Pub Date : 2019-07-16DOI: 10.5749/BUILDLAND.26.1.0011
J. King
ABSTRACT:The ruins and relics of Jamestown, the first settlement (1607) and capital of the Virginia colony, were important elements in the old town’s remaking as a historical landscape beginning in the early nineteenth century. Visitors made their way to Jamestown to see, touch, and sometimes pilfer the ruins, articulating a story of Jamestown as the birthplace of the United States. This article examines that story, or founding myth, and the role the Jamestown landscape played in the story’s creation. Race sits at the core of the Jamestown myth, from the colonists’ initial encounters in Native territory to the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in 1619 to how those events are commemorated and memorialized. Of the many ruins, relics, and artifacts associated with Jamestown, four in particular—the church tower, the 1608 fort, the powder magazine, and the statehouse ruin—appear or are referenced most consistently in the commemorative accounts. These features are the signs and symbols of the colonial project, their material reality reinforcing the truth of the Jamestown founding narrative.
{"title":"Ruins of Jamestown","authors":"J. King","doi":"10.5749/BUILDLAND.26.1.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5749/BUILDLAND.26.1.0011","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:The ruins and relics of Jamestown, the first settlement (1607) and capital of the Virginia colony, were important elements in the old town’s remaking as a historical landscape beginning in the early nineteenth century. Visitors made their way to Jamestown to see, touch, and sometimes pilfer the ruins, articulating a story of Jamestown as the birthplace of the United States. This article examines that story, or founding myth, and the role the Jamestown landscape played in the story’s creation. Race sits at the core of the Jamestown myth, from the colonists’ initial encounters in Native territory to the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in 1619 to how those events are commemorated and memorialized. Of the many ruins, relics, and artifacts associated with Jamestown, four in particular—the church tower, the 1608 fort, the powder magazine, and the statehouse ruin—appear or are referenced most consistently in the commemorative accounts. These features are the signs and symbols of the colonial project, their material reality reinforcing the truth of the Jamestown founding narrative.","PeriodicalId":41826,"journal":{"name":"Buildings & Landscapes-Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76866047","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-07-16DOI: 10.5749/buildland.26.1.0001
M. Kenney, Cynthia G. Falk
{"title":"An Interview with Richard Longstreth","authors":"M. Kenney, Cynthia G. Falk","doi":"10.5749/buildland.26.1.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5749/buildland.26.1.0001","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41826,"journal":{"name":"Buildings & Landscapes-Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75947533","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-07-16DOI: 10.5749/BUILDLAND.26.1.0032
W. Granger
ABSTRACT:San Felipe Courts (1939–1942), a low-income housing development designed by Karl Kamrath in Houston, Texas, was built under the impetus of New Deal progressivism. A modern complex modeled on the Zeilenbau superblock, the development was intended to house white residents in Houston’s Fourth Ward, a neighborhood historically home to the city’s African American community. The style and spatialization of San Felipe Courts paid little heed to the concerns of the local community, as municipal leaders and housing officials imposed a new vision of modernity on the city. This vision, drawn from the political context of Southern progressivism and purveyed through various urban revitalization efforts of the 1920s and 1930s, entailed an aesthetic and spatial remapping of race within Houston to create a curated landscape from suburb to downtown, setting the formal language of San Felipe’s modernism in opposition to the extant built environment of the Fourth Ward. By using San Felipe Courts as a case study, this paper both supports and challenges national narratives regarding the efficacy of American public housing by situating this conversation in its local context.
摘要:圣费利佩庭院(San Felipe Courts, 1939-1942)是在新政进步主义的推动下，由卡尔·卡姆拉特(Karl Kamrath)设计的一个位于德克萨斯州休斯顿的低收入住房开发项目。这是一个以泽伦堡(Zeilenbau)超级街区为蓝本的现代建筑群，开发项目的目的是为休斯顿第四区(Houston’s Fourth Ward)的白人居民提供住房，该社区历史上是该市非裔美国人社区的所在地。圣费利佩法院的风格和空间化几乎没有考虑到当地社区的担忧，因为市政领导人和住房官员对城市施加了新的现代化愿景。这一愿景来自南方进步主义的政治背景，并通过20世纪20年代和30年代的各种城市复兴努力提供，需要在休斯顿内对种族进行美学和空间重新映射，以创建从郊区到市中心的精心策划的景观，将圣费利佩现代主义的正式语言与第四区现有的建筑环境相对立。通过使用圣费利佩法院作为案例研究，本文通过将对话置于当地背景中，支持和挑战关于美国公共住房功效的国家叙事。
{"title":"“Order, Convenience, and Beauty”: The Style, Space, and Multiple Narratives of San Felipe Courts","authors":"W. Granger","doi":"10.5749/BUILDLAND.26.1.0032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5749/BUILDLAND.26.1.0032","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:San Felipe Courts (1939–1942), a low-income housing development designed by Karl Kamrath in Houston, Texas, was built under the impetus of New Deal progressivism. A modern complex modeled on the Zeilenbau superblock, the development was intended to house white residents in Houston’s Fourth Ward, a neighborhood historically home to the city’s African American community. The style and spatialization of San Felipe Courts paid little heed to the concerns of the local community, as municipal leaders and housing officials imposed a new vision of modernity on the city. This vision, drawn from the political context of Southern progressivism and purveyed through various urban revitalization efforts of the 1920s and 1930s, entailed an aesthetic and spatial remapping of race within Houston to create a curated landscape from suburb to downtown, setting the formal language of San Felipe’s modernism in opposition to the extant built environment of the Fourth Ward. By using San Felipe Courts as a case study, this paper both supports and challenges national narratives regarding the efficacy of American public housing by situating this conversation in its local context.","PeriodicalId":41826,"journal":{"name":"Buildings & Landscapes-Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76658697","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-05-06DOI: 10.5749/BUILDLAND.25.2.0048
E. Montgomery
abstract:During the first two decades of the twentieth century the square house, now commonly called the foursquare or American foursquare, shared the consumer marketplace with the bungalow and dwellings in the colonial revival style. The form has not received the same level of attention as it did earlier in popular architecture and design media. This essay argues that the square house was popular despite its lack of formal definition because it was adaptable in size, exterior elaboration, interior plan, and cost. Designs were available to suit a range of budgets within the widely-defined middle class. The form was recognized for its cubic mass addressing the street, with openings and decorative elaboration governed by that proportion. The core of the square house was a centralized, looped circulation pattern through four main spaces located in the corners. Its period of popularity coincided with the transition from highly regimented Victorian plans, which emphasized the separation of public and private activities, to a more open arrangement with movement through contiguous spaces. The form’s basic cubic mass was an ideal fit for the narrow suburban lots of the streetcar suburbs. Early examples retained many Victorian elements, while later ones featured details associated with newer styles such as prairie, craftsman, or colonial revival. The evolution of the square house mirrored the changing aesthetic preferences and domestic usage patterns in the bungalow era.
{"title":"Beyond the American Foursquare: The Square House in Period Perspective","authors":"E. Montgomery","doi":"10.5749/BUILDLAND.25.2.0048","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5749/BUILDLAND.25.2.0048","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:During the first two decades of the twentieth century the square house, now commonly called the foursquare or American foursquare, shared the consumer marketplace with the bungalow and dwellings in the colonial revival style. The form has not received the same level of attention as it did earlier in popular architecture and design media. This essay argues that the square house was popular despite its lack of formal definition because it was adaptable in size, exterior elaboration, interior plan, and cost. Designs were available to suit a range of budgets within the widely-defined middle class. The form was recognized for its cubic mass addressing the street, with openings and decorative elaboration governed by that proportion. The core of the square house was a centralized, looped circulation pattern through four main spaces located in the corners. Its period of popularity coincided with the transition from highly regimented Victorian plans, which emphasized the separation of public and private activities, to a more open arrangement with movement through contiguous spaces. The form’s basic cubic mass was an ideal fit for the narrow suburban lots of the streetcar suburbs. Early examples retained many Victorian elements, while later ones featured details associated with newer styles such as prairie, craftsman, or colonial revival. The evolution of the square house mirrored the changing aesthetic preferences and domestic usage patterns in the bungalow era.","PeriodicalId":41826,"journal":{"name":"Buildings & Landscapes-Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87616283","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-05-06DOI: 10.5749/BUILDLAND.25.2.0066
Marisa Gomez Nordyke
abstract:In the late 1940s, American builders found themselves competing against a growing number of prefabricated housing manufacturers in a race to meet demand for detached, single-family homes in the suburbs. The National Homes Corporation of Lafayette, Indiana, and its competitors were pioneering the mass manufacture of room-sized panels that could be shipped by truck to the building site and assembled by unskilled workers. Although the production experience prefabricators gained during the war made the factory-built home’s peacetime success seem certain, they were met with skeptical consumers. National Homes propelled itself to the top of the prefab industry with a three-pronged campaign aimed at banks, builders, and buyers. Advertising for National Homes, which ran in nationally circulating financial publications, building trade journals, and consumer magazines, reveals prefabricators’ struggle to gain traction in a competitive housing market and sheds light on the shift within the building industry from the production of standardized economy dwellings in the 1940s to individualized homes offering the latest design trends and custom features in the 1950s. Analysis of the company’s “revolution in home merchandising” enriches our understanding of the competing interests and conflicting values that shaped the postwar housing boom.
{"title":"Restyling the Postwar Prefab: The National Homes Corporation’s Revolution in Home Merchandising","authors":"Marisa Gomez Nordyke","doi":"10.5749/BUILDLAND.25.2.0066","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5749/BUILDLAND.25.2.0066","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:In the late 1940s, American builders found themselves competing against a growing number of prefabricated housing manufacturers in a race to meet demand for detached, single-family homes in the suburbs. The National Homes Corporation of Lafayette, Indiana, and its competitors were pioneering the mass manufacture of room-sized panels that could be shipped by truck to the building site and assembled by unskilled workers. Although the production experience prefabricators gained during the war made the factory-built home’s peacetime success seem certain, they were met with skeptical consumers. National Homes propelled itself to the top of the prefab industry with a three-pronged campaign aimed at banks, builders, and buyers. Advertising for National Homes, which ran in nationally circulating financial publications, building trade journals, and consumer magazines, reveals prefabricators’ struggle to gain traction in a competitive housing market and sheds light on the shift within the building industry from the production of standardized economy dwellings in the 1940s to individualized homes offering the latest design trends and custom features in the 1950s. Analysis of the company’s “revolution in home merchandising” enriches our understanding of the competing interests and conflicting values that shaped the postwar housing boom.","PeriodicalId":41826,"journal":{"name":"Buildings & Landscapes-Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87817288","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-05-06DOI: 10.5749/BUILDLAND.25.2.0095
Travis C. McDonald
Anne Spencer (1882– 1975) was an African Ameri can high school librarian in Lynchburg, Virginia, who became nationally known, if not by her own choosing, as a poet of the Harlem Renaissance during the 1920s. The 1903 house Anne built with her husband Edward is now a National Register property and Virginia Landmark house museum, known principally for its personal and eclectic interior and flower garden, which evolved over a sixtytwoyear period. This essay considers how to interpret this remarkable yet littleknown historic site, which represents an artistic and architectural creation that is inextricably based on, and exhibits, the ephemeral characteristics of flowers and poetry. Fieldwork at the Anne and Edward Spencer house prompts questions about how and why we record what we record. The site defies typical interpretations, and even the widenet approaches found in VAF’s Invitation to Vernacular Architecture. In this case many of the fields through which architectural history is now studied overlap: ethnicity, gender, class, race, sociology, feminism, and economics. A Venn diagram of intersecting subjects at this site would thicken with the major themes of architecture, art, interior decorating, decorative arts, craftsmanship, material culture, gardening, and poetry. The diversity of new fields and the range of subjects within those fields have led to a broader but more fragmented view of architectural history. Dell Upton characterized architecture as “the art of social storytelling, a means for shaping American society and culture.” That is surely the more public macro lens though which to see the Spencer site. Upton also acknowledged that in some cases architecture was “a vehicle of individual aesthetic expression.” This is the more challenging and private micro lens through which to see Anne Spencer’s artistic creation. Particularly challenging to confront is how the ephemeral and everchanging essence of Anne Spencer’s garden found expression both in her poetry and in her interior decorations and furnishings (Figure 1). Anne managed to describe the colors, smells, and textures of flowers in words, writing, “Earth, I thank you / for the pleasure of your language.” She effectively used poetry to capture the nuances of nature, but describing the poetry of colors, patterns, and textures of an interior setting, inspired by the same ephemeral beauty of nature, challenges our typical interpretive conventions. Literary and artistic shrines can evoke the autobiographical nature of a writer’s or artist’s home and garden, yet few have the symbiotic spirit and presence of poetry, flowers, art, and architecture that define the Spencer house and garden. While Anne Spencer’s poetry and gardening have been studied to an extent, the house itself had been minimally documented before I took on what I thought would be the modest task of recording the interior and advising on restoration issues. The authenticity of the house rests on the fortunate circumstance tha
{"title":"Research Notes: Understanding the Physical Poetry of a Parallel American Dream","authors":"Travis C. McDonald","doi":"10.5749/BUILDLAND.25.2.0095","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5749/BUILDLAND.25.2.0095","url":null,"abstract":"Anne Spencer (1882– 1975) was an African Ameri can high school librarian in Lynchburg, Virginia, who became nationally known, if not by her own choosing, as a poet of the Harlem Renaissance during the 1920s. The 1903 house Anne built with her husband Edward is now a National Register property and Virginia Landmark house museum, known principally for its personal and eclectic interior and flower garden, which evolved over a sixtytwoyear period. This essay considers how to interpret this remarkable yet littleknown historic site, which represents an artistic and architectural creation that is inextricably based on, and exhibits, the ephemeral characteristics of flowers and poetry. Fieldwork at the Anne and Edward Spencer house prompts questions about how and why we record what we record. The site defies typical interpretations, and even the widenet approaches found in VAF’s Invitation to Vernacular Architecture. In this case many of the fields through which architectural history is now studied overlap: ethnicity, gender, class, race, sociology, feminism, and economics. A Venn diagram of intersecting subjects at this site would thicken with the major themes of architecture, art, interior decorating, decorative arts, craftsmanship, material culture, gardening, and poetry. The diversity of new fields and the range of subjects within those fields have led to a broader but more fragmented view of architectural history. Dell Upton characterized architecture as “the art of social storytelling, a means for shaping American society and culture.” That is surely the more public macro lens though which to see the Spencer site. Upton also acknowledged that in some cases architecture was “a vehicle of individual aesthetic expression.” This is the more challenging and private micro lens through which to see Anne Spencer’s artistic creation. Particularly challenging to confront is how the ephemeral and everchanging essence of Anne Spencer’s garden found expression both in her poetry and in her interior decorations and furnishings (Figure 1). Anne managed to describe the colors, smells, and textures of flowers in words, writing, “Earth, I thank you / for the pleasure of your language.” She effectively used poetry to capture the nuances of nature, but describing the poetry of colors, patterns, and textures of an interior setting, inspired by the same ephemeral beauty of nature, challenges our typical interpretive conventions. Literary and artistic shrines can evoke the autobiographical nature of a writer’s or artist’s home and garden, yet few have the symbiotic spirit and presence of poetry, flowers, art, and architecture that define the Spencer house and garden. While Anne Spencer’s poetry and gardening have been studied to an extent, the house itself had been minimally documented before I took on what I thought would be the modest task of recording the interior and advising on restoration issues. The authenticity of the house rests on the fortunate circumstance tha","PeriodicalId":41826,"journal":{"name":"Buildings & Landscapes-Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73962583","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-05-06DOI: 10.5749/BUILDLAND.25.2.0017
Louis P. Nelson
{"title":"Object Lesson: Monuments and Memory in Charlottesville","authors":"Louis P. Nelson","doi":"10.5749/BUILDLAND.25.2.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5749/BUILDLAND.25.2.0017","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41826,"journal":{"name":"Buildings & Landscapes-Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76423515","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-05-06DOI: 10.5749/BUILDLAND.25.2.0036
K. Britton
{"title":"Object Lesson: A Mission among the Navajo: The Vicar, an Architect, and Unforeseen Ghosts","authors":"K. Britton","doi":"10.5749/BUILDLAND.25.2.0036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5749/BUILDLAND.25.2.0036","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41826,"journal":{"name":"Buildings & Landscapes-Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74243316","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-05-06DOI: 10.5749/BUILDLAND.25.2.0001
Jeffrey E. Klee
{"title":"Viewpoint: Fieldwork, Mind, and Building","authors":"Jeffrey E. Klee","doi":"10.5749/BUILDLAND.25.2.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5749/BUILDLAND.25.2.0001","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41826,"journal":{"name":"Buildings & Landscapes-Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76179780","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-03-01DOI: 10.5749/BUILDLAND.26.1.0048
Christine O'Malley
ABSTRACT:American Greek letter intercollegiate fraternities established a highly visible physical presence on the Cornell University campus in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through their large fraternity residences. Following the policies of their national organizations, these fraternities did not permit African American students to become members, preventing them from participating in a common form of student social engagement with their white peers. This racial discrimination points to the differences in the white and black student experience of the campus landscape at a majority white institution with a strongly embedded fraternity culture. Faced with this situation, several African American students at Cornell came together in 1906 to found Alpha Phi Alpha, the first black Greek letter intercollegiate fraternity in the United States. Although the Cornell Alpha Phi Alpha brothers did not build their own fraternity house on or near campus, they found success by creating and establishing off-campus spaces for their fraternity activities within Ithaca. Mapping and locating their meeting and event locations during their formative years from 1905 to 1920 reveals how the students dynamically resisted the overt exclusion they faced by shaping their own social, organizational, and spatial activity. In contrast to the white fraternities at Cornell, the use of fraternal space by the Alpha Phi Alpha members ultimately operated at a more intimate and private scale, with meetings and events taking place in their own rented rooms and the homes of African American community members. The study of Alpha Phi Alpha’s early history and its search for fraternal space at Cornell expands our understanding of American fraternity culture’s development in early twentieth-century campus landscapes and their environs.
{"title":"“First of All”: The Founding of Alpha Phi Alpha and the Search for Fraternal Space at Cornell University, 1905–1920","authors":"Christine O'Malley","doi":"10.5749/BUILDLAND.26.1.0048","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5749/BUILDLAND.26.1.0048","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:American Greek letter intercollegiate fraternities established a highly visible physical presence on the Cornell University campus in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through their large fraternity residences. Following the policies of their national organizations, these fraternities did not permit African American students to become members, preventing them from participating in a common form of student social engagement with their white peers. This racial discrimination points to the differences in the white and black student experience of the campus landscape at a majority white institution with a strongly embedded fraternity culture. Faced with this situation, several African American students at Cornell came together in 1906 to found Alpha Phi Alpha, the first black Greek letter intercollegiate fraternity in the United States. Although the Cornell Alpha Phi Alpha brothers did not build their own fraternity house on or near campus, they found success by creating and establishing off-campus spaces for their fraternity activities within Ithaca. Mapping and locating their meeting and event locations during their formative years from 1905 to 1920 reveals how the students dynamically resisted the overt exclusion they faced by shaping their own social, organizational, and spatial activity. In contrast to the white fraternities at Cornell, the use of fraternal space by the Alpha Phi Alpha members ultimately operated at a more intimate and private scale, with meetings and events taking place in their own rented rooms and the homes of African American community members. The study of Alpha Phi Alpha’s early history and its search for fraternal space at Cornell expands our understanding of American fraternity culture’s development in early twentieth-century campus landscapes and their environs.","PeriodicalId":41826,"journal":{"name":"Buildings & Landscapes-Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2019-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85667066","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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