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.
The slave pen housed inside the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, was originally from a farm in Germantown, Mason County, Kentucky. The only known surviving rural slave pen, it differs markedly from the urban slave pens or jails that existed nearby in downtown Maysville, further downriver in Louisville, Kentucky, and as far afield as Alexandria, Virginia. The Germantown slave pen was discovered in 1999 and moved shortly thereafter to Cincinnati. more
The Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) offers a vision of the twenty-first century land-grant university campus: cognizant of the past, connected to its present, and deeply rooted in the natural landscape. Rising above the city of Santa Fe, New Mexico, with sweeping views to the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the expansive grounds radiate around a central, sunken circular plaza through which solstice lines and points have intersected since the campus began construction at the millennium’s turn. ...more
A trio of domes constructed of salvaged Quonset hut ribs, coal, and half-formed chunks of glass, the Ford House is among architect Bruce Goff’s most inspired and fully realized creations. In 1947, Ruth Van Sickle Ford, a watercolorist and director of the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, hired Goff, a former Academy colleague, to design her new residence in a suburban town west of Chicago. Goff designed the house, and his former apprentice, Don Tosi, built the idiosyncratic structure. more
Now the residence for the president of Tuskegee University, one of the nation’s oldest historically black institutions of higher learning, Grey Columns is a striking architectural testament to the pre–Civil War affluence made possible in this part of Alabama by the work of enslaved African Americans. Visually, it also embodies a mythic image of the Old South that for generations mesmerized white Americans from both the North and South. more
