Save the date for Directors' Night 2025! This virtual program features three lectures by three current board members on their recent and ongoing research. The event will take place on February 13 at 7 PM, and registrants will receive a Zoom link on the day of the event. Please follow the "events" subheading above to register.

This year's talks will feature:

Dennis DeWitt, "Bostons Parisian Pissoirs": In the early nineteenth century, American and European cities provided little or no opportunities for working men to relieve themselves. In 1855 Boston initiated a now long-forgotten program of constructing public street urinals, just as the first iron pissoirs were appearing in Paris. Over the course of some 65 years the program sponsored the creation of twenty-six examples from four different designs, in the face on ongoing opposition. DeWitt's pre-recorded talk examines the design, construction, and ultimate removal of these urban pissoirs.

Sophie Higgerson, "The Mechanics of Obscurity: Lois Welzenbacher and Modernism's Margins": Sophie Higgerson presents a work-in-progress talk on Lois Welzenbacher's inclusion in MoMA's 1932 exhibition of modern architecture. Though he was included to represent the country of Austria, Welzenbacher's architecture was largely dismissed by the show's co-curators Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock, who criticized Welzenbacher's designs in their accompanying scholarly publication. Higgerson investigates how the circumstances of Welzenbacher's career and discovery by the two Americans contributed to his marginal status in architectural history today.

Christina Volpe, "Preserving Legacy: The Barnes Museum and Southington's Built Environment": The Barnes Museum, a historic house museum nestled in Southington, Connecticut, stands as a testament to over two centuries of local history and family legacy. Celebrating its 50th anniversary as a museum, this 19th-century homestead remains a time capsule, showcasing the Bradley Barnes family's daily lives, aspirations, and influence. Christina Volpe explores the Barnes Museum's pivotal role in shaping Southington's built environment and collective memory, highlighting how the industrialists of the Gilded Age left an enduring impact on the town's physical and cultural landscape. Her forthcoming book The Barnes Museum & Homestead (available February 25, Arcadia Publishing) expands on these stories, weaving together the threads of community, preservation, and legacy.

The program will conclude with a live Q&A with Sophie Higgerson and Christina Volpe

The New England Society of Architectural Historians is headed to Provincetown, Massachusetts on October 12, 2024 for a day of tours, discussions, and adventure!

Located at the northerly tip of Cape Cod, Provincetown is the site of the initial landing of the Mayflower in 1620 and where the Mayflower Compact was drafted and declared.

From the landmarks of Provincetown's West End, to the legendary artist dune shacks in the Cape Cod National Seashore, we are excited to experience these opportunities. 
The cost for members is $75 and does not include lodging. 
To Register, go to A Day in Provincetown 
For more information or questions, please email nesah.president@gmail.com

NE/SAH is pleased to host a lecture from our 2023 John Coolidge Fellowship recipient, Carter Jackson of Boston University. 

Thursday, September 12
7:00 pm

Presented via Zoom. Pre-registration for this free event is required. Please register here!

In the 1890s, the British Empire covered nearly one quarter of the globe, but it faced growing dissent in its colonies and challenges to its hegemony. In response to these concerns, a massive building complex called the Imperial Institute opened in London in 1893. Its program included conference rooms, emigration and intelligence offices, as well as galleries of natural resources from the colonies—all of which were intended to serve as a “permanent binding force” for the Empire. However, the Imperial Institute never achieved its unifying purpose, and it has long been deemed an ill-conceived one-off and a failure. 

The 2023 John Coolidge Research Fellowship supported archival research for Carter’s doctoral dissertation, which includes an investigation of the Imperial Institute and similar institutional buildings. His lecture aims to situate the Imperial Institute within the longer, largely overlooked history of similar institutional buildings in Britain and its colonies. It will also explore the ambitions and assumptions that underpinned the Institute’s design and how they ironically thwarted its mission.

Carter Jackson is a PhD candidate in the History of Art and Architecture at Boston University. His dissertation, entitled “The Architecture of Britain’s Imperial Institutes and the Misgivings of Empire,” explores the privately funded institutional buildings that once served as the scientific, social, and economic centers that helped make Britain’s Empire tangible and facilitated its development. Carter has worked with architecture in the context of museums and historic preservation through internships and fellowships at Historic New England, the Library of Congress, the Massachusetts Historical Commission, the MIT Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The Fellowship Committee of the New England chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians (NESAH) is pleased to announce Olivia Wynne Houck as the recipient of the 2024 John Coolidge Research Fellowship.

Olivia Wynne Houck is a PHD candidate in the History of Architecture program at MIT, where she focuses on the intersection of the built environment, diplomacy, and geopolitics during the Cold War. She is particularly interested in the interplay between NATO, American and Nordic foreign policies, technology, and infrastructure in the European and North American Arctics. Entitled “Concrete Security: NATO as a Territorial Project, 1940-1960,” she employs the methodologies and considerations of the built environment to interrogate diplomatic exchanges between the United States and other NATO member nations, particularly Iceland, Norway, and Denmark, within the venue of NATO. She considers how structures related to militarization, especially the military base, caused friction between NATO members, and how this necessitated the alliance’s interrogation of larger questions about policy, politics, sovereignty, and territory.She also explores how a historical focus on the built environment can be used to contribute to current policy analysis, especially with regards to national security. She holds a B.A. in Art History from the College of William and Mary, a M.A. in Architectural History from the University of Virginia. The John Coolidge Research Fellowship will allow her to consult the NATO Archives in Brussels. 

Olivia will give a lecture for NESAH upon completion of her research.

Congratulations Olivia!

The Fellowship Committee of the New England chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians (NESAH) is pleased to announce Phoebe Springstubb as the recipient of the 2024 Robert Rettig Student Annual Meeting Fellowship.

Phoebe Springstubb is a PhD candidate in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture at MIT. Her dissertation examines the role of ephemeral architecture, infrastructure-building, and politics of time in conceptualizing the North American Arctic’s deep past. More broadly, she researches the built and natural environments of the nineteenth and twentieth-century Circumpolar North, with a particular interest in connections between Alaska and Siberia. Before beginning her studies at MIT, she was a curatorial assistant in the Department of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Her writing has appeared in Architectural Theory Review, Journal of Architectural Education, a Canadian Centre for Architecture web issue, and elsewhere.

At the SAH Conference, Phoebe will present one of her dissertation chapters on a panel called “Institutions of Life: Architecture and the Life Sciences.” Phoebe's paper, “‘They builde with whale bones’: Whaling and the Construction of a Useable Past in the North American Arctic,” will contribute research on a geography that is still little studied by architectural history—Alaska and the Arctic.

Congratulations Phoebe!

Saturday, March 9, 2024
1:00 - 4:00 pm

First Church in Roxbury
10 Putnam Street, Boston, MA 02119

Keynote Speakers:

	Historian Byron Rushing will discuss the rich history and ongoing preservation of Roxbury, one of Boston's most historic neighborhoods. Byron served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives for over thirty years, and was also the president of the Museum of African-American History in Boston.
	Researcher Aabid Allibhai will discuss his report "Race & Slavery at the First Church in Roxbury (The Colonial Period 1631-1775)," released in early 2023. This report tells the story of at least fifty-eight human beings—Black and Indigenous men, women, and children— who were enslaved by First Church’s white parishioners. Aabid is currently a PhD candidate at Harvard.

Tour:

Attendees will also have the opportunity to tour the 1804 Meetinghouse with Andrea Gilmore, the preservationist in charge of its restoration. The meetinghouse (pictured below) is the oldest wood-framed church still standing in Boston and its historic building fabric has been remarkably well preserved on both the exterior and the interior.

Additional details:

The program will also include a brief business meeting for elections and chapter updates. Light refreshments will be served.  

NESAH membership and event registration is required to attend the annual meeting. To become a member, or to renew your membership, please visit our membership page. (Please note that anyone with an interest in architecture history is welcome to become a member!)

To register for the meeting, click here:

REGISTER HERE

Please save the date of Saturday, March 9, 2024, for the 2024 Annual Meeting! We have some very exciting plans in the works and will be announcing the details shortly.

Please note: If you are not a current member but are interested in joining or renewing your membership with NESAH, please visit our Membership tab!

NE/SAH is pleased to host a lecture from our 2022 John Coolidge Fellowship recipient, Chelsea Spencer of MIT. 

Tuesday, January 16
7:00 pm

Presented via Zoom. Pre-registration for this free event is required. Please register here!

The 2022 John Coolidge Research Fellowship supported Chelsea’s archival fieldwork, sending her to Pittsburgh to study the construction records of the Frick Building, a twenty-story office building still standing in Downtown Pittsburgh.

Managed by the George A. Fuller Company, construction of the Frick Building began in 1901 and was completed by 1903, leaving behind an unusually voluminous archive and an acrid dispute between the Fuller Company and its client, the wealthy industrialist Henry Clay Frick. Chelsea used this archive as a window onto the operations of what was then the largest, most well-capitalized construction company in the United States at a pivotal moment in the firm’s history. On January 16th, Chelsea will give a virtual talk to share more about what she found in the archive and how it will contribute to her dissertation project.

The New England Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians is pleased to share information on the 44th Annual Student Symposium, which will be a hybrid conference taking place on April 8, 2023. Attendees can choose to join in person at Yale University or on Zoom. Please see the poster below for more details.

To register to attend the symposium, please click here: registration.

For any questions about the symposium, please email nesah.symposium2023@gmail.com.