This past weekend, my wife came home to find three suspicious squirrels having a confab under my 1995 Volvo 850 T5-R, a lovely, lovely car that was parked in the driveway. They bolted when she pulled in, as squirels will do when they’re up to no good.

Later that day, when she started the Volvo, gas came pouring out from underneath, so she shut it down–this was not just a little leak but a rivulet of gasoline, flowing out onto the driveway, her shoes, etc. So we had the car towed to our mechanic, who told me, with amazement, that the gas line looked like an animal had chewed a huge hole in it and that there was no sign of any other damage, as there would be if I’d driven over something that cut the line.

So maybe it’s finally time to get a cat, or a dog we can train to go after critters with gas on their breath. Those stupid things think they can get away with anything because they have fluffy tails but they’re really just mooching, punk-ass rodents. Or maybe we can work something out with the local hawks.

College of William and Mary and Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

Architectural Field School, History 490/590

July 6-August 7, 2009

Williamsburg, Virginia

Carl Lounsbury, Instructor

            The Colonial Williamsburg Architectural Research Department in conjunction with the College of William and Mary’s National Institute of American History and Democracy offers a five-week course this summer that is open to undergraduate and graduate students as well as those with a special interest in early American architecture. This field school introduces students to the methods used in the investigation and recording of buildings.  On-site examination of structures in the Historic Area of Williamsburg and visits to buildings in the surrounding Tidewater region follow several introductory lectures on building technology and architectural features.  The program is intended to help students distinguish the form, fabrication, and assembly of materials and building elements and understand their chronology. They will learn how to apply field evidence to answer larger questions concerning architectural and social history.

            The fourth week is devoted to investigating and recording buildings on location away from Williamsburg.  The field school will return to Beaufort, South Carolina, to assist the Historic Beaufort Foundation in recording town houses and plantation sites. Back in Williamsburg for the last week, students will convert their fieldwork into measured drawings using a CAD program and write reports on their sites.

            This class will meet four days a week from 10:00 to 4:30.  It will require travel (in a van) and some physical exercise—mainly climbing and squeezing.  Students must be enrolled for the course through the College of William and Mary. The cost of travel and accommodations in Beaufort will be covered by the program. For more information, please email Carl Lounsbury at clounsbury@cwf.org or call (757) 220-7654.

For more information about past field schools, including finished reports, see here.

For images from previous field schools, see here.

The Chronicle reported Tuesday about the Catalog of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts. This is a simple, lovely new resource developed by a UCLA professor of English, Matthew Fisher, to identify and index the digital manuscripts that are currently scattered across the web and difficult to find.

It’s a very simple idea, and not one designed for its commercial appeal but surely one that could usefully be applied to,  say, North American buildings built before 1800, referencing HABS, statewide surveys, etc., and including fields for name, location (ideally in lat-long format), date, and a link to the resource. It would be simple but labor-intensive to build, and a major boon to scholars and students of early American architecture.

There’s so much material available, I guess we’re back to needing Yahoo!, at least for scholars.

Those within an hour’s drive of Williamsburg should come this Saturday, December 20th, to watch the heavy timber frame of Charlton’s Coffeehouse be raised into place. The front wall and the upper level floor system will be erected starting at 9am, at the east end of Duke of Gloucester Street.

The frame has been cut entirely by hand and will be raised using only muscle power. It will be quite a sight.

From the official press release:

“Williamsburg, VA: Historic Trades carpenters with the assistance of 15 civil engineering students from the Virginia Military Institute’s corps of cadets and members of the Timber Framers Guild will raise the heavy timber-framed south wall and second floor framing of the coffeehouse without the aid of modern machinery. Applying ancient principles of physics and lifting technology common to the 18th century, the carpenters and cadets will erect the building’s timbers using A-frame cranes and old-fashioned muscle power.

The south wall will be raised and pegged into position between 9 – 10 a.m. At 10 a.m., the first of the five heavy timber tie beams that form the second floor framing will be lifted, placed in position and secured. The process of installing the tie beams should require about one hour per beam.

The Charlton’s coffeehouse project is one of the most important reconstructions on the Historic Area’s Duke of Gloucester Street in half a century thanks to a generous $5 million gift from Mr. and Mrs. Forrest E. Mars Jr.”

Don’t miss it.

There is a fantastic exhibit of photographs in the New York City Housing Authority Collection up here. It includes images from the 1930s and 40s of new public housing, as well as some invaluable views of the tenements and neighborhoods that were demolished to make room for them. Look for images of back-lot tenements and old-law tenement interiors, in particular.
It seems this has been up for a while, so belated congratulations to the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives at Laguardia Community College for posting these fabulous images.

The new and much improved website for the Vernacular Architecture Forum is now public, at http://vafweb.org/.

If you have an interest in American buildings of any period and aren’t yet a member, join us. The conferences, which devote at least two days to tours and only one to paper sessions, are always a fantastic way to take the measure of a place, much more so than typical academic conferences which park attendees in a conference hotel for four days, with furloughs for meals. Membership is 45 bucks per year and only 25 for students–cheap! Your dues get you a quarterly newsletter, an annual journal, and reduced conference fees.

You can get a sense for most of the conferences since 2003 on a new Flickr group, here. If you prefer, a map interface to this material is here.

As long as you’re killing time on the web, or waiting for your delayed flight to board, you might as well be learning about existentialism.

Open Culture has a compiled a list of college lectures, organized by subject, that are available as free mp3s and YouTube videos. It also includes, at the bottom, links to downloadable lecture collections from a handful of major universities. The Yale site includes some very nice recordings from the School of Music (where I once worked, very happily, in the recording studio).

Want to dip your toe into archaeology? Or marketing, or cognitive psychology? If you’ve got a computer and 45 minutes to spare, start here.

A tip of the hat to the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus column. Follow this link to read some anxious comments about the degree to which freely available video and audio can replace live teaching at the university level.

Birthplace of John Adams, Quincy, Mass., taken 1929 by Leon Abdalian, originally uploaded by Boston Public Library.

We’ve become spoiled, and a little jaded, perhaps, by great resources like HABS and the New York Public Library’s on-line image collections but there’s a huge amount of newly digitized historic material still being put on the web. Yesterday, the Boston Public Library posted a fabulous collection of historic photographs on Flickr that deserves attention from architectural historians and others. It includes 781 photographs by Leon Abdalian, an Armenian immigrant who photographed sites in and around Boston between the 1910s and early 1950s. It includes a number of wintry landscape views but most images show significant buildings in the region, including the old and new Massachusetts State houses, Faneuil Hall, Richardson’s Trinity Church, and many many others. For anyone interested in the early architecture of eastern Massachusetts, or the colonial revival in New England, they are a marvelous resource.

At the moment, the images are well captioned but not tagged. It would be fantastic to have them geo-tagged, as well, but having them available digitally is a great start.

I’d love to know more about Abdalian himself, and the circumstances of these photographs. His day job was, apparently, driving a trolley but was he paid to make these expensive glass-plate negatives? If he was a hobbyist, shooting what was of interest, how did he choose his subjects? The buildings in the collection include some of the oldest in the Massachusetts Bay area, though he also recorded some sites that seem to have been of greater historical than architectural interest, like Benjamin Franklin’s birthplace.

It’s worth noting, as well, that the photographs in the collection are predominantly of 17th, 18th, and 19th-century buildings. There are very few images of contemporary architecture, which presumably reflects Abdalian’s preferences but perhaps also says something about the building culture of Boston in the first half of the twentieth century. The few early 20th-century buildings in the collection are predominantly Beaux-Arts civic structures. There is also a very nice series of religious buildings, including Old South Church and Temple Israel Synagogue in Boston, and a series of public monuments.

After you’ve looked over the Abdalian images, don’t miss the BPL’s Boston Stereographs collection.

As an employee of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, on the one hand, and a digital hack, on the other, I often feel like I live in two very separate worlds: one deliberately off the grid; the other utterly dependent upon it. Occasionally, they collide, as in our Ravenscroft blog, covering our archaeolgical field school in 2007 and 2008, and this post, by Adam Crymble. Adam writes approvingly of CW’s Historic Trades staff, and rightly so. They are one of the highlights of any visit to the Historic Area, and consistently reward the curiosity of visitors with their depth of understanding about their craft.

So thanks, Adam, for the good press. Tell all your friends.

Today I loaded three new pages of How-To material: one on slide scanning, a second on choosing a digital camera, the third on desktop image-management software. All make for gripping reading.