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• Olivia Wynne Houck Coolidge Fellowship Lecture

  • When
    30 Oct 2025
  •  
    7:00 PM - 8:30 PM
  • Location
    Zoom

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  Far-Flung Frontier: American Basing Negotiations with Iceland, 1945-1947

  Thursday, October 30, 2025

  7:00pm

  
  

  Lecture by Olivia Wynne Houck

  Presented via Zoom; Pre-registration required.

  
  

  
  

  NESAH is pleased to host a lecture from our 2024 John Coolidge Fellowship recipient, Olivia Wynne Houck of MIT, whose presentation on the strategic importance of Iceland in the founding of NATO will highlight research conducted in the NATO archive with the support of the Coolidge Fellowship.

  
  

  Throughout the Second World War, the United States established temporary military bases on islands in the North Atlantic Ocean – spanning from Iceland and Greenland down to the Azores – as a means to protect the Western Hemisphere and facilitate the movement of materiel to Europe. However, after the war ended it became apparent that the strategic need for these bases remained vital to U.S. security, and the Americans embarked on a series of negotiations with the Icelanders in order to secure longer leases and maintain their presence on the island. These negotiations were eventually successful, but the contours of public debate around overseas U.S. basing, particularly in relation to the developing tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, reveal not just a more expansive understanding of American security, but also the valence that “bases” took on in diplomatic venues and public messaging. In these contexts, the “base” had three meanings – it was an instrument of power projection, or a way of enabling operational capacity; it was an object of negotiation, or a focal point from which to argue about larger tensions of intention and presence; and it was a tool for navigating and facilitating bilateral and multilateral security arrangements and guarantees. Not only were “bases” crucial nodes in the development of a growing global infrastructure, but they also were political and symbolic, evidencing larger accusations of “aggression” or “expansion.” By interrogating American negotiations to secure bases on the northern edge of the North Atlantic region, we can see how politics, diplomacy, and technology coalesced, laying the groundwork for the infrastructure that would comprise the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

  
  

  Olivia Wynne Houck is a a doctoral candidate in the History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she focuses on the intersection of the built environment, diplomacy, and geopolitics during the early Cold War. She is particularly interested in the interplay between NATO, American foreign policy, technology, and infrastructure in relation to the European and North American Arctic regions. Her work considers American foreign policy and NATO from their coldest edges. Entitled “Concrete Security: Constructing and Defending the North Atlantic Region, 1940-1950” her dissertation centers the built environment as a means to investigate how the North Atlantic region became a strategic territory, in large part through the American desire for, and fear of, military bases on the islands of Greenland and Iceland during the Second World War and postwar period. Houck holds a B.A. in Art History from the College of William and Mary, an M.A. in Architectural History from the University of Virginia, and a Postgraduate Diploma in ‘Small States Studies’ from the University of Iceland. She is a Research Associate at The Arctic Institute and a Research Fellow with the North American and Arctic Defense and Security Network and has held visiting researcher positions and fellowships with the Fridtjof Nansen Institute in Oslo and the Arctic Institute.

  
  

  Image caption and source: “Bases to Make America Secure," Chicago Daily Tribune, February 25, 1946.

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• 46th Annual Student Symposium

  • When
    8 Nov 2025
  •  
    10:00 AM - 3:30 PM
  • Location
    64 College Street, Providence RI 02912

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  The New England Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians is pleased to announce the 46th Annual Student Symposium.

  The Student Symposium features presentations by outstanding students from programs across New England in the history, theory, and criticism of architecture, art history, urban studies, historic preservation, and related fields. This year's event will take place from 10 AM to 3:15 PM on Saturday, November 8, 2025 at Brown University's List Art Center, 64 College Street, Providence RI 02912. You may register to attend the event in person, or watch the proceedings over Zoom.

  A full program can be found below. Light refreshments will be provided and a Q&A with the audience will follow each of the two session.

  
  

  10 AM: Check-in begins

  10:15 AM: Opening remarks

  10:30 AM: Session 1: Landscape, Territory, and Regions

  Anny Li, Harvard University: “Hedging Hardiness: The Arnold Arboretum’s Hedge Collection and the US ‘Home Landscape,’ 1935-1970”
  
  Gengjiang Chang, Northeastern University: “Validating a 'Counter-Reality': Mapping the Momentary Equilibrium between State-led Eco- infrastructure Projects and Local Responses”
  
  Romain David, Harvard University: “A New Headquarters for the Bank of Thailand: Ambiguous Sovereignty and the Extraterritoriality of Expertise”
  
  Mohadeseh Salari Sardari, Brown University: “Tongues of Women: Print, Gender, and the Making of Public Space in Iran”
  
  Discussion and Q&A

  12:15 PM: Lunch break
  
  1:30 PM: Session 2: Interiority, Domesticity, and External Projections
  
  Tristan Whalen, Brown University: “From King Solomon’s Temple to Solomon’s Temple Lodge: Secrecy and Standardization in American Masonic Architecture”
  
  M.J. Cuozzo, Brown University: “Home-Making as Architectural Practice: The History and Exportation of Ndebele Murals”
  
  Camille Blanco, Brown University: “Domus Aurea Altierōrum: Carlo Maratti’s Triumph of Clemency as a Strategy of Papal Propaganda and Political Ingenuity in Late Seventeenth-Century Rome”
  
  Paulina Allen, Clark University: “Cistercian Compromise in the Daphni Monastery”
  
  Discussion and Q&A
  
  3:15 PM: Close of symposium

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• Richardson’s House on Sippican Harbor, Revisited: Notes since 2010

  • When
    12 Nov 2025
  •  
    7:00 PM - 8:30 PM
  • Location
    Zoom

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  Richardson's House on Sippican Harbor, Revisited: Notes since 2010

  Wednesday, November 12, 2025

  7:00pm

  Lecture by Mark Wright

  Presented via Zoom; Pre-registration required.

  
  

  

  On November 12 at 7 PM, Mark Wright will present his talk "Richardson’s House on Sippican Harbor, Revisited: Notes since 2010."

  In his article "H. H. Richardson’s House for Rev’d Browne, Rediscovered" (Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, March 2010), Wright presented one of Richardson’s most enigmatic and consequential works. His graphic reconstruction of the house as it was originally built was grounded in then-newly-identified 19th- and early 20th-century photographs, archival research, and close examination and measurement of the surviving, altered building. To fill the house in mind’s eye with the family for whom it was created, he explored the lives of Richardson’s clients and their neighbors. This perspective engendered a lively picture of the house’s place in the physical and social landscape, and led to a fuller understanding of how the commission's design influenced the architect’s rivals and followers, and – perhaps most importantly – their clients. Consideration of the house in the context of some of H. H. Richardson’s better-known work of the period between 1879 and 1882 showed that this tiny commission was central to the architect’s development as a mature artist.
  
  It is a fitting time for an update. At the time of the article's publication, the house had recently changed hands and its future was uncertain. In 2019 a hastily mounted but successful social media and letter-writing campaign convinced the owners to withdraw their application for a permit to demolish the house outright, and to look instead for an institutionally supportable use for the cultural asset of which they’d discovered themselves to be stewards. The town has become more engaged in an
  ongoing effort to assure the building’s preservation. It has been nominated to the Preservation Massachusetts Most Endangered Historic Resources Program. And, over the last 15 years, Mr. Wright has enriched his own understanding both of the process of its design – including fruitful improvisation based on input from the owner and contractor – and of how the unique shingle detailing with which H. H. Richardson treated this house (and no other) behaved in changing sunshine. The talk is based on one Wright recently delivered to a lay audience in Marion, Massachusetts, sponsored by the Sippican Historical Society.

  Mark Wright is an architect in private practice. He was educated at the Rice University School of Architecture (BA '80, BArch '82), then had the good fortune to spend his first professional decade with Kliment & Halsband. Since 2003, Wright & Robinson Architects has worked to bring 21st century families and their 19th century houses into happy mutual accommodation. Wright's technical understanding of the Queen Anne and Shingle Style architecture of the towns along the Wachtung Ridge undergirds his work on Richardson's Percy Browne house and his ongoing research into houses by Charles Follen McKim, John Charles Olmsted, and Frederick B. White. 

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