The New England Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians
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 Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians is pleased to announce its upcoming 45th Annual Student Symposium.
The Student Symposium features presentations by outstanding students from programs across New England in the history, theory, and criticism of architecture, art history, urban studies, historic preservation, and related fields. This year's event will take place from mid-morning to mid-afternoon on Saturday, November 9, 2024 at the MIT Museum, 314 Main Street, Gambrill Center, Cambridge, MA 02142. Student presenters must present in-person, though the event will be held in a hybrid format for remote viewing.
Student symposium presenters are typically engaged in producing a thesis or dissertation, or are interested in developing work done in connection with a seminar or lecture course. Symposium paper topics may concern the architecture of any era or place. Presenters should be current students at an academic institution in the New England region. Paper presentations should be 20 minutes in length and accompanied by slides; presentations will be followed by a brief Q&A.
If you are interested in presenting your work at the symposium, please submit an abstract and short biographical note by September 27, 2024. Student abstracts should include the student’s name, the name of their faculty advisor, their field of study, and their institutional affiliation. Abstracts should be less than 300 words in length and should be followed by a short biography of less than 100 words. Please submit as a single PDF document to nesah.president@gmail.com.
We will notify students of acceptance decisions by October 4, 2024.
Please do not hesitate to contact us at nesah.president@gmail.com with any questions that you may have.
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!
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.
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:
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:
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
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.
Join NESAH today to be notified about upcoming events, stay up to date with preservation news in New England, and support our programming!
NESAH is a non-profit organization.