The Southeastern Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians (SESAH) announces the 2008 SESAH Award Winners. The awards were made at the 26th SESAH Annual Meeting, held recently in Greensboro, North Carolina.

The 2008 Best Article Award was presented to Richard Cleary, PhD, for "Texas Gothic, French Accent: The Architecture of the Roman Catholic Church in Antebellum Texas" in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (Vol. 66, No. 1, March 2007). Clearly investigates a distinctive strain of Gothic Revival architecture nurtured in the American South. The revolution and formation of the Republic of Texas (1836-1845) made it impossible for the Roman Catholic Church to govern its Texan affairs from Mexico. This article describes the church's reliance on French missionaries to reassert its presence. Richard Cleary is a professor of architecture at the University of Texas at Austin.

The 2008 Best Book Award goes to Kathryn E. Holliday, PhD, for Leopold Eidlitz: Architecture and Idealism in the Gilded Age (W.W. Norton, 2008; hardcover). The first critical examination of the work of New York architect Leopold Eidlitz (1823-1908), America's first Jewish architect, founding member of the American Institute of Architects, and the first American to define a modern organic architecture, this book reveals his formidable influence. Though the organic tradition has long been understood to be a central defining feature of American architecture, associated most strongly with Chicago and Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, Eidlitz in fact began the exploration of the organic ideal a generation earlier in New York. Kathryn Holliday teaches architectural history and theory at the University of Texas at Arlington.

An Honorable Mention for the 2008 Best Book Award was presented to Anthony Alofsin, PhD, AIA, for When Buildings Speak: Architecture as Language in the Hapsburg Empire and Its Aftermath, 1867-1933 (University of Chicago Press, 2006; hardcover; 2008, paperback). Alofsin explores the rich yet often overlooked architecture of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire and its successor states. He shows that several different styles emerged in this milieu during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Moreover, he contends that each of these styles communicates to us in a manner resembling language and its particular means of expression. Anthony Alofsin is a professor of art and art history at the University of Texas at Austin.

The 2008 Best of the South: Preserving Southern Architecture Award goes to the Preservation Trust of Spartanburg, South Carolina, a local nonprofit organization founded in 1998. This award honors a project that preserves or restores a historic building, or complex of buildings, in an outstanding manner and that demonstrates excellence in research, technique, and documentation.

This year's winner used its preservation mandate to tackle the problem of urban decline and abandonment. Carlisle Street, located in the historic Hampton Heights neighborhood in Spartanburg, South Carolina, is a 1920s residential street composed of 26 houses. In 2005, more than half of the houses were vacant and abandoned, and the street's decline was beginning to affect the rest of the neighborhood. The Preservation Trust of Spartanburg's innovative street-wide approach involved acquiring, restoring, and reselling 14 properties on the street, upgrading lighting, and creating a green space in place of a former dead zone. Throughout the $1.3 million project, the Trust created partnerships with neighborhood and city leaders as well as private foundations and a productive network that will lay new groundwork for further preservation projects in the city. Visit www.preservespartanburg.org to learn more about this organization.

SESAH seeks to recognize and encourage authors publishing books and journal articles or essays written on architectural history subjects concerned with our 12-state Southeast region, and to recognize and encourage authors who reside in the our region and publish books and journal articles or essays on any architectural history subjects.

Future SESAH conferences will be held in Jackson, Mississippi, in 2009; Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 2010; and Charleston, South Carolina, in 2011.

Visit www.sesah.org for more information.