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.

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.

THATCamp

edwired has a series of posts on the recent THATCamp at CHNM at George Mason. It sounds like it was an exciting, productive weekend. The website and blog associated with it are rich resources, overflowing with useful links for people interested in technology and the humanities. There are a lot of very interesting projects underway out there, so click around…

News from Peru

Check out this post by my friend Jeremiah on some artifacts in the Ica Regional Museum, whose delights include a two-headed pot depicting a father teaching a son how to decapitate captured enemies (am I crazy or do those words have the same root*?) and a measly $1.45 charge for permission to photograph the artifacts.

*no, not exactly. Capture is from the Latin capio, to seize or take; decapitate is from caput, or head.

History and Gaming

CWF just won an award from the AAM for its social history game for schoolchildren, “Betwixt Folly and Fate.” Congratulations to the staff who helped develop it. It’s a fine game, with users choosing to spend a day as one of four young characters, making choices about what to say to whom, and being rewarded with status points based on the completion of specified tasks in a timely fashion. It’s a good reflection of our recent interpretive priorities (hence the AAM award) but, presumably because we don’t have a multi-million dollar gaming budget, necessarily limited in scope.

But what if CWF, or any other museum, did have a multi-million dollar budget to develop a game? What would we do? I can think of three models: a macro-scale Atlantic World colonization game, like a more finely grained version of the Civilization series; a micro-scale social history game, or an 18th-century version of the Sims; or a first-person game (shooter or otherwise), set in the Rev War, say, in which a player might play as a Redcoat, a rebel, or a slave trying to escape or sign on with the crown.

These three types each represent assumptions about historical significance by privileging a perspective. They also correspond neatly to three major genres of historical writing (history of leadership; social history; biography). Because effects in the game need to be encoded, they would also require us to be explicit about our assumptions about how history unfolds: who are historical agents; how do micro decisions affect macro patterns; how do macro decisions affect micro events? We have a huge amount of data to work with that could inform any number of experiments in speculative history, for example, and that aren’t necessarily suitable for scholarship, or interpretation but that might well engage an audience in historical thinking (what if Peyton Randolph had done X?), as well as historiographical thinking (why doesn’t the game let me do Y?).

(incidentally, why isn’t there a Dickens game yet? How great would it be to run around the back alleys of 19th-century London? Grand Theft Carriage, anyone?)

It’s pretty easy to imagine how these games would unfold and, I think, easy to imagine that they would be entertaining both to design and to play. It’s more difficult to imagine more expansive, open-ended kinds of games, though there are a few people who have started to do just this in the context of teaching history, such as Rob MacDougall in his post on gaming as a couse subject. Rob also has a thoughtful post on the limitations and possibilities for history gaming, including a discussion of History Canada, itself a mod for Civilization.

Still, there are very few games that combine the enjoyment of exploring alternative cultures with the intense, immersive quality of the best games. An exception, and one of the most expansive thinkers about games in general is Jane McGonigal, who developed “World Without Oil,” a massive, collaborative thought expermient about a peak oil disaster. Fun (really)!

Computer History Museum

Last night I arrived, for the first time, in California. I’m staying in the Bay Area for a few days before the 2008 meeting of the Vernacular Architecture Forum in Fresno. One of my first stops was at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, a stone’s throw or two from the Google headquarters (one of tomorrow’s stops). This is a very interesting place and well worth a visit for anyone who has the slightest curiosity about the subject. I haven’t fully processed the experience, so this post represents a first crack at what I saw today.

First off, I should say that, for such a new institution, the place shows itself well. Exhibits are well lit and well presented, the building is spacious and new, and best of all, admission is FREE. There were about 20-25 other visitors in the hour-and-a-half or so while I was there, which made for a pleasantly quiet visit.

I’ve wanted to see the Computer History Museum for about a year, as I am fascinated by the idea of a museum devoted to objects whose significance can’t be grasped (or even guessed at) by just looking at them, at least for most of us. They need, badly, to be interpreted. It’s hard enough presenting history in a museum environment, which tends to require either acres of wall text or small armies of interpreters (the CWF approach).

On the main level, there are currently three exhibits: one devoted to “Silicon Valley Pioneers,” which consists of short biographies and photographs of 20th-century movers and shakers in the industry, accompanied by a couple of objects each and mounted in display cases. This is familiar stuff in a familiar format. Substitute governors, or abolitionists, or baseball players, and you can imagine a similar display in your favorite history museum.

A small exhibit devoted to the history of chess-playing machines was, likewise, familiar in format, with large banners, lengthy wall text, and illustrations telling the story from the Mechanical Turk to Deep Blue. Because this is a modern museum, there are video displays, too.

The main event in the museum, however, and certainly the main reason to go, is its collection of historic computing devices, from abaci and slide rules to calculators to a couple of supercomputers and rows upon rows of personal computers. These are all arranged in a large room, organized by type and then, seemingly, by chronology. The name of this exhibit is “Visible Storage.” I only had about an hour in it but I must say that i was very sorry not to have had more.

There is very little interpretive text in this exhibit. For the most part, labels describe the particular innovation that one device or another represents: a leap forward in memory storage, for example, or one of the first Cray supercomputers. But if you’re looking for basic information, such as “what does that button do?” this is utterly lacking. And of course it is. For the more ancient devices, such as a 1959 DEC PDP-1, or a Cold War missile guidance system, knowing what the “On” switch is wouldn’t help much. The ONLY way, really, for a non-technologist to make any sense of this is with some context.

Context, then, came in the form of an enthusiastic docent, who was leading a tour around for much of the time that I was there and generally seeming to chat with anyone who would listen. I’m not sure how else you could explain this stuff to anyone.

The exception to the need for extensive interpretation, of course, are the computers that a visitor has had some direct experience with. From listening a little to some of the other visitors, it was clear that I was the tyro in the room (“do you know why they wired these things this way? It’s because they needed to…” “Ooh, boy, I threw away two of these just a couple of years ago.”) Still, it was strangely affecting, and somehow validating, to see the first computer I ever used, a Radio Shack TRS-80, on display. And then there was the Commodore 64, and a couple of Apples, and a box for Zork I, and the fancy HP calculator I had in high school. And then, whoops, on a table a few feet away, here’s the on-board guidance computer for a Minuteman I.

Despite the destructive power at the business end of a few of these devices, and despite the scrubbed appearance of some of the corporate computing machines, there’s something very ad hoc about most of the displays that make it clear how much of this history was made up along the way. There are those little raised-letter, stuck-on labels (original!) everywhere, and tiny notes stuck onto panels (“Patch the input first and the output second, or, turn off the plate power.”) Though I have no idea what most of these early machines did, it’s not hard to sense some of the delight their original users had in just making them function, to say nothing of getting them to solve particular problems.

The weirdest object in the room, and the one that surely warrants a more extended discussion than I have the time or patience for, is a sleek “Kitchen Computer,” offered by Neiman Marcus for $10,600 in 1969. Its interface consists of a series of obscurely labeled switches and LED lights. Long and low and made of lovely red and white plastic, it was meant to store and retrieve recipes. The panel describing it notes that “there is no evidence that any Kitchen Computer was ever sold.”

Historicizing Digital Work

Last week I attended the 2008 annual meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians in Cincinnati. One of the best talks I heard was by Olivia Horsfall Turner, a graduate student at University College, London, on late-17th-century antiquarian depictions of architecture.

The central figure of her discussion was Willim Somner, who broke with earlier, terse conventions of architectural description to provide wealth of analysis and detail about ancient monuments of Canterbury. Somner sought to understand buildings by looking closely at them, treating them as objects of historical analysis, in ways that clearly parallel modern methods. Like many early modern scholars, his approach was wide-ranging, and it drew, in particular (according to Olivia Turner) on contemporary conventions of scientific illustration, newly enlivened by widespread use of the microscope.

This talk provided a useful (to me) reminder of the ways in which modern architectural representation is rooted in some very old conventions and assumptions. The means we have relied upon for a long time–textual description and two-dimensional images–are artifacts of the printing press. They are only two means among many to describe a building and surely not always the best. This is not to say that there is no value in the scholarly convention of crafting a careful argement through an extended illustrated narrative but that those conventions are historically situated and far from self-evident.

As we develop new representations–computer models, digital photographs, databases, and who-knows-what else–it is useful to be reminded how earlier students of architecture developed new methods.

A Blog? Seriously?

How can anyone with any claim to scholarship spend time on something as seemingly frivolous and self-absorbed as a blog? To be sure, there is no shortage of dreck on the web but a weblog is no more and no less than a medium for written communication and therefore a useful tool. I have taken up this tool for two reasons, both centered around the utililty of computing for architectural history.

First, there is little understanding evident among my peers about the potential of digital technologies for architectural research. Our friends in history, archaeology, architectural design, literary studies, the social sciences, and even art history have begun to explore digital possibilities for their work with much more enthusiasm. So, I hope, this blog can help shine a little light on what architectual historians have to gain from computers.

Second, I want to explore, through writing, the possibilities of working digitally and the larger implications of rendering buildings in digital form. What is gained or lost in representing architecture in a digital photograph, or a digital model, or a database? What happens to our work as its publication moves from print to digital, and from the library to the web? To help understand these questions, I am beginning to explore the history of architectural representation in writing, drawings, and models to help me place digitization within our particular disciplinary context.

My hope is that short posts on particular digital topics–imaging, CAD drafting, database construction, for example–will, over time, develop as useful web-based reference materials for architectural research. I have posted several notes to email discussion lists on some of these subjects over the last few years, and given advice to friends privately, but this material is not widely available even though experience suggests that it should be.

Finally, I hope that the discipline of writing short public pieces on a regular basis will help me clarify my thinking on architectural representations and motivate me to push my research along. Because I work in a museum, I do not have a regular audience of students for testing ideas but a blog seems a fine venue for semi-baked notions that are not ready for a conference paper or publication. The very qualities that make blogs seem to lack seriousness (they are unvetted, spontaneous, and ephemeral) are the same ones that make them an ideal testing ground for new material.