Nashville, TN Downtown Presbyterian Church ~ interior

Nashville, TN Downtown Presbyterian Church ~ interior, originally uploaded by army.arch.

There are still plenty of surprises out there.
I didn’t know about this building: an Egyptian Revival Presbyterian church by William Strickland, 1851, in Nashville, TN. What was going on among the Presbyterians of Nashville to make this thing happen? Thanks to ArmyArch for posting this mind-bending building.

Charlton’s Coffeehouse Opening

Next Friday, November 20th, 2009, will be the official opening of Richard Charlton’s Coffeehouse in Williamsburg, Virginia. The reconstruction of this building and the interpretive planning have been an intense two-year project involving people across the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. The results are indeed spectacular, so be sure to visit if you’ll be in the area. I understand that the coffee is pretty tasty, too.

There are piles of information on the project at the official CWF website. Start with the announcement here.

2009 CWF/William and Mary Field School in Architecture

Prospective scholars of early American architectural history, take note:

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.

Catalog of Digital Manuscripts

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.

Charlton’s Coffeehouse Frame-Raising

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.

NYCHA Photo Exhibit

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.

Vernacular Architecture Forum website launch

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.

Boston Public Library Historic Photographs on Flickr

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.

Remote Sensing Extravaganza

The Boston Globe reports on a project at the Paul Revere House that combines laser scanning and ground-penetrating radar to form an above-and-below ground 3D model of the site (don’t miss the nifty fly-through). It’s an extravagant, expansive project, and rare in its combination of above and below-ground spatial data in a single model. The idea is to use the information to help decide, among other things, where to put a new elevator and it also represents the first detailed survey of the museum property.

With a little help, it might also become the structure for an on-going, annotated survey of the building and the site, noting which pieces of the building, for example, are 17th or 18th-century and which are 20th-century reconstructions. The problems will lie in integrating the fielded data (dates, materials, etc.) with the spatial data. I don’t know of an off-the-shelf software solution that would allow a relational database to be combined with a CAD model in a flexible and sustainable way.

There’s no word, yet, on the larger plans for what will certainly be a marvelous resource as-is.

Vincent Scully needs a blog

There’s nothing snappier than Anthony Lane writing about something he hates; nor anything more ponderous than Paul Goldberger on something he likes.

I brings me no pleasure to say it but I find it a struggle to make it through passages like this: “The engineering required to keep all this metal in the air is highly sophisticated: the building may look like a huge steel sculpture, but most of the beams are structural, not decorative.” (Most of them? You can’t be serious. How fascinating.) Vincent Scully was born about 50 years too early, I reckon. His manner of firing interpretive zingers at an incredible range of buildings made him seem untrustworthy to more sober-minded scholars (Goldberger the critic is nothing but sober-minded) but would have been perfect for the off-handed, staccato pace of the blog.

It’s not too late, Professor Scully.