NEW ENGLAND SOCIETY OF ARCHITECTURAL HISTORIANS
DIRECTORS NIGHT
6:00pm Wednesday 25 March 2015
Historic New England’s Otis House Museum Auditorium,
141 Cambridge Street, Boston, MA
-LYNDE STREET ENTRANCE-
“Jonas Mulokas: Lithuanian Vernacular + American Modernism”
Milda Richardson, Northeastern University
Two examples of ecclesiastical architecture by Jonas Mulokas unite inherited folk culture and American modernism as illustrated in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and others.
“Gropius Copying Gropius?: The Abele House and the spread of Suburban Modernism”
Amy D. Finstein, Massachusetts College of Art and Design
Walter Gropius’ home in Lincoln, MA is well known as the embodiment of Bauhaus ideals in the late1930s. Less familiar, however, is the kinship between Gropius’ house and a slightly later commission completed during Gropius’ brief partnership with Marcel Breuer, the Abele house. This talk will compare and contrast these two houses and explore their relationship to the spread of Modernism in the Boston suburbs in the mid-twentieth century.
“A Tale of Two (Would-be) Historic Districts”
George Walter Born, Boston University
This talk explores the first efforts to create historic districts in Boston after the founding of the Boston Landmarks Commission in 1975. Residents from Ashmont Hill and the West Back Bay/Bay State Road petitioned the newly created Commission in the late 1970s for historic-district designation, but the outcomes were very different. One provoked a counter-movement that successfully stopped the designation effort; the other moved smoothly through the process to be designated. These case-studies in local historic-preservation activism showcase varying levels of acceptance for municipal action in this sphere, especially among different neighborhood groups. Employing methodologies borrowed from urban sociologists and scholars of social movements, this investigation forms a part of a larger project examining the creation of historic districts in Boston from 1953 to 1983.
“Croatia at the Crossroads: A Report on the SAH 2014 Study Tour”
Jacob D. Albert, Albert, Righter & Tittmann Architects, Inc.
After glancing at a pre-tour stop in Zagreb, we’ll be following the course of the SAH tour, starting in Sarajevo in Bosnia; looking at several places along the Adriatic coast of Croatia which have, over the centuries, been part of the Roman, Venetian, and Austro-Hungarian empires; and ending in Venice, where we visited the architecture Biennale. Medieval urbanism will be a focus of the exploration of the Croatian coast.
