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October Newsletter 2013

Oct 17, 2013 by User Not Found

 
October 2013 Volume LVII, No. 10 / Society of Architectural Historians Newsletter
 

  Little White Houses: Race, Space and the Ordinary Postwar Home
SAH past-president Dianne Harris will discuss her Graham-funded book, Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America, during a free lecture at the Graham Foundation on October 17. Harris will uncover the production of an extraordinarily powerful iconographic and cultural field that repeatedly equated ordinary, single-family houses with middle-class and white identities to the exclusion of others, creating an invidious cultural iconography that continues to resonate today. A reception and book signing will follow the lecture. Presented in partnership with the Graham Foundation. 
Read More.
     

  Charnley-Persky House to Participate in Open House Chicago
On October 19 & 20, the Charnley-Persky House will be among the 150 sites participating in the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s third annual Open House Chicago (OHC), a free public event that offers participants behind-the-scenes access to over 150 sites across the city. Visitors will have the opportunity to tour the Charnley-Persky House, which serves as the headquarters of the Society of Architectural Historians, between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. during OHC weekend. Read More.
     
  SAH Awards Gala Tickets Now Available
Tickets to the 2013 SAH Awards Gala are now available for purchase. SAH will present four Awards for Architectural Excellence during the gala. The theme is “A Century of Progress: 1913–2013,” recognizing the changes in the urban landscape over the past 100 years. Tickets are $150 (tax-deductible portion $50). Sponsorship opportunities are available. The tax-deductible portion of your sponsorship contribution will match an NEH grant SAH received to develop SAH Archipedia.
     
  Frank Lloyd Wright's Modern Human Sold Out
SAH is partnering with the Chicago Humanities Festival (CHF) to present the discussion “Frank Lloyd Wright’s Modern Human,” on November 10. This program has sold out. MoMA curator Barry Bergdoll and architect Jeanne Gang will explore Frank Lloyd Wright’s legacy in a conversation informed by and showcasing the newly available Wright archive, recently acquired by the Museum of Modern Art and Columbia University’s Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library. Dianne Harris, past SAH president and chair of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center Advisory Board, will moderate. Read More.
     

  SAH Launches Conference Host Pilot Program
Will you be attending the SAH conference for the first time? We want to ensure that you feel included and welcome. As SAH expands its base and draws more attendees to our Annual Conference, especially from abroad, we think it is important to make first-time conference attendees feel welcome by helping them get oriented, familiarizing them with the Society, its activities and offerings, and helping them meet fellow attendees with whom they can start forming new networks. At the 2014 Annual Conference in Austin we will be piloting a support program, and we would like to invite experienced SAH members to volunteer to become SAH Conference Hosts for first-time conference attendees. Read More.
     
  New Look for the 2014 Annual Conference Participant Roster 
In order to facilitate discussion, networking opportunities, as well as seeking general interest among conference attendees, SAH will be implementing a new field on the registration form to input your area of study or field of interest. This information will be printed on the participant roster. Attendees will now be able to consult the roster to find others whose studies and interests are beneficial to their own. We hope this will generate new connections for our members and further enhance the experience of the conference.
     
  Landscape History Chapter of SAH Celebrates 10th Anniversary
Join the Landscape History Chapter of SAH as they celebrate their 10th anniversary on Friday, April 11, at 7 p.m., at a restaurant in downtown Austin. All are welcome to join. Additional details will be on the LHC website in the near future. Please contact President Sonja Duempelmann at sdeumpelmann@gsd.harvard.edu or Vice President Dorothee Imbert at imbert.4@osu.edu by April 4 for further information and directions.
     

  SAH Website Now Available in Over 70 Languages
In an effort to better serve our international audiences and reach a wider audience, SAH has added Google's Website Translator to the SAH website. Use the Google Translator tool at the top right corner of the SAH website to choose from over 70 languages and automatically translate the website. 
     
  Lessons About Architecture and the Civil Rights Era Added to SAH Archipedia
SAH is pleased to announce the addition of three lesson plans about architecture and the civil rights era to SAH Archipedia. Written by award-winning teacher Charles M. Yarborough (2008 Mississippi History Teacher of the Year and 2011 Mississippi Historical Society Outstanding History Teacher, among other recognitions), these lesson plans include links to online multimedia resources, photos and class activities in the form of PDFs available for free download. Read More.
     

  Building Data: Field Notes on the Future of Architectural History
Essay by Gabrielle Esperdy on SAH Archipedia from Places Journal
After decades of lurking in the shadows of the digital realm, metadata is finally facing the glare of the media spotlight, from revelations about National Security Agency surveillance to disclosures of Wikipedia’s woman problem to discoveries of privacy breaches on Facebook. At first glance, these disparate scandals don’t seem to have a whole lot to do with metadata: at Facebook, the company was sharing member preferences and activities with advertisers; at Wikipedia, site editors were changing classifications for American novelists, separating out those who also happened to be women; at the NSA, analysts were tracking phone records, looking for patterns in who called whom. Read More.
     

  Alienation and Education: Massive Open Online Courseware and the Future of Architectural History Instruction
SAH Blog Post by Samuel Ray Jacobson
With a team of administrators, programmers, video editors, and student interns I spent the summer developing the first ever massive open online course on the subject of architectural history. Offered on the edX platform beginning September 17, the MITx course “A Global History of Architecture: Part 1”—known to us at MIT by its course number, 4.605x—is intended to serve as a platform for thought about architecture throughout the world and the history of human society. Like most online courses entering the education marketplace today, 4.605x is constructed around a body of pre-existing material. Read More.
     

  Call for Nominations to the JSAH Editorial Advisory Committee
The Society of Architectural Historians invites nominations and self-nominations for eight individuals to serve on the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians Editorial Advisory Committee for staggered terms of one to four years. JSAH features leading scholarship in the English language in all aspects of the history of the built environment. Ideal candidates have published substantially in the field and may come from any of the Society’s constituencies in academia, preservation, museum work or independent scholarship; institutional affiliation is not required. The Society seeks to form a committee that will collectively provide expertise across the discipline’s chronological and geographic subfields. Read More.
 
  SAH Fall Membership Drive
Did you know that SAH conducts a membership drive every fall? Membership is the lifeblood of SAH – we exist for our members! SAH’s current membership is 2,500 individuals and has hovered there for the past few years. The board of director’s Membership & Diversity Committee has set a goal of increasing membership by 10% each year for the next 10 years. Growing membership has two facets – renewals and new members. With double the members, your dues stay affordable and we can do even more for YOU. Fall is the perfect time to introduce a colleague, friend, associate or student to all that SAH offers. Read More.
     

Henri Labrouste: Structure Brought to Light and Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes
By Study Tour Fellow Emily Morash
For a brief period this spring, an unprecedented amount of temporary exhibition space at the Museum of Modern Art was simultaneously devoted to two seminal figures of modern architecture, Henri Labrouste and Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret). As a recipient of the Society’s Scott Opler Endowment for New Scholars Study Tour Fellowship, I had the exceptional experience of touring the exhibits with their curators and a group of architectural historians and enthusiasts. Read More.
       

  SAHARA Travel Fellow Report – My Summer with Maya and SAHARA  
By SAHARA Fellow Leah McCurdy
Slightly tongue in cheek, I can accurately say that Maya (architecture) and I have been through a lot together. As if old friends, I spent my summer with Maya architecture and the SAHARA image archive. I am a doctoral student specializing in archaeological studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio and have always held an intense interest in ancient architecture. This summer I completed my sixth field season excavating Maya structures and was able to introduce my new friend SAHARA into the mix. Read More.		  
       
  JSTOR Launches JPASS
JSTOR has created JPASS, which gives scholars who may not have access to JSTOR through a school or public library personal access to a library of over 1,500 academic journals. One-month or 1-year JPASS access plans are available. Read More.		  


SAH Seeks Information About Members' Slide Collections
SAH is gathering information about our members' 35mm slide collections related to the built environment with the goal of finding a way to preserve them. We recognize that many such collections are increasingly endangered by loss, environmental damage or destruction. A study group led by SAH First Vice President Ken Breisch and SAHARA Editors Jacqueline Spafford and Jeffrey Klee has prepared an initial survey to get a better understanding of the variety, size and scope of members' slide collections to help create a plan for preserving valuable and unique materials and, ideally, digitizing and sharing them. Read more and take the survey.		  
   
Scalar Webinars Announces Fall Schedule
Scalar is a free, open source authoring and publishing platform that’s designed to make it easy for authors to write long-form, born-digital scholarship online. Scalar enables users to assemble media from multiple sources and juxtapose them with their own writing in a variety of ways, with minimal technical expertise required. To follow up on the recent Beta release of the new multimedia publishing platform, the Scalar development team will be offering a series of free online webinars this fall. Visit the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture website to register.		  
   
Environmental Design Archives (EDA) Completes NHPRC-Funded Project
The Environmental Design Archives (EDA) at the University of California, Berkeley is pleased to announce the completion of a 12-month project funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC). The project, titled "Living and Learning: The Architecture of Housing and Schools – Providing Access to the Records of Two Architects," resulted in the archival processing of the Ernest J. Kump and Charles Warren Callister collections spanning the years 1928-2007. These records have been arranged, described and preserved and are now available for research. Read More.		  
   
Chapter & Partner News
The Marion Dean Ross, Pacific Northwest Chapter of SAH (MDR/SAH) will be holding its Annual Meeting and Conference in Salem, Oregon from October 18-20. The theme of the gathering is The Willamette River Valley: Settlers and Founders. Highlights of the conference include a panel discussion on the state of the Willamette Valley's Settlement-Era Homesteads, which were recently named to Oregon's "Most Endangered" list; paper sessions by our members; and tours of locally significant sites including the Oregon State Hospital, made nationally famous as the setting for the movie of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Read More.

MDR/SAH's board recently awarded the second set of research grants named for prominent architectural historian and stalwart chapter member Elisabeth Walton Potter. This year, awards went to Professor Anne Marshall of Moscow, Idaho for her work titled Indigenous Architecture: Creating The Museum At Warm Springs and to Liz Carter of Eugene, Oregon for Mid-nineteenth Century Dwellings of Oregon's Black Pioneers: A Brief Historical Context. For more on MDR/SAH events and members, see the Chapter Blog at sahmdr.wordpress.com.

The Minnesota Chapter of SAH (MNSAH) annual fall tour features the work of Cass Gilbert in the Summit Avenue area of St. Paul. University of Minnesota architectural historians and MNSAH members Kate Solomonson and Jeanne Kilde will lead the October 19, 2013, tour, entitled "Cass Gilbert’s Houses & Churches: Architecture and Social Context in St. Paul." The tour will include the 1887 Virginia Street Church on Selby Avenue, Dayton Avenue Presbyterian Church (1888), Crawford Livingston House (1898), and Charles and Emily Noyes House (1887). Read More.

“Whose Tradition?” is the theme of the fourteenth conference of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments (IASTE) to be held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia from December 14-17, 2014. In examining themes of authorship and subjectivity, this conference will seek to uncover in what manner, for what reason, by whom, to what effect, and during what intervals traditions have been deployed with regard to the built environment. Scholars from relevant disciplines are invited to submit a 500-word abstract and short biography by February 17, 2014. Read More.

The Italian Art Society Program Committee is looking for submissions for IAS-sponsored sessions at the Society for Architectural Historians (Chicago, April 2015; deadline to IAS: December 1, 2014); the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference (New Orleans, October 2014; deadline to IAS: March 2014); and the American Association of Italian Studies conference (Zurich, May 2014; deadline to IAS: October 15, 2013). The IAS also currently seeks paper proposals for the annual IAS/Kress Lecture Series in Italy, which will take place in Pisa on May 29 or June 16, 2014 (deadline: Jan. 4, 2014). The distinguished scholar selected will speak on a topic related to art/architecture of any period from Pisa or Tuscany and will receive an honorarium and lecture allowance. Like IAS on Facebook, visit our website and popular Italian art blog, and follow the IAS at Academia.edu and on Twitter (@ItalianArtSoc). We welcome all who are interested in Italian art or architectural history to join the IAS.

The Society for Industrial Archeology held its Fall Tour in Rockford, IL Sept 26-29. Tours of current industries, some in historic buildings, e.g. the Fairbanks Morse Stone Building, a limestone structure from the late 1800's, still in use, delighted members. There were also formal talks followed by visits to other sites, some abandoned, e.g. Nelson Knitting Company, the creators of the red heal and red toe socks that became the "sock monkey," now a Rockford icon. There are descendants of industries started in the boom of water power on the Rock River in the mid-1800s still in (highly modified) buildings of the era. The area is steeped in industrial architecture history.		  
   
Current SAH Opportunities 
SAH Award for Film and Video: The SAH Award for Film and Video was established in 2013 to recognize annually the most distinguished international work of film or video on the history of the built environment. Deadline December 1.

HABS-SAH Sally Kress Tompkins Fellowship: A joint program of the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) and the National Park Service's Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), this fellowship permits an architectural historian to work on a 12-week HABS project during the summer of 2014. Deadline December 31.

Charles E. Peterson Fellowship: A joint program with the Athenaeum of Philadelphia, this fellowship supports the participation of a graduate student in the research and writing for a volume in the Buildings of the United States (BUS) series and/or SAH Archipedia, the Society’s online architectural resource. Deadline January 2.

Call for Sessions: SAH 68th Annual Conference in Chicago: The Society invites members and future members to chair a session at the 2015 SAH Annual Conference in Chicago, April 15-19. Deadline January 15.		  
   
Other Opportunities 
SAH now has so many new opportunities posted to its website every week that we have decided to distribute links to them in a dedicated email every Friday. In addition, you are welcome to post your own opportunities as long as they focus on the history of the built environment. Look for the Friday SAH email for updates on calls for papers, conferences, fellowships and other opportunities to advance your career.
 
    
Members in the News
Maurie McInnis & Dell Upton: The Civil War in Art and Memory
Joseph Rykwert Awarded 2014 RIBA Royal Gold Medal
Obituary: Prof. Nancy J. Volkman
  

 
SAH October Booklist
Read the October Booklist of recently published architecture books and related works. The booklist and exhibition catalog list are selected by Barbara Opar, architecture librarian, Syracuse University Library.