Fay Jones School to Host Society of Architectural Historians Regional Conference

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Gwendolyn Wright is the keynote speaker for the 2014 annual conference of the Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians, hosted by the Fay Jones School of Architecture from Oct. 29 through Nov. 1. She'll give her free public lecture at 5:30 p.m. Thursday in Vol Walker Hall.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – The Fay Jones School of Architecture will host the 2014 annual conference of the Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians in Vol Walker Hall at the University of Arkansas from Oct. 29 through Nov. 1. This conference was last held in Fayetteville in 1998.

This regional chapter of the national society includes 12 states – Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.

The nonprofit organization was founded in 1982 at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. Its mission is to promote scholarship on architecture and related subjects, as well as to serve as a forum for ideas among architectural historians, architects, preservationists and others involved in professions related to the built environment.

Society members from across the United States attend an annual meeting that features scholarly paper sessions, business meetings, study tours and a keynote lecture given by a national leader in the field. The organization also publishes a newsletter three times a year, publishes an annual journal and presents annual awards.

This conference will showcase members’ scholarship in paper sessions and the sharing of new highlights of the region’s evolving cityscape, with a focus on campus historic preservation endeavors.

“The areas of inquiry that SESAH spotlights – architectural and urban history, design theory and historic preservation – long have been centers of excellence in the Fay Jones School,” said Ethel Goodstein-Murphree, associate dean of the school and conference chairperson. “That distinction, together with an impressive record of leadership in the society by our faculty, which includes former SESAH presidents, board members, and journal editors, makes our school a special destination for the annual conference.

“Of course, Northwest Arkansas always will be known to architectural historians as the home of Fay Jones and a nexus of his most renown works, which were the focus of the last SESAH meeting that we hosted in 1998. With this conference, we will broaden the architectural identity of our region, examining other mid-century modern legacies and celebrating the impact of new construction, in particular historic preservation endeavors, on the U of A campus – including our own Vol Walker Hall renovation.”

Gwendolyn Wright will present the keynote lecture for the conference at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 30, in Ken and Linda Sue Shollmier Hall. Admission to the lecture is free and open to the public, but seating is limited.

Wright is a professor of architecture in Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation, the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities, the Stanford Humanities Center, the Ford Foundation and other institutions.

In 1985, she was elected a Fellow of the Society of American Historians, which honors literary quality in American history writing. Wright also has been made a Fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians and was named an Outstanding Alumnus from the University of California at Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design, where she received her Master of Architecture and doctorate.

Wright is the author of six major books, her most recent being USA. She also has written The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism, Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America and Moralism and the Model Home: Domestic Architecture and Cultural Conflict in Chicago.

The author focuses on the interconnections between architecture, urbanism and political culture from the late 19th century to the present. Her special interests include the history and future of American housing, contrasts between popular and professional “urban imaginaries” and trans-national patterns of architecture and urbanism, especially colonial and post-colonial design. Her many articles have been published in scholarly books and journals around the world.

Wright also has been one of the five hosts for the PBS television series History Detectives since 2003. By 2012, it was the third-most widely viewed show on PBS.

The conference will provide other opportunities for attendees, including an open house at the Arkansas Architectural Archive in University Libraries, which holds the papers of Fay Jones, as well as a tour of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville.

Several faculty members in the Fay Jones School will moderate discussions during the conference. Sessions will include “House, Place, Community in the South,” moderated by Noah Billig; “Digital Methods for Architectural History and Preservation,” moderated by Christine Hilker; “Everything you wanted to know about Arkansas Architecture, but were afraid to ask,” moderated by Carl Matthews; “Modern Problems,” moderated by Gregory Herman; “Defining the Body Politic: The Rhetoric of National Belonging in Modern Architecture,” moderated by Jeff Shannon; “Landscapes of Memory,” moderated by Carl Smith; “Art and Architecture, Theory and Ideology,” moderated by David Buege; “The Modern South,” moderated by Ethel Goodstein-Murphree and “Making Public Places,” moderated by Kim Sexton.

Many other faculty members, as well as Fay Jones School alumni who are pursuing careers in architectural history and preservation, will present papers at the conference.

“We are thrilled to have this opportunity to share the research interests of our faculty with our colleagues, but, moreover, we are excited about exposing our students to rich and often inter-disciplinary scholarship about the history of architecture and its preservation that is produced in our region and beyond,” Goodstein-Murphree said.

Registration will take place Wednesday evening and Thursday morning. The conference will begin at 8:30 a.m. Thursday in Shollmier Hall in Vol Walker Hall.

For more information on the 2014 SESAH conference, visit http://sesah.org/.