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By Elizabeth Terry Rose The Library of Congress Center for
Architecture Design and Engineering hosted a standing-room-only,
six-speaker symposium on Nov. 14 in celebration of the 75th
anniversary of the Historic American Building Survey (HABS),
the only continuing New Deal program and one of the Library’s
most popular and beloved collections.
The symposium, "American Place: The Historic American Buildings Survey at 75," surveyed
the success of the program that had its genesis in the Great
Depression.
In times of great economic hardship, the arts are
often the first expenditure to be cut as funding drops away
and priorities are triaged. So it was in the Great Depression
of the 1930s. Photographers and writers found themselves out
of work as commissions dried up and publications folded. Architects,
practitioners of the most expensive and involved of arts, had
nothing to do and no way to live as buildings ceased to be built.
The Historic American Buildings Survey was created in 1933 under
President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal to provide much-needed
work for architects, photographers, and historians, who documented
America’s built environment at a key moment in modernization
and nationalization. The effort provided an invaluable historical
record of sociological, technological, and design development
as well as art, information and inspiration for Americans of
that time and ours.
HABS was the first significant boon to historic
preservation at the national level. The program field-tested
many of the preservation strategies still in use today, such
as surveying contextual information and the establishment of
national standards for documentation. Still growing after 75
years, HABS and its affiliated engineering and landscape surveys
record more than 500,000 drawings, photographs and histories
for more than 41,000 historic structures and sites dating from
Pre-Columbian times to the 21st-century.
HABS continues to thrive
in a tri-lateral partnership consisting of the Library of Congress,
the National Park Service and the private-sector American Institute
of Architects. The AIA guides architects and architectural professors
and students who volunteer as survey teams, which, under the
Park Service, now document buildings from high-profile, high-style
homes of presidents and soaring houses of worship to everyday
dinettes, infamous slave markets, humbly dignified tenant-farm
shacks and other ‘forgotten’ building types that help tell America’s
story but whose memories might be lost if not for HABS. Surveys
are often recorded in the nick of time as structures crumble,
fortunes and fashions change or cities re-zone, refresh and
move on.
![HABS drawing of St. Michael's Cathedral](graphics/StMike75.jpg)
A
detailed drawing from the Historic American Buildings Survey
(HABS) enabled the St. Michael's Russian Orthodox Cathedral
in Sitka, Alaska, to be rebuilt and dedicated in 1976, following
a fire in 1966. The church was originally built in the 1840s. |
Historic American Buildings Survey is housed, researched and
served by the Library's Prints and Photographs Division. The
survey is one of the Library’s most heavily used collections,
which may be accessed through Library visits, the hugely trafficked
HABS site on the Prints and Photographs Online Catalog, and
publications such as the Library’s Visual Sourcebooks series.
Users include elementary school geography students, family genealogists,
and contemporary architects. Hollywood producers use HABS to
define and convey a sense of period authenticity and visual
character. Restoration architects use HABS’ precisely measured
drawings and evocative, detailed photographs to save endangered
national treasures. For example, after a 1966 fire destroyed
an elaborate onion-domed Russian Orthodox Cathedral of St. Michael,
which was built in 1848 in Sitka, Alaska, the building was wholly
and exactly reconstructed from the Library’s HABS survey.
History
lovers, design scholars and accomplished or aspiring architects,
who gathered in the Mumford Room for the Nov. 14 symposium,
were treated to six speakers representing varying perspectives
on HABS’ past and future, culminating in a lively discussion
of that future. After guests saw thousands of rich illustrations,
they visited the Prints and Photographs Reading Room to see
some of the actual HABS artifacts.
Speakers for the morning session "Celebrating the Past and
Present" were C. Ford Peatross, founding director of the Center
for Architecture, Design and Engineering in the Prints and Photographs
Division, who spoke about "HABS as a Catalyst in the Library
of Congress: Reflections on 75 Years"; Jack Larkin, chief historian
of Old Sturbridge Village and affiliate professor of history
at Clark University, whose topic was "Evoking the Past: The
Significance of HABS for American Social and Cultural History";
and Camille Wells, lecturer in the Department of Architectural
History at the College of William and Mary and former architectural
historian for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, who recalled
her memories as a youthful survey member, "Dispatches from the
Field: What Those Buildings Want Us to Understand."
The afternoon
session was titled "Planning for the Future." David Woodcock,
professor of architecture and director of the Historic Resources
Imaging Laboratory at Texas A&M University, discussed "Reading
Buildings: The Role of Documentation in Education and Practice."
Anne Weber, a senior associate with Farewell, Mills, Gatsch
Architects in Princeton, N.J., asked and answered the question,
"Are HABS Drawing Standards Viable in 21st-Century Architectural
Practice?” Katherine M. Arrington, digital library specialist
in the Prints and Photographs Division, addressed "HABS: A Digital
Present and Future."
The Historic American Buildings Survey, Historic American Engineering
Record, and Historic American Landscapes Survey are copyright-free,
contain useful data and beautiful art, are added to quarterly,
and are accessible online at www.loc.gov/rr/print
and in the Prints & Photographs Division Reading Room.
—Elizabeth Terry Rose is Curatorial Assistant
for Architecture, Design and Engineering in the Library of Congress
Prints & Photographs Division.
Originally published in Library of Congress Gazette, Volume 20, No.
2, January 16, 2009, Editor in Chief Gail Fineberg.
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