2011 BEST OF THE SOUTH PRESERVING SOUTHERN ARCHITECTURE AWARD

The Best of the South: Preserving Southern Architecture Award was first presented in 2006.

Read More.

© 2011 www.polytekton.com

and Southeast Chapter Society of Architectural Historians

CALL FOR NOMINATIONS 2011 SESAH PUBLICATIONS AWARD

SESAH is seeking nominations for the 2012 Publication Awards. The awards honor outstanding scholarship about the architecture of the South or by authors who reside in the South (defined as SESAH member states). Three categories of publication that are recognized: books, journal articles, and essays published in book format. The copyright should be no earlier than 2010. An article or essay should be copied in triplicate and include complete bibliographic information. Book titles must include full bibliographical information. Send submissions (3 copies) to the chair of the committee no later than July 31st, 2012:

Travis C McDonald Travis@poplarforest.org

Deadline is July 31, 2012


CALL FOR NOMINATIONS FOR 2012

SESAH seeks nominations for the Best of the South: Preserving Southern Architecture Award. This annual award honors a project that preserves or restores an historic building, or complex of buildings, in an outstanding manner and that demonstrates excellence in research, technique, and documentation. Projects in the twelve-state region of SESAH that were completed in 2010 or 2011 are eligible. Nominations should consist of no more than two typed pages of description, and be accompanied by hard copy illustrations and any other supporting material. A cover letter should identify the owner of the project, the use of the building(s), and the names of all the major participants of the project. For more information please contact the Best of the South Award committee chair Ben Ross blross@gmail.com. Send three (3) hard copies of the nomination to Ben Ross. The deadline for submissions is July 31, 2012. Winners will be announced at the 30th SESAH Annual Meeting in Athens, Georgia, in October 2012.

SESAH’s annual Best of the South: Preserving Southern Architecture Award honors a project that preserves or restores an historic building, or complex of buildings, in an outstanding manner and that demonstrates excellence in research, technique, and documentation.

The 2011 winner is the Texas Historic Courthouse Preservation Program of the Texas Historical Commission. This recognizes the program’s recent restoration of five historic county courthouses in Texas. Established in1999 by the Texas Legislature, the program has facilitated the full restoration of 45 historic county courthouses in Texas to date, with eight additional projects anticipated for completion by the end of 2011. Over the past decade, the program has provided $227 million in grant funds with local matches exceeding $150 million. This investment has generated 8,579 jobs and more than $238 million in local tax revenues while also promoting downtown revitalization and heritage tourism. The restoration of a county courthouse can have a significant impact on a community’s pride and sense of place, causing the general public to consider the importance of historic buildings and other icons of public memory and meaning. The impacts of the program have been particularly visible in small and rural communities, where courthouse restorations have served as a catalyst for downtown revitalization. The Texas Historic Courthouse Preservation Program highlights the power of historic preservation projects to revitalize communities, promote economic development and job creation, increase local tax revenues, and to reinforce a community’s pride and sense of place. The program’s most recent projects build on a decade of progress, serving as an outstanding example of the wide-ranging impact of historic preservation.



2011 PUBLICATION AWARDS

The Publication Awards go back to 2004. Read More...


SESAH’s annual Publication Awards honor outstanding scholarship about the architecture of the South or by authors who reside in the South (defined as SESAH member states). Three categories of publication are recognized: books, journal articles, and essays published in book format.


David Gobel, on behalf of fellow committee members Sheila Crane and the late Pamela Simpson, announced the winners of the Publication Awards at the SESAH Annual Meeting in Charleston, SC. He noted that the Publications Award Committee reviewed nine books, nine articles, and eight essays for this year’s awards. Each category had several award contenders, but there was clear agreement in the committee’s deliberations.


The Book Award was given to Michelangelo Sabatino for Pride in Modesty: Modernist Architecture and the Vernacular Tradition in Italy (University of Toronto Press, 2010).

Michelangelo Sabatino’s Pride in Modesty expands, deepens and challenges our understanding of twentieth-century modernism both in Italy and beyond. Sabatino does this by taking his reader on a hundred-year journey across the diverse landscape of Italian architecture from national unification in 1871 to the work of Aldo Rossi in the 1970s. As he investigates well-known movements such as Futurism, Rationalism and Neo-Rationalism, he shows how inadequate the canonic modernist narrative has been in accounting for form and meaning in architecture. What he shows to be far more potent and pervasive in shaping architectural discourse is the influence of the vernacular tradition. Navigating his way through political, social and regional contexts, Sabatino shows us an Italian architecture that is at once more complex and more familiar than we have ever known.


The Article Award was given to Travis McDonald for “The East and West Wings of the White House: History in Architecture and Building,” White House History, 29 (Summer 2011): 44-87.

For White House History, McDonald has produced a tour de force. Not just what happened when, but a view into the process by which the talents of and tensions between creative geniuses (Jefferson, Latrobe) produced remarkable architectural achievements. Newly discovered materials and ingenious insights based on them as well as on long-known documents, make this essay the pick of the crop for the SESAH Best Article of 2011 award.


The Essay Award was given to Ann E. McCleary for “The Turnpike Towns,” in The Great Valley Road of Virginia: Shenandoah Landscapes from Prehistory to the Present, edited by Warren R. Hofstra and Karl Raitz. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), pp. 190–238.

In this ambitiously synthetic essay, Ann McCleary traces the circumstances that fueled the development of towns along Virginia’s Valley Turnpike, from the settlement patterns that defined their establishment in the colonial period to the characteristic buildings that dominated their development into the early twentieth century. Deftly ranging in her analysis from town plans and public squares to commercial buildings and brick I-houses, McCleary trains a subtle eye on both the external influences and local circumstances that shaped these varied towns. As her compelling narrative reveals, the turnpike and the networks of communication it forged contributed significantly to the development of a regionally distinctive architecture across the Shenandoah Valley.