Society Of Architectural Historians Research Articles

Annual Publication Awards of the Society of Architectural Historians

Annual Publication Awards of the Society of Architectural Historians

Papers Delivered in the Thematic Sessions of the 72nd Annual International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians

Papers Delivered in the Thematic Sessions of the 72nd Annual International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians

Papers Delivered in the Thematic Sessions of the 71st Annual International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians

Papers Delivered in the Thematic Sessions of the 71st Annual International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians

Review: Scalar and Omeka

Scalar and Omeka : https://scalar.me/anvc/; http://omeka.org The migration of academic scholarship to digital platforms over the past two decades has seen its share of ups and downs. Advocates of digitization and online publication have pointed out the lower costs of publishing, the democratizing potential of the Internet, and the increased opportunities for collaboration and iterative work afforded by digital and online tools. At the same time, critics of online publication have pointed to questions of rigor and peer review, along with dilemmas such as how to preserve and cite works that are inherently unstable, how to credit individuals involved in collaborative efforts, and how to assess work that by its nature involves ongoing change and multiple versions. To address some of the challenges of digital scholarship, scholarly societies have adopted standards for assessment, including the “Guidelines for the Evaluation of Digital Scholarship in Art and Architectural History” developed by the Society of Architectural Historians in partnership with the College Art Association and released in 2016.1 At the same time, a number of university presses are investing in the development of platforms that reimagine the process of publishing peer-reviewed born-digital work. Take, for instance, the recently released platform Manifold Scholarship, which is being developed by the University of Minnesota Press in collaboration with GC Digital Scholarship Lab at the City University of New York. Like many such platforms, Manifold is open source, meaning the original source code for the software is freely and publicly available for anyone to adopt or modify. In the same spirit, this software departs from the print and even e-book models for textual academic scholarship in that the document remains dynamic, collaborative, and iterative, allowing for commentary from a community of readers as well as revision and expansion of the project by the author beyond its first release. Even as Manifold and …

Abbott Lowell Cummings, 1923–2017

Abbott Lowell Cummings, 1923–2017 Richard M. Candee (bio) Abbott Lowell Cummings, the first president of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, died on May 29, 2017, in Elaine Center at Hadley, Massachusetts. He was ninety-four. Instrumental in guiding the VAF during its formative years, he was best known outside our organization as the leading authority on seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century First Period architecture in the American northeast. He will long be remembered as the author of The Framed Houses of Massachusetts Bay, 1625–1725, which won the Alice Davis Hitchcock Award from the Society of Architectural Historians.1 Scholar, preservationist, and educator, he had a profound influence on many VAF members and others in the field of early American architecture, especially in his career as an outstanding teacher at Boston University, Yale University, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he mentored dozens of young scholars. As I was one of his first acolytes, Abbott asked me many years ago to memorialize his life and scholarship at the end of his long and distinguished career. Born in St. Albans, Vermont, on March 14, 1923, the son of a Congregational minister and sometimes supporter of Norman Thomas, Abbott spent much of his youth living with his beloved paternal grandmother in Southington, Connecticut. This old Yankee helped form his love of genealogy and an appreciation of New England's past. It was she, too, who gave him a membership in the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA) at age fifteen. The budding art historian was educated at Hoosac School in New York (1936–1941), Oberlin College (BA 1945, MA 1946), and Ohio State (PhD 1950), then one of the few universities offering advanced degrees in American architectural history. He quickly learned discretion in speaking of his research after Professor Henry Russell Hitchcock published Cummings's new discoveries on the design and building of the Greek Revival Ohio state capitol in 1948, without credit. From 1948 to 1951, Abbott taught at Antioch College, while finishing his critical study of Federal-era architectural pattern books by New England builder Asher Benjamin. He drew upon this early interest in Benjamin in later research and publications focused on design in nineteenth-century New England. Following his stint at Antioch, he served as assistant curator for the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art until 1955, when he was hired as assistant director of SPNEA (now Historic New England) and editor of its journal, Old-Time New England. We met in 1962, when I was an Oberlin sophomore in a summer program at Historic Deerfield, and Abbott was leading a fast-paced tour of Boston's buildings (known as the "Death March") for the group. Given our mutual history at Oberlin he encouraged me to seek out his old professor, Clarence Ward, and urge him to give me a class on American architecture. This set me on my own career in architectural preservation. At Oberlin in September 1946, Abbott's master's thesis, "Documentary Histories of Seventeenth Century Houses in Massachusetts Bay" observed that stylistic consistency over the seventeenth century and a time lag for adopting new [End Page 1] design ideas "are confusing to the historian in his attempt to establish a system of dating for the houses of the seventeenth century." He carefully sifted through the documentary evidence of seventy houses in the Commonwealth (many of them no longer standing) with detailed notes on the condition and plan development for those still extant. This was followed—in typical Abbott Cummings fashion—by an appendix of ten building contracts and similar documents, and a full secondary bibliography. I mention this first exploration of what would become his favorite topic to show how long ago his work on Framed Houses actually began. Over the next thirty-four years Abbott continued his research about what really happened to the (mostly) surviving houses and what changes in structure or style occurred. This was complimented by his work at the American Wing, where he documented all of the New England period rooms that George Francis Dow helped install in the 1920s. Joining the SPNEA in 1955, Abbott was allowed one day a month for personal...

Evidence and Narrative

At the seventieth annual conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, held in Glasgow, we cochaired a session titled “Evidence and Narrative in Architectural History.”1 The purpose of this session was to discover some of the practices widely used in the discipline, especially those employed to manage two interrelated problems of particular interest: choosing evidence with which to make arguments and developing structures for telling stories. From the SAH session, as well as in future conferences and workshops on these topics, we hope to seed a conversation on writing history that will help the field become more self-conscious about its use of evidence and narrative. Ultimately, reconsideration of evidence and narrative will produce new and different histories of architecture as well as reimagined agencies for ourselves as writers, readers, teachers, and students. Issues of evidence and narrative have always been part of architectural history discursively, despite architectural historians’ general indifference. Yet there may be an institutional timeliness to the intertwined themes. For architectural historians in art history departments, focusing on narrative might foster alliances with scholars in similarly concerned fields, like history, literature, and philosophy, strengthening architectural history's identity and legitimacy within the humanities and the academy. For architectural historians in architecture schools, focusing on evidence can create links with the sciences and law, underscoring the field's validity for professional practices that rely on the legitimating capacity of objective knowledge. Insofar as architectural history sits between these two sources of institutional power, by considering the reciprocal dependencies of evidence and narrative in our writing, we can give our work the capacity to make this dynamic explicit. Architectural historians find evidence everywhere. We mine built and unbuilt projects alike, textual and visual documents of all kinds, and findings of other fields. Quantitative data, too, have recently entered the field—plural and …

Annual Publication Awards of the Society of Architectural Historians

Annual Publication Awards of the Society of Architectural Historians

Papers Delivered in the Thematic Sessions of the 2016 Annual International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians

Papers Delivered in the Thematic Sessions of the 2016 Annual International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians

Seventy-Five Years of JSAH

In January 1941, during World War II, the nascent American Society of Architectural Historians published the inaugural issue of its journal, edited by Turpin C. Bannister.1 The society created the journal to allow members to keep in touch and to disseminate research in the field of architectural history, a purpose it filled with an “unpretentious” bulletin that was typed and mimeographed for the first several years of its existence (Figure 1). The first issue contained an introduction to the society, a scholarly article on the Roman brick industry, a bibliography of current works in architectural history, an account of the founding of the society, and a short note on next steps for the ASAH. The journal also registered the violence and destruction in the European theater of war with a short piece, “In Memoriam Monumentorum,” that reported on buildings and districts that had been damaged or destroyed in the fighting. Noting that it would be some time before the final toll of European monuments could be compiled, the editors decried the loss of significant and everyday structures alike: Figure 1 Information provided in the first issue of JASAH about the cover image: “EXPLANATION OF THE ROMAN BRICK STAMP… . The text runs, OP(us) DOL(iare) EX PR(aedis) C. FUL(vi) PLAUT(iani) PR(aefecti) PR(aetorio) C(larissimi) V(iri) CO(n)S(ulis) II, (ex) FIG(linis) TER(entianis), A L(ucio) AEL(io) PHIDEL(i). Translation: Brick from the estates of His Excellency C. Fulvius Plautianus, Prefect of the Guard, Consul for the second time, from the Terentian Brickyard, made by L. Aelius Phidelis (203–205 AD). The central eagle is the most frequent trade-mark of the Figlinae Terentianae” ( Journal of the American Society of Architectural Historians 1, no. 1 [Jan. 1941], 8). > The mutilation and destruction of the great architectural masterpieces which form one of our most priceless cultural heritages, is to many only …

Review: Saint Louis

Saint Louis Conciergerie, Paris (organized by the Centre des Monuments Nationaux) 8 October 2014–11 January, 2015 Even among the colorful panoply of great medieval rulers, very few can match the legacy and regal charisma of Louis IX (1226–70). Admired and imitated by his contemporaries and successors in France and the courts of Europe, Louis seemed to epitomize the quintessential but often unattainable qualities of a Christian monarch in the High Middle Ages: he was a courtly and just ruler who consolidated his kingdom, a chivalric crusader, a devout and sophisticated patron, and, ultimately, a saint. The irresistible glamour of Louis IX’s reign not only attached itself to the king but also permeated the entire court and especially its seat, the city of Paris and the Ile-de-France. The dazzling quality of art produced in France in this period and the shift in architectural tastes to a particularly refined Gothic style known as Rayonnant inspired Robert Branner (editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians from 1964 to 1966) to introduce the term “court style” as a way of linking artistic innovations to royal projects, thereby unleashing decades of art historical debate.1 In Louis IX, art history has found an enlightened patron who not only defined thirteenth-century France but, through the dissemination of the Rayonnant style, also determined the course of European medieval architecture in the following century. It is thus fitting that the …

SAH at Seventy-Five

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 …

“A Parley of Historians”; or, A Learned Society in Public

In 1960 the Society of Architectural Historians, then in its second decade of existence, appeared in the New York Times on two occasions: in an article about the annual meeting and in an advertisement about the benefits of membership. Though unrelated, these mentions provide a good starting point for exploring perceptions of the learned society from within and without, raising issues about the nature and character of SAH as a dynamic organization whose aims and aspirations have evolved over seventy-five years. In October 1960, when SAH had 1,500 members, the society placed an advertisement in the New York Times Book Review inviting “the participation and support of all professionals and laymen who share its interest in our architectural past.”1 SAH was hoping to swell its ranks through direct appeal to the paper’s 1.3 million Sunday readers, inducing them to attend its meetings, join its tours, and read its journal. Complete with a mail-in coupon, the ad revealed SAH as a learned society coming to terms with the age of mass media and mass consumption, as far as these were manifest in the demographics of the readership of the Times Book Review . Here, in effect, was a public declaration that enthusiasm for the subject, along with an ability to pay $7.50 in dues, was as valid a qualification for SAH membership as an academic affiliation or any other conventionally recognized credential. You needn’t be learned about architecture, the ad implied; you need only be keen on buildings. Though the society’s Newsletter noted that the ad brought a “good response,” it is not clear how many Book Review readers, if any, accepted SAH’s invitation.2 This big-tent self-image was a departure from the conventional public persona of a learned society in the middle of the twentieth century, which is exactly …

Editors’ Note

Editors' Note This volume ofArris: Journal ofthe Southeast Chapter ofthe Society ofArchitectural Historians involves a new editorial team taking over from the steady stewardship ofvolumes 2325 of the journal with editors Gregor Kalas and Barbara Klinkhammer. The transition brings with it the opportunity to harness the skills and resources ofthe editors' home institution , in this case the Savannah College of Art and Design, which previously hosted this journal in 2002-2004 (volumes 13-15) when David Gobel and Daves Rossell served as editors. The most conspicuous change in the current volume involves the graphic design and layout, from the new cover design to the adoption of new fonts within. One feature introduced by our predecessors, the inclusion ofarticle abstracts, has been retained, but now these are collected together at the beginning of the volume to facilitate a quick perusal of the article contents . The design is the work of Maria Sinisterra, a Master's student from Colombia in Graphic Design at SCAD. We thank Professor Jason Fox, the Graphic Design chairman, for securing one ofhis students to work on theArris redesign as an internship and providing her with important direction. Her design brings a new face to this venerable journal as it enters its second quarter century of publication with this volume 26. The four articles included in this volume fall, rather serendipitously, into two thematic sets: One looks at how works relate to the architectural history canon (Muecke and Walker; Dreller), and the other investigates the role ofclimate control before and after the introduction of electricity (Frederick-Rothwell and Archer, respectively). Furthermore, while addressing topics spanning two continents and two centuries , the papers take as their focus, variously, the effects our perceptions ofmental and physical health have on interpretations ofthebuiltenvironment, the way in which structures canfunction as portraits of a single creator or a comprehensive stylistic category, and how technology can bring about division in professionalpractice yet bind a communityin its leisure pursuits. This volume therefore reflects the rich diversity ofscholarship within the field ofarchitectural history and our goal for future volumes would be to see that range expand geographically, temporally, and methodologically. ED IT O RS' NO TE The international scope for which we strive has been nicely accomplished by the third member of our editorial team, Vandana Baweja at the University ofFlorida, who is our book reviews editor. The books reviewed herein address the iconography ofa Hindu temple in India, the experience ofautotourism in the American South, and a study ofthe technology and art of architecture in Latin America. We greatly appreciate Dr. Baweja's efforts to secure such a diverse range of books for review and the insightful evaluations by our three reviewers. We've taken the liberty to introduce a new section toArris to give a view from the trenches, so to speak: Field Notes. Lydia Brandt's work documenting mid-century modern buildings in Columbia, South Carolina, and making a case for their preservation has raised challenging issues regarding the nature of architectural history scholarship of this period and its tendency to focus on a relative few major architects. Celeste Lovette Guichard and Robin B. Williams ARRIS 26 · 2015 1 ...

Aquarius and Beyond: Thinking through the Counterculture

Aquarius and Beyond: Thinking through the Counterculture

Buildings of Texas: Central, South, and Gulf Coast by Gerald Moorhead

BOOK REVIEWS Gerald Moorhead. Buildings ofTexas: Central, South, and GulfCoast. Charlottesville and London: University ofVirginia Press, 2013, 608 pp., 351 black-and-white illustrations, hardcover, ISBN 9780813932552. Texas is unique. Senator William Blakley observed that it is neither southern nor western. "Texas is Texas," he said.1 Its enormous size and cultural diversity, and its long and colorful history challenge the historian to come to terms with its rich architectural heritage. Gerald Moorhead embraces this task in Buildings of Texas: Central South, and GulfCoast, the first oftwo volumes to document the architecture of Texas as part of the Buildings ofthe United States (BUS) series. Moorhead, a noted architect, writer, and architectural photographer, edits the volume and does the photography. A strong group of collaborators assist him: James W Steely, W Dwayne Jones, Anna Mod, John C. Ferguson, Cheryl ARRIS 64 § Volume 25 § 2014 Caldwell Ferguson, Mario L. Sanchez, and Stephen Fox draw on their expertise with specific areas of the state, while Steph MacDougal, Patsy Pittman Light, and Rob Walsh also contribute. There are many books about Texas architecture. Most are specialized treatments; few attempt to be comprehensive because the task is daunting. Even surveys such as Architecture in Texas, 1895 - 1945 by the late Jay Henry narrow the focus to make the subject manageable.2 Buildings of Texas, which takes on half the state's architectural landmarks, defines a niche that others have not filled. Those wanting more should consult its excellent bibliography. Moorhead organizes the book geographically, by region, because at one level this is a guidebook, and it can serve as a portable-if weighty-companion for those who travel the state. In that regard it does not disappoint, offering more than enough architectural highlights to fill any itinerary. Yet more is expected from the Society of Architectural Historians' BUS series, whose audience includes academics and professional architectural historians. The scholarly orientation of Buildings of Texas is clear at once: a substantial introduction provides the historical background and context for the architecture treated in the following chapters. Moreover, each chapter begins with a lengthy essay about the history of the region in question, explaining why it is distinct from other parts of Texas and showing how the forces of geography, history, and culture shaped its identity. Aided by maps, a thorough description for each landmark follows the introductory essay, beginning with the city that anchors the region before moving outward to surrounding areas. The authors begin in the center of the state with its most distinctive region, the rugged land known as the Texas Hill Country. Its gateway is the capital city, Austin, home to the state government and the sprawling University of Texas campus. Recently, it has become known for its thriving music scene and its booming high-technology industry. Yet many of the landmarks chosen for the discussion ofAustinwell -known government and university buildingsare predictable. More interesting are the surprises found on the byways of central Texas. The churches, courthouses, and pavilions of Brenham, Round Top, Schulenburg, and other small towns are a testament to the influence ofthe German and Eastern European immigrants who settled the area. Their architectural legacy includes some unusual building types. The large polygonal dance halls-eighteen of themare said to be unique to Texas and receive extended discussion. South of Austin is San Antonio, the largest city in South Central Texas. San Antonio is one of the oldest settlements in Texas and is now a mecca for tourists drawn by its deeply Hispanic character and its Spanish colonial buildings. Its oldest structures date from the eighteenth century. They include the Alamo, a former Spanish mission and site of a pivotal battle for Texas independence; La Villita, a restored Spanish village; and the Spanish Governor's Palace. Nearby are many nineteenth-century commercial buildings and the King William District, a well-preserved neighborhood ofnineteenth-century homes. At the heart ofit all is the Riverwalk, a portion ofthe San Antonio River lined by hotels, shops, and restaurants. South of downtown is a group of four eighteenth-century Spanish missions that comprise the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park. Although San Antonio is a modern and thriving metropolis and is the state's...

Open Brief*

To commence the thirtieth annual conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand (SAHANZ), held on Australia's Gold Coast in July 2013, ten delegates were invited, with very little warning, to take five minutes and one image and offer a provocation on the open matters of architectural history in the present moment. The term 'open' was taken as the conference theme-a device used by SAHANZ meetings not so much to define the scope of papers presented as to declare the conference flavour year by year. It was not, therefore, an open conference ( anything goes) so much as a conference on open issues ( where, indeed, to go). The ten interlocutors were invited after the conference to document their interventions. They are presented here as a record of the preoccupations of a specific moment and a specific institutional geography, with all the idiosyncrasies and commonalities it might reveal to a broader audience.

Papers Delivered in the Thematic Sessions of the Sixty-Sixth Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians

Papers Delivered in the Thematic Sessions of the Sixty-Sixth Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians

Annual Publication Awards of the Society of Architectural Historians

Annual Publication Awards of the Society of Architectural Historians

Collaboration at its Best: How Dozens of Digital Humanists Helped a Learned Society Create Three Online Academic Resources in Four Years

Between 2008 and 2012, the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) launched three online academic resources that provide new models for peer review and academic publishing. With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, SAH developed SAHARA (http://www.sah.org/publications-and-research/sahara; launched 2009), a shared image archive for teaching and research; JSAH Online (http://www.sah.org/publications-and-research/jsah; launched 2010), a multimedia scholarly journal; and SAH Archipedia (http://sah-archipedia.org/; launched 2012), an online encyclopedia of the global built environment. This article discusses the collaborations—with librarians, scholars, publishers, technology providers, and funders—necessary to create and sustain these new digital humanities resources. The authors also share lessons learned for all who plan to create digital academic resources.

Buildings of Pennsylvania: Philadelphia and Eastern Pennsylvania

Buildings of Pennsylvania: Philadelphia and Eastern Pennsylvania