Past Events

Images from Annual Meeting in Jackson

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 20:12:05 -0500

Images from the Annual SESAH meeting in Jackson, MS are now available via Daves Rossell’s Flickr account at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/egdrossell/sets/72157622754718148/

Enjoy! If you have any questions please contact Daves directly at

erossell@scad.edu

SESAH announces 2008 Award Winners

Fri, 5 Dec 2008 11:35:13 -0500

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.

Kenneth Jackson Lecture on Four Cities

Sat, 17 Nov 2007 22:40:05 -0500

Jacques Barzun Professor of History and the Social Sciences at Columbia University Kenneth Jackson gave the keynote SESAH lecture A Tale of Four Cities, sponsored by SESAH and the Vanderbilt University Chancellor’s Lecture Series on October 25 at the Blair School of Music, Ingram Hall, in Nashville. If you would like to see the video streamed please click on the link below

http://www.vanderbilt.edu/news/releases/2007/10/26/video-kenneth-jackson-on-20th-century-history-of-new-orleans-memphis-nashville-and-houston

SESAH announces 2007 Award Winners

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 20:49:41 -0500

“Best of the South: Preserving Southern Architecture Award”
Goes to Walker Hall Restoration at the South Carolina School for the Deaf & the Blind. For more information about the project click here.

Annual Publication Awards go to Authors in Georgia, Texas & Tennessee

Nashville, TN – November 13, 2007. The Southeastern Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians (SESAH) announces the 2007 SESAH Award Winners. The awards were made at the 25th SESAH Annual Meeting, held in Nashville, Tennessee, from October 24-27, 2007. Visit www.sesah.org for more information about the conference.

The 2007 Best Essay Award was presented to Robert M. Craig for his chapter “Pilgrimage Route to Paradise: The Sacred and Profane along the Dixie Highway,” in Claudette Stager and Martha Carver, eds., Looking Beyond the Highway: Dixie Roads and Culture (University of Tennessee Press, 2006). Craig wittily compares early-twentieth century motor tourists on the Dixie Highway with long-ago pilgrims in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The intriguing book explores the diversity of history along the Dixie Highway from Illinois to Florida in the era before interstate highways. Craig is a professor in the College of Architecture, Georgia Institute of Technology. See the press response from GATech here.

The 2007 Best Article Award was presented to Clifton Ellis for “The Mansion House at Berry Hill Plantation: Architecture and the Changing Nature of Slavery in Antebellum Virginia,” in Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture (Volume 13, No. 1, 2006). Ellis shows how the Virginia plantation house, Berry Hill, was shaped by gender and race in a time of cultural change and racial tension. Ellis is Assistant Professor of Architectural History, College of Architecture, Texas Tech University.

The 2007 Best Book Award goes to Mary Hoffschwelle for The Rosenwald Schools of the American South (University Press of Florida, 2006). Hoffschwelle, Professor of History at Middle Tennessee State University, highlights the remarkable partnership that built model schools for black children during the Jim Crow era in the South. The Rosenwald program, which erected more than 5,300 schools between 1912 and 1932, began when Booker T. Washington, principal of Tuskegee Institute, turned to Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck & Company, to help build schools to educate the South's black children.
See the press response here.

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The 2007 Best of the South: Preserving Southern Architecture award goes to McMillan Smith & Partners Architects, PLLC, of Spartanburg, South Carolina, for the restoration of Walker Hall at the South Carolina School for the Deaf and the Blind near Spartanburg, South Carolina.

Founded in 1849, the South Carolina School for the Deaf and the Blind enriched the lives of generations of sensory disabled students. Architect Edward C. Jones designed Walker Hall, centerpiece of the campus, in 1859, and it was expanded by famed architects Samuel Sloan of Philadelphia (1884) and Edwards & Sayward of Atlanta (1921). After years of neglect, funding shortages, and constant use left the building in disrepair, in 1999, the architects began planning the renovation of the nearly 70,000 square foot building. The $13 million renovation project maintained the historic character of the building while meeting and exceeding code standards. Today Walker Hall continues to serve deaf, blind, and sensory multi-disabled children and adults. Architect Donnie Love, his team of contractors, and the South Carolina School for the Deaf and the Blind executed an exemplary project in restoring a building of unique history.

“The 25th SESAH Annual Meeting was our biggest ever with 105 attendees traveling from over 20 states, Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico,” stated SESAH president David Gobel of the Savannah College of Architecture and Design. “The local host committee made celebrating this milestone in Nashville a very special occasion, with an opening plenary session featuring the mayor and live music, a keystone lecture at Vanderbilt University with over 400 in attendance, a closing party at the city’s Civic Design Center, and walking tours of several landmarks. We are grateful for our Nashville hosts as well as the many local partners and donors for making our visit to the Music City such a memorable experience.” Future SESAH conferences will be held in Greensboro, North Carolina, from October 1-4, 2008; Jackson, Mississippi, in 2009; and Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 2010.

The 2007 SESAH Publications Award Committee consisted of Ellen Weiss of Tulane University; Marilyn Casto of Virginia Tech University; and Travis McDonald of Jefferson’s Poplar Forest in Virginia. The 2007 Best of the South: Preserving Southern Architecture Award Committee consisted of Andrew Chandler of the South Carolina Department of Archives & History, Chair; Julia King of London and Pennsylvania; and Jennifer Baughn of the Mississippi State Historic Preservation Office.

ABOUT SESAH

The Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians (SESAH) is a regional chapter of the national Society of Architectural Historians and includes twelve states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia). The nonprofit organization holds an annual meeting, publishes a quarterly newsletter and an annual journal, ARRIS, and presents annual awards. SESAH was founded in 1983 at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta to promote scholarship on architecture and related subjects and to serve as a forum for ideas among architectural historians, architects, preservationists, and others involved in professions related to the built environment. The annual meeting features scholarly paper sessions, business meeting, study tours, and a keynote lecture by a national leader in the field. SESAH members come from across the U.S. and Europe.

www.sesah.org

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SESAH announces 2006 Award Winners

Fri, 6 Oct 2006 19:02:22 -0400

Press Contact: Travis McDonald, Director of Architectural Restoration, Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest, P.O. Box 419, Forest, VA 24551-0419, Phone: (434) 534-8123, Fax: (334) 525-7252, Email: travis@poplarforest.org

SESAH ANNOUNCES 2006 AWARD WINNERS & EXPANDS TO INCLUDE TEXAS

Inaugural “Best of the South: Preserving Southern Architecture Award” Goes to The Coastal Heritage Society in Savannah, Georgia

Annual Publication Awards go to Authors in Virginia, Mississippi, Ohio, & Washington, DC – Special Award to Preservationist in Mississippi

SESAH Expands to include Texas in New 12-State Territory

Forest, VA – October 6, 2006. The Board of Directors of the Southeastern Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians (SESAH) announced the 2006 SESAH Award Winners at the 24th Annual SESAH Annual Meeting. Auburn University’s College of Architecture, Design, & Construction hosted the three-day conference, held September 27-30 in Auburn, Alabama. “SESAH continues to grow in many ways and this year’s meeting was marked by very strong attendance with nearly 100 participants from around the southeast, the nation, and even internationally,” stated SESAH president David Gobel of the Savannah College of Art & Design in Georgia. “The society’s Auburn meeting will be remembered not only for bringing in Texas, but for its inaugural ‘Best of the South’ award for preservation and for its generally delightful and exceptionally well-organized program of events.”

“The 2006 SESAH Awards reflect the diversity of scholarly and innovative preservation work being undertaken by scholars and preservationists throughout the South as well as from those outside the region,” stated Travis McDonald, spokesperson for the SESAH awards committees and the Director of Architectural Restoration at Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest in Forest, Virginia. “From Midwestern grain palaces and New South industrial architecture to the rehabilitation of a 1855 railroad roundhouse and academic studies of architects Benjamin Latrobe and Frank Milburn, this year’s award winners cover a wide range of architectural types and subject matter.”

The 2006 Best Essay Award was presented to Pamela H. Simpson for her chapter “Cereal Architecture: Late-Nineteenth-Century Grain Palaces and Crop Art,” published in the book Building Environments: Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture X, edited by Kenneth A. Breisch and Alison K. Hoagland

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(Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2005), 269-282. “In this essay Simpson investigates the practice of making brightly colored ‘mosaics’ of natural seeds and grain that clad county fair buildings in the mid-west in the late 19th century,” stated Philippe Oszusick of the University of South Alabama and chair of the Publications Award Committee. “These ‘grain palaces’ inspired other communities to create their own versions of ‘cereal architecture.’” Simpson teaches Art and Architectural History at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.

The 2006 Best Article Award was presented to Daniel J. Vivian for “A Practical Architect: Frank P. Milburn and the Transformation of Architectural Practice in the New South, 1890-1925,” published in Winterthur Portofolio, Vol. 40, No. 1, (Spring 2005), 17-45. “Vivian brings to light an architect working from the late 1880s to 1926 who was very popular in his time with at least 250 buildings to his credit in the Southeast,” stated Oszusick. “Yet much of his career remains in mystery with little knowledge of his work. This article examines Milburn’s career in relation to the changes that reshaped architecture and architectural practice in the post-Reconstruction South and the reasons why he was quickly forgotten following his death in 1926.” Vivian is an historian with the National Park Service in Washington, D.C. and a graduate student in history at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

The 2006 Best Book Award was presented to Michael W. Fazio and Patrick A. Snadon for The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.) This major work analyzes all the domestic works of Latrobe, both in England and in America, “offering an authoritative treatment of the concepts, designs, and unique interior and exterior features of his houses.” “The authors analyze Latrobe as both an international architect and as someone who developed a ‘rational house’ for American society and culture,” stated Oszusick. “The well-researched book is beautifully illustrated with photographs, drawings, maps, and computer generated perspective drawings of unexecuted or lost works. This is a major contribution to the previous body of work on Latrobe.” Fazio is an architecture professor at Mississippi State University. Snadon is a professor of interior design at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio.

This year, SESAH created a new award called “Best of the South: Preserving Southern Architecture.” This 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. SESAH’s inaugural 2006 Best of the South: Preserving Southern Architecture Award goes to The Coastal Heritage Society of Savannah, Georgia, for their preservation, restoration and adaptive use of the Roundhouse Railroad Museum Complex. The Central of Georgia’s railway complex is one of the oldest of its type in the country, dating to 1855. “The Coastal Heritage Society has done an outstanding job over many years in bringing this important industrial complex back into use,” stated Travis McDonald, chair of the Best of the South Awards Committee. “The recent work for which the award was given includes the rehabilitation work on the 1855 Tender Frame Shop; the restoration of the early twentieth-century workers’ garden and the 1923 locomotive turntable; the adaptive use of a 1920s African-American workers washroom; and the conservation of the 1920s addition to the 1855 Roundhouse. A preservation team of researchers and craftsmen have used sound documentary research, archaeology, architectural investigation, paint research, masonry and metal replication, timber conservation, and sensitive retrofitting of modern systems to preserve, restore, reuse, and interpret this important complex of buildings and structures.” Jury members called it “an excellent long-term project design” with “exemplary execution of craftsmanship.” Traci Bakit, Preservation Planner, and Jeanne Fullam, Project Superintendent, accepted the award on behalf of the Coastal Heritage Society.

One of the 2006 Best of the South Honorable Mention Awards went to Hanbury Evans Wright Vlattas Architects headquartered in Norfolk, Virginia, and the Community Arts Center Foundation of South Boston, Virginia, for the renovation and adaptive use of The Prizery, an early twentieth century tobacco warehouse that was converted into a community arts center, theater, art gallery, welcome center, and teaching center in South Boston, Virginia.

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The second 2006 Best of the South Honorable Mention Award went to Kann & Associates, an architectural firm in Baltimore, for the restoration of the Lovely Lane United Methodist Church in Baltimore, Maryland. This “exemplary restoration project” included the conservation and restoration of the ceiling mural in this 1885 Romanesque Style Church, designed by renowned architect Stanford White.

SESAH also announced a special award for “Professional Commitment” given to Jennifer Baughn, an architectural historian with the Mississippi State Historic Preservation Office in Jackson, Mississippi, for her unflagging efforts in the aftermath of last year’s Hurricane Katrina. Baughn organized and led teams of staff and volunteers in the enormous task of inventorying, assessing, and preserving the damaged historic buildings on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

The 2006 SESAH Publications Award Committee consisted of Philippe Oszusick of the University of South Alabama, Chair; Catherine Zipf of Regina Salve University in Rhode Island; and Travis McDonald of Jefferson’s Poplar Forest in Virginia. The 2006 Best of the South: Preserving Southern Architecture Award Committee consisted of Travis McDonald, Chair; Andrew Chandler of the South Carolina Department of Archives & History; Julia King of Fredericksburg, Virginia; and Jennifer Baughn of the Mississippi State Historic Preservation Office.

Future SESAH conferences will be held in Nashville, Tennessee, on October 24-27, 2007, and Greensboro, North Carolina, in October 2008. Visit www.sesah.org for more information.

ABOUT SESAH
The Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians (SESAH) is a regional chapter of the national Society of Architectural Historians and includes twelve states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia). The nonprofit organization holds an annual meeting, publishes a quarterly newsletter and an annual journal, ARRIS, and presents annual awards. SESAH was founded in 1982 at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta to promote scholarship on architecture and related subjects and to serve as a forum for ideas among architectural historians, architects, preservationists, and others involved in professions related to the built environment. The annual meeting features scholarly paper sessions, business meeting, study tours, and a keynote lecture by a national leader in the field. SESAH members come from across the U.S. and Europe.

www.sesah.org