Monthly Archives: December 2016

library, new books

New Books for Winter Reading

First, I would like to call attention to William Allin Storrer’s two new books on Frank Lloyd Wright that just arrived – Frank Lloyd Wright: Creating American Architecture and Frank Lloyd Wright: Designing Democratic America. Storrer notes in both works, “It is, too, a personal memoir and distillation of what my 66 years ‘with Frank Lloyd Wright’ has come to mean to me” (Designing Democratic America, IV; Creating American Architecture, III). Each work focuses on domestic architecture – Creating American Architecture specifically on Wright’s Prairie architecture and Designing Democratic America on his Usonian designs.

Storrer, William Allin. Frank Lloyd Wright: Creating American Architecture. With D. Dominique Watts and Rich Johnson. Traverse City, MI: WineWright Media, 2015. Storrer, William Allin. Frank Lloyd Wright Designing Democratic America. Traverse City, MI: WineWright Media, 2015.

The other two books I selected to share pertain to cities – Chicago and Florence, though they will be of interest to  historians, architects, and urban planners.

Betancur, John J. and Janet L. Smith. Claiming Neighborhood: New Ways of Understanding Urban Change. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2016.

betancurBetancur and Smith examine Chicago as a case study for understanding the history and future of neighborhoods. They write:

We argue that current theories – the tools used by academics and policy makers to explain how and why neighborhoods change – limit our ability to interpret what is actually happening while at the same time advancing in a veiled form a specific position or point of view and mandate. In particular, long-standing assumptions about what a neighborhood is and its importance in our lives rely on an image from the past that never existed and ignores or hides the realities on the ground. (pg. vii)

Atkinson, Niall. The Noisy Renaissance: Sound, Architecture, and Florentine Urban Life. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University, 2016.

I am particularly excited about Niall Atkinson’s book on Renaissance Florence.  While I was not anticipating his work, I find medieval and Renaissance Florence incredibly engaging and it is always one of my favorite sections to teach. I am curious how The Noisy Renaissance will either act as a companion piece to Marvin Trachtenberg’s Dominion of the Eye: Urbanism, Art, and Power in Early Modern Florence by enhancing our understanding of Renaissance Florence or perhaps challenge Trachtenberg’s interpretation of the city experience. Atkinson writes:

The Renaissance city was by no means a quiet place. In a variety of ways atkinsonit spoke directly to its inhabitants, who, irresistibly, were drawn to speak back. With its buildings and spaces, walls and gates, doors and windows, it facilitated and obstructed the flow of information, the dissemination of official messages, the telling of stories, the performance of music, the rhythm of prayer, the trade in secrets, and the low-frequency murmur of rumors, lies, and gossip. The built environment was not a stage upon which a discordant urban drama played out, but the very medium that gave that drama form, shaped its meaning, and modulated its towns. The city expressed the most compelling aspects of its design when people danced on its surfaces, crowded its spaces, poked holes in its walls, and upended its hierarchical organizations. And it is through these exchanges that we can learn a great deal not only about how contemporaries understand the buildings and spaces that surrounded them, but how they participated in a collective dialogue that continually reinforced, undermined, and reconfigured architectural meaning (pg. 4).

archive

School of Architecture Event Recordings

For the past seven years, UT’s School of Architecture has been posting videos of lectures, forums, and other presentations hosted by the school to their dedicated Vimeo page. The turnaround is superb; many events held just this fall, like a talk given in October by alumnus Craig Dykers of Snøhetta, are already available online for anyone who missed them, whether for reasons geographical (hard to find a cheap flight from Oslo) or spatial (they simply couldn’t find an open seat in the packed lecture hall).

For the past three years, we at the Alexander Architectural Archives also have been working (until now behind the scenes) to provide online access to past School of Architecture events, albeit from a different, earlier era, when programs were recorded on audio cassettes instead of HD video. Cassette tapes, unfortunately, are a notoriously unstable storage medium. Their magnetic tape is particularly susceptible to degradation through processes like acid hydrolysis. So, since 2013, we’ve been collaborating with Digitization Services at UT’s Perry-Castañeda Library to digitize a collection of approximately two hundred cassette recordings of interviews and public lectures given at the School of Architecture during the 1980s and 1990s by prominent architects and architectural historians from both the United States and abroad, including AIA Gold Medalists Ricardo Legorreta, Charles W. Moore, Glenn Murcutt, and César Pelli, among others.

Audio cassette tapes of UT School of Architecture event recordings from the 1980s and 1990s stored at the Alexander Architectural Archives in Battle Hall

Once reformatted, we review all the audio to capture index terms like persons, places, subjects, and architectural buildings and sites mentioned by speakers so that when the digital files are uploaded to Texas ScholarWorks, UT-Austin’s institutional digital repository, keywords and other descriptive metadata can be added with the files to facilitate search and discovery of the recordings. The audio review process can be arduous, as the original recordings, many of which were of slide lectures, have neither transcripts nor listings of images. Often we must ascertain, through minimal verbal description, which building an architect might have been talking about at a given moment during a lecture, even though someone in the audience at the time would have known immediately simply by looking at the slide being shown.

So far around one hundred of these cassettes have been digitized. Of these, we’ve currently ingested digital versions of over twenty-five of these historic programs (each program might have several .mp3 files associated with it) into Texas ScholarWorks. Anyone with a University of Texas EID can sign in and download and listen to them. (The collection can be browsed and bookmarked here: https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/43672) We also encourage outside researchers who don’t have immediate access to contact us (apl-aaa@lib.utexas.edu) should they want to listen to any particular recording, which we anticipate they will. To read secondary literature about Fay Jones, for instance, is one thing. To listen to his understated, gentlemanly Arkansan drawl reveal the inspiration behind some of his most cherished and sublime of works—how, say, Thorncrown Chapel winks at Sainte-Chapelle—is incomparably more beguiling.

Friday Find!, special collections

Friday Finds: Southern Architect and Building News

Southern Architect and Building News is not a traditional Friday Finds – I did not discover it this morning by wandering around in Special Collections. I have been working with this journal run for about a year now seeking funding to have the collection digitized. The challenge with SABN is that the content within the issues has never been indexed. While a patron might be able to find a record of the journal in the library’s catalog, a patron must search through the physical journals to identify any content that might be relevant to his/her research. With that in mind, I am going to share interesting bits of information that I find in SABN from time to time to raise awareness regarding its useful and interesting content.

Flipping through the issues from November 1912 to October 1913, I noticed that Texas architecture and architects were well represented with an emphasis on Dallas and San Antonio. One of the notices that stood out, however, was a short passage about lifting the restriction on wooden shingles in Jackson, Mississippi. The notice reads:

Jackson Can Use Wooden Shingles.

The Jackson, Miss., city council has repealed the ordinance requiring all buildings erected in that city to be roofed with metal or slate. The ordinance originally adopted, after being held up for a year, went into effect two months ago, but there was such strong opposition to it, it has been finally repealed. The opposition contended that it was a detriment to the erection of cheap homes and that its enforcement was to take away the demand for a natural forest resource manufactured in that city. (Southern Architect and Building News 30.1 (1912): 39)

SABN’s content was ever evolving as the journal shifted from trade publication to professional journal. During the 1910s, the journal often included notices about building practices, architects, contractors, suppliers, and new construction underway across the South. While the Jackson, Mississippi notice may seem innocuous it provides context for the use of specific materials for construction in Jackson during the early twentieth century. If the material was digitized with full text search capability, notices like this one could more easily be discovered by researchers.