Jennifer Sale Crane

The 2010 Vernacular Architecture Forum conference, “Housing Washington,” has sadly drawn to a close. I’ve heard from many in the architectural history and preservation fields that VAF conferences are their favorite, and now I understand why. A great balance of bus tours, walking tours, and sessions of three 20-minute presentations grouped by theme keeps things moving and interesting.

As for me, I somehow managed to get through my presentation, “Postwar Prefabs in the Washington, D.C., Suburbs: The Mass-Production Success of Vernacular Prefab Homes,” without dry heaves or hyperventilating. Many thanks to session moderator Janet Foster, of Columbia University, and the other session presenters, Nancy Holst and Erin Cunningham, for providing a supportive, collegiate atmosphere.

I was pleasantly surprised at the interest the audience showed in my topic — more historians have begun to take interest in the prefab homes in their own postwar suburbs. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s an open house this weekend of a charming postwar cottage for sale in Silver Spring, with some special qualities that are hidden in plain sight.

1948 Gunnison Home prefab. 9130 Walden Rd., Silver Spring, MD

The front brick chimney stack with wrought iron “S”, small metal chimney or roof vent with double slits, and seams on the interior walls spaced every four feet clearly identify the house as a late 1940s Gunnison Home prefab.

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Aluminaire, NYIT, Central Islip, NY, Aug. 2009

The 1931 Aluminaire just can’t catch a break. It has been moved, and subsequently forgotten, not once, not twice, but thrice in its lifetime. Each time, after a brief flurry of excitement about this one-of-a-kind early American International-style house, it has faded back into obscurity, waiting to be rediscovered yet again.

Designed by architects A. Lawrence Kocher and Albert Frey for the 1931 Architectural League exhibition in New York, the Aluminaire was one of only two houses by American architects to be included in the Museum of Modern Art’s famed 1932 International Exhibition of Modern Architecture.

In the late 1980s, a grassroots campaign helped save the house from demolition, and the New York Institute of Technology got a grant to disassemble and move the house to their Central Islip, Long Island campus. Here’s a New York Times piece about the restoration project.

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Bell Labs, Holmdel, NJ / by Flickr user sodapop / CC BY-ND 2.0

With the increase in preservation of 20th-century historic sites has come a parallel rise in  preservation efforts for buildings and places that played host to some of the greatest innovations in science & technology.  As a former digital content manager, married to a computer programmer who’s nuts about science, I’ve been following with interest the efforts to preserve Nikola Tesla’s 1902 Lab on Long Island and the Eero Saarinen-designed Bell Labs in New Jersey, the site of significant research leading to the computer and cellphone.

Now tech history buffs have a new guidebook, The Geek Atlas. A BBC News story, “Follow in the footsteps of geeks,” features this new travel guide that highlights important science & tech history sites across the globe. Although heavy on places in the UK, the guide includes sites such as the White Sands missile testing range in New Mexico and the Jacquard Museum in Roubaix, France, with exhibits on punched-card weaving technology, predecessor to the modern computer. Each entry in the book includes background info and precise GPS coordinates, natch.

BBC journalist Bill Thompson says, “It’s our geek heritage, and the more we make people aware of it the more likely it is to be preserved in some way.”

Read the full BBC article >

The BBC is currently airing a documentary series on English Heritage, a historic preservation (termed “conservation” in the UK) governmental advisory commission.  It’s a rare opportunity to get an inside look at how our British brethren face the day-to-day challenges of preservation, including the ongoing debate about brutalism. Unfortunely, the Guardian claims that this “grimly funny series,” also called “English Heritage,” reinforces stereotypes about elitist preservationists.  You can decide for yourself by watching the show online. Currently the show is only viewable online by those within the UK, but English Heritage has established a webpage to cast light on the issues raised in the program.

The very nature of preservation often has us on the defense, fighting to be heard by developers, city councils, and sometimes the public at large. But we run the risk of taking ourselves too seriously. A TV series exposing the process of preservation, warts and all, can still raise the profile of the overall issue of the importance of place and preserving our built heritage, pushing the dialogue forward. And that’s a good thing.

One week ago, on Sunday night around 8:00pm, I  received an emergency call that made my heart stop — an ADT rep told me that the smoke detectors in the Arlington Historical Museum had just been set off, and they had notified the fire department. It was the type of call I’d feared most as Chair of the Museum Building Committee. Our museum and extensive local artifact collection is housed in the historic 1891 Hume School building, by noted Washington architect B. Stanley Simmons.

When I arrived at the museum about 15 minutes later, this was the horrifying scene I encountered, sure to make any museum director’s or board of directors’ blood run cold.

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The Humanities Council of Washington, DC is offering up to $2,000 for nonprofits working on projects to document and preserve DC’s heritage. Deadline for applications is May 1st. To get information and assistance for applying, attend the grant workshop tonight, Tuesday, April 21 rom 5:30 PM to 7:00 PM, at the Southeast Neighborhood Library.

For more information, contact Albert Shaheen at grants@wdchumanities.org or check the Humanities Council of Washington, DC website.

I spent this past weekend back at my alma mater, Goucher College in Baltimore, for the conference “A Critical Look at Sustainability and Historic Preservation.” Sustainability is a hot button issue for preservation, especially when it comes to LEED standards for green building and whether they really give historic buildings credit where credit is due. More than just a catchphrase, “The greenest building is one that’s already built” is a sustainability mantra that conveys the massive amount of embodied energy in old buildings. You can even figure out how much energy is lost in the demolition of a building using this handy embodied energy caluculator.

Of all the great presentations, I was most impressed by the “accidental preservationists” — speakers from two Philly-based nonprofit organizations whose missions represented a holy trinity of environmental, social, and preservation goals.
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From the ubiquitous (“George Washington slept here”) to the obscure (Bunny Man Bridge), every community has local lore unproved as fact or fiction. Local legends, like some old Hollywood screen legends, often refuse to die.  Local myths linger on, taking on new life and usually growing more salacious with each successive generation. Sometimes the story is so preposterous, local historians won’t touch it. But often there’s just enough plausibility, or even a thin shred of evidence, to lure us on a wild goose chase for the truth. Ultimately, confirming or disproving the story becomes secondary to the value local lore holds in our personal and collective memories.

Pola Negri and the Gulf Branch Nature Center

In Arlington, Virginia, there’s a long-held story about a local visit from silent film star Pola Negri. Many Arlington residents have heard the story that Pola Negri once lived in the 1920s stone bungalow on Military Road, converted into the Gulf Branch Nature Center in the 1960s.  The staff of the Nature Center have even incorporated the Pola Negri connection into their programs, screening her films during an annual “Pola Negri Night.” But despite the many affirmations of the Pola Negri connection in local news stories about the Gulf Branch Nature center, a source of documentation is rarely cited.

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We Americans have long been obsessed with documenting — or claiming — firsts in achievements and innovations. A claim to “being first” can be influenced by the precise definition of the achievement, the available information at the time of the claim, and yes, ego. In the case of architecture, many prefab homes have been erroneously awarded the title of “first prefabricated house in America.”

Some folks think prefab in the U.S. dates back to the Sears Homes of the 1910s to 1930s, since they are perhaps the most successful and well-known kit homes. Many other prefab homes are mislabeled as “one of the earliest,” but actually miss the mark by at least 40 or 50 years.
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