Editors’ Note on Updating Content (Summer 2020)

The built environment is in constant flux, whether from demolition and new construction, renovations and additions, or changing function and use. Social protest and cultural progress can also transform the built environment, as we have witnessed this summer in efforts to remove monuments to the Confederacy from public spaces. (See “SAH Statement on The Removal of Monuments to the Confederacy from Public Spaces.”)

As a digital publication, SAH Archipedia strives to ensure that its content is up to date and that published texts accurately reflect physical conditions on the ground. To that end, our editors and authors are reviewing individual entries and essays to identify those that need to be updated.

While this work is ongoing and continuous, we want our readers to know that we are prioritizing updates to entries and essays (and illustrations and metadata) dealing with monuments to the Confederacy and memorials that otherwise symbolize oppression to indicate (1) the removal of statues and other forms of dismantling or transformation, (2) the renaming or retitling of buildings, parks, plazas, bridges, streets, and highways, (3) necessary contextualizing and interpretations in light of new historical research and scholarship.

As always, SAH Archipedia’s editors will work with authors and peer reviewers to maintain the highest standards of a scholarly publication.

Featured Building

Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial

Thematic Essay

Historic Preservation in Savannah

Place-based Essay

Austin, Texas

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FEATURED

National Hispanic Cultural Center

The national and local politics of cultural identity converge in the National Hispanic Cultural Center. Built by the state of New Mexico to celebrate the nation’s diverse Hispanic cultures and heritages, the Center was also meant to serve as an instrument of revitalization for the local Hispanic community of Barelas. Its construction, however, displaced residents from an established neighborhood and helped spur a process of gentrification that is altering the community’s historic landscape. While some residents and business owners believe it has introduced positive economic and social changes, others believe that the Center has contributed to erasing part of the very Hispanic culture it seeks to preserve. more

Viewpoint

Viewpoint is a modest retirement house built in the Tucson Mountain Foothills for Christina Affeld Johnson by her daughter, Judith Davidson Chafee, a renowned local architect with modernist training and regionalist sensibilities. While Chafee would go on to construct several larger dwellings in the desert, this small, critical regionalist house is significant as her simplest, most personal expression of domesticity in a striking Sonoran desert setting. more

Robert Russa Moton Museum

Farmville's one building of national importance is an unprepossessing landmark, a modest structure on the principal street of African American houses and businesses. This, the first building constructed for the secondary education of African American children in Prince Edward County, was named for Robert Russa Moton, a Prince Edward native (see PE14) who succeeded Booker T. Washington as president at Tuskegee Institute. The school was the scene of an opening chapter in the civil rights movement. On April 23, 1951, Barbara R. Johns led fellow students in a strike to protest insufficient funding and crowded conditions in the facility, including classrooms in temporary wooden buildings behind the single-story brick school. ... more

Oasis Diner

The Oasis Diner is a historic prefabricated diner, manufactured by Mountain View Diners in Singac, New Jersey. The diner was delivered by train and opened in 1954 between Plainfield and Indianapolis along U.S. Route 40, an important transcontinental highway. It has stood as a regional landmark for generations. more

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