building Survey drawings and photographs; and frighteningly intricate digital reconstructions. All this has made this volume the longest in the history of Arris, but we hope you do not get tired of reading and deliberating on the intellectual themes covered here. Surely there is something to interest and enlighten everyone. As we've been learning from recent history, variety is not simply the spice...
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Nov 30, 2020
Open Access