Author: info@philachaptersah.org

Joseph Brinton’s ‘Celebrated’ Serpentine Stone: How A Chester County Stone Became a Multi-Regional Gilded Age Fad

October 23, 2025 / / 0 Comments

by Anne E. Krulikowski, PhD
Tuesday, November 4 at 7:00 p.m. on Zoom
Free and open to all.
Please email info@philachaptersah.org to receive the Zoom link.

Join us as Anne Krulikowski explores the craze for green building stone that spanned America’s Gilded Age, when the Brinton quarry south of West Chester became the most famous and longest operated serpentine quarry of the era.

After a brief look at the folklore and history of serpentine around the world, we will focus on Quaker Joseph Brinton’s determination to build a successful business despite numerous obstacles. Hundreds of dwellings, churches, schools, and institutions were faced with Brinton’s serpentine. The green stone became such a recognizable feature in the urban landscape of many cities that green stone buildings featured in short stories, novels, and travel accounts as markers of prosperity and wealth.

Anne is a professor of American/Public History at West Chester University. She is a specialist in material culture, beginning with a graduate school research project in the late 1990s through her recent article in the Victorian Society’s publication, 19th Century, Krulikowski has been tracing the story of Brinton’s stone through 18 states and Washington, D.C. A previous article focused on the use of Brinton’s stone in Chicago.

ART-ANTHROPOLOGY IMBROGLIOS AT THE PENN MUSEUM

October 13, 2025 / / 0 Comments

“Chinese Rotunda,” the Charles Custis Harrison Hall. Photograph by Charles Sheeler, ca. 1916. From “An Exhibition of Oriental Art.” The Museum Journal VII, no. 1 (March, 1916), 3

Thursday, October 23, at 7:00 p.m. on Zoom
By Chenchen Yan, PhD candidate in History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University, and the 2025 Phila Chapter SAH George B. Tatum SAH Annual International Conference Fellow

Free and open to all.
Please email info@philachaptersah.org to receive the Zoom link.

This talk examines an anomaly at the heart of the Penn Museum—the so-called “Chinese Rotunda”—a disruption not only of the museum’s architectural plan but also of the evolutionary logic that once structured American anthropology. Formally known as the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the Penn Museum was founded in 1887 during the “golden age” of “museum anthropology,” when collections were gathered in the course of fieldwork and were then studied in the museum, and in most cases, were used as evidence in the application of evolutionary theory to anthropological research. As was typical of the period, such an evolutionary consciousness was also embedded in the 1896 master plan of the Museum’s new building, in which the Chinese Rotunda was, notably, nowhere to be found. Even more intriguingly, given that the Museum has never carried out any anthropological expeditions to China in its history, why and how did it develop such an extensive Chinese collection? And what is really “Chinese” about the Chinese Rotunda? Chenchen argues that the spectacular space of the Chinese Rotunda served as a medium of exchange in the economy of anthropological research, not only reorganizing the museum layout but also disrupting the architectural epistemology designed to narrate a Western-centric account of civilizations.

Chenchen Yan is a PhD candidate in History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University. Her dissertation explores processes of “becoming Chinese” of objects that were introduced into Western knowledge systems around the turn of the twentieth century and how these objects reshaped the spaces in which they were catalogued, stored, and displayed. Her work has been supported by the Society of Architectural Historians, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, among others.

“BOOM TO BUST: GARDEN APARTMENTS IN THE CITY OF HOMES TO THE DEPRESSION

September 25, 2025 / / 0 Comments

An illustrated talk by Emily T. Cooperman, PhD
Online via Zoom
Tuesday, September 30 at 7:00 PM
Free and open to all
Please register at info@philachaptersah.org to receive the Zoom link

Despite its ubiquity, the American apartment house as a building type in the period before the Great Depression has garnered little scholarly notice, and the garden apartment even less. This talk will chart the evolution of the garden apartment house in Philadelphia before the Great Depression, starting with the city’s first apartments in the 1880s, followed by a remarkable construction boom in the 1920s, and ending in the “bust” of the 1930s. A focus of the presentation will be the social trends that accompanied and led to the rise in popularity of these buildings, including the fallacies of the myth of the “City of Homes” that imagined Philadelphia as a city of “comfortable dwellings largely occupied by their owners.” The talk will also explore the emergence of garden apartment developers, developer-architects, and developer-engineers; and the rise of a new group of designers (including apartment specialists) outside the elite cohort that had dominated the architecture profession in the region. The presentation will conclude with connections between progressive post-World War II multi-family buildings (including public housing), and the garden apartments and their associations created before the Depression.

GARDEN COURT WALKING TOUR

September 14, 2025 / / 0 Comments


Sunday, September 21, 2025 at 1:00 p.m.

Preservation Alliance Executive Director Paul Steinke will lead a walking tour of his former neighborhood.

The brainchild of developer Clarence Siegel, Garden Court took shape in the 1920s, occupying in a tiny sliver of undeveloped land in the midst of West Philadelphia’s older streetcar suburbs. A planned community of detached, semi-detached and row homes rose up before the Great Depression, along with several distinctive multi-family apartment buildings. The neighborhood’s tree-lined streets, front gardens and accommodations for the increasingly popular private automobile set it apart from the older neighborhoods surrounding Garden Court. The borders of the Garden Court neighborhood are from 46th to 52nd street between Locust Street and Cedar Avenue. This area also sometimes overlaps the” Cedar Park” neighborhood.

ADVANCE REGISTRATION REQUIRED

WE NEED FIVE MORE PEOPLE TO SIGN UP BY WEDNESDAY, SEPT 17 OR THE TOUR WILL HAVE TO BE CANCELLED

$20 per person
To register please send your name and cell phone number to info@philachaptersah.org
If space is available, we will send you the payment link.

PHILA SAH ANNUAL CHAPTER MEMBERS MEETING

April 28, 2025 / / 0 Comments


Philadelphia Chapter Society of Architectural Historians
ANNUAL CHAPTER MEMBERS MEETING
Friday May 9, 2025 at 6:00 p.m.
The University of Pennsylvania Architectural Archives
Fisher Fine Arts Library Lower Level, 220 S. 34th St, Philadelphia, PA 19104

The event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.
RSVP requested at info@philachaptersah.org
We will have a brief business meeting followed by our presentation:

BOOK PRESENTATION: SPATIAL THEORIES FOR THE AMERICAS: COUNTERWEIGHTS TO FIVE CENTURIES OF EUROCENTRISM
by author Fernando Lara. PhD, Professor of Architecture, UPenn Stuart Weitzman School of Design

To study the built environment of the Americas is to wrestle with an inherent contradiction. While the disciplines of architecture, urban design, landscape, and planning share the fundamental belief that space and place matter, the overwhelming majority of canonical knowledge and the vernacular used to describe these disciplines comes from another, very different, continent. With this book, Fernando Luiz Lara discusses several theories of space—drawing on cartography, geography, anthropology, and mostly architecture—and proposes counterweights to five centuries of Eurocentrism. The first part of Spatial Theories for the Americas offers a critique of Eurocentrism in the discipline of architecture, problematizing its theoretical foundation in relation to the inseparability of modernization and colonization. The second part makes explicit the insufficiencies of a hegemonic Western tradition at the core of spatial theories by discussing a long list of authors who have thought about the Americas. To overcome centuries of Eurocentrism, Lara concludes, will require a tremendous effort, but, nonetheless, we have the responsibility of looking at the built environment of the Americas through our own lenses. Spatial Theories for the Americas proposes a fundamental step in that direction.

Fernando Luiz Lara works on theorizing spaces of the Americas with an emphasis on the dissemination of design ideas beyond the traditional disciplinary boundaries. Framed by decolonial theories, Lara has written widely about issues that pertain to the built environment of our continent.

His latest publications include Spatial Theories for the Americas (University of Pittsburgh Press, November 2024); Street Matters: A Critical History of 20th Century Urban Policy in Brazil (with Ana Paula Koury, 2022); Excepcionalidad del Modernismo Brasileño (2019); Modern Architecture in Latin America (with Luis Carranza, 2015); and The Rise of Popular Modernist Architecture in Brazil (2008). Among the many books he edited are Decolonizing the Spatial History of the Americas (2022) and Spatial Concepts for Decolonizing the Americas (with Felipe Hernandez, 2023).

Before joining the Weitzman School, Lara was the director of the PhD Program in Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin (2018-23), and chair of the Brazil center at the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies in that same University (2012-15). He has also taught at the University of Michigan (2004-09) and was a visiting professor at the University of São Paulo, Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros, in 2017.

A TOUR OF GLEN FOERD ESTATE

February 26, 2025 / / 0 Comments

Saturday, March 15 from 11:00 a.m. to approx. 12:30 p.m.
5001 Grant Avenue, Philadelphia PA 19114
Follow signs to the parking area when you arrive, then walk back to the house.

Advance registration and pre-payment required.
$10 for Phila Chapter SAH members – use this link to pay for & reserve your spot
https://www.paypal.com/ncp/payment/58WYFFQP5NCNW

$15 for non-members – use this link to pay for & reserve your spot
https://www.paypal.com/ncp/payment/5ZT7UZMAAW5H6

You may choose to make the payment via your PayPal Account, Venmo or your debit/credit card by selecting the proper button. Please fill in your name, address and email so that we may properly record your payment.

Questions? info@philachaptersah.org

The Glen Foerd estate was established by Charles Macalester, Jr. Born in Philadelphia in 1798, he was a respected businessman and broker in the Philadelphia firm of Gaw, Macalester and Company. In 1850, he purchased 84 acres in northeastern Philadelphia. He sold some of the land retaining a section along the Delaware River for a summer residence that he called Glengarry. When he died in 1873, the property was inherited by his daughter Eliza “Lily” Macalester Laughton, who continued to spend summers there until her death in 1891.

In 1895, the mansion was purchased by Robert H. and Caroline Foerderer. Robert made his fortune in the manufacture of kidskin leather. Leather gloves, shoes and other clothing accessories made from the soft, supple leather was the height of fashion. His Philadelphia manufacturing enterprise employed 5,000 workers and processed nine million goat skins a year.

After purchasing the estate, Foerderer hired architect, William McAuley of Philadelphia, to handle extensive renovations to the mansion. The house was enlarged and enhanced with Classical Revival additions. Additions included a porte cochere, formal dining room, and impressive art gallery. Other enhancements included a Haskell pipe organ, parquet floors, grand staircase, elaborate leaded glass skylights, and rathskellar. Everything was planned to accommodate entertainment on a grand scale. As a final touch, they changed the name of the estate to Glen Foerd, a merger of Glengarry and the Foerderer name. Due to the elaborate renovation design and labor delays, the Foerderers had not yet moved back into the mansion when Robert died in 1903.

Caroline Foerderer continued to reside at Glen Foerd and continued to renovate the estate.. Around 1915, Florence Foerderer Tonner and her husband William moved to Glen Foerd to assist her widowed mother. After her mother’s death in 1934, Florence continued to add to her parents’ art collection. Florence was a strong supporter of the arts. She remained very active in the cultural and social affairs of Philadelphia, until her death in 1971.

Florence left the estate to the Lutheran Church of America. In 1985, the Glen Foerd Conservation Corporation and the Fairmount Park Commission assumed ownership of the property that is now a public park, historic house museum and event venue.

The Architecture of Instruction In Late Ottoman Istanbul

November 15, 2024 / / 0 Comments

The Philadelphia Chapter Society of Architectural Historians &
The Tyler School of Art & Architecture at Temple Univ present
The Architecture of Instruction In Late Ottoman Istanbul
by Ryan J. Mitchell, PhD Student, Art History, Tyler School of Art & Architecture

Wednesday, December 4 at 6:00 p.m.
In person at Temple’s Charles Library, Event Space/Room 102, 1900 N 13th St, Philadelphia.
(The Event Space is in the library atrium, directly across from the 13th Street entrance to the building.)
Free and open to all.  Registration not required.
Questions: info@philachaptersah.org

Focusing on schools constructed in Istanbul and Athens between 1868 and 1900, this paper offers a comparative study of the Greek (also known as Rum) educational institutions, analyzing the various strategies of self-representation at play in their architectural programs. The study compares the shared stylistic language of eclectic classicism that appear in the Zografyon Lyceum (1890) and the Zappeio School for Girls (1885) in Istanbul’s Beyoğlu district, as well as related structures within the Ottoman lands and in the then nascent Kingdom of Greece. Shared design choices across ethno-religious communities resident in the late Ottoman Empire created an associative “architecture of instruction,” which will be illustrated through a discussion of the designs of Zografyon and the Zappeio that contextualizes the use of a kind of neo-classicism in Istanbul’s late Ottoman schools as both part of the era’s global patterns of taste, as well as explores the questions of identity at play in the Ottoman sphere. The paper also aims to show how this phenomenon in the built environment inscribed in the urban fabric the imperial bureaucracy’s attempt to unite its diverse population under a common identity constructed on an imagined Helleno-Ottoman past.

Ryan is the 2024 Philadelphia Chapter Society of Architectural Historians George B. Tatum Fellow. Now in the fourth year of his PhD, his research focus on Islamic art and architecture with a concentration on the Ottoman Empire and Eastern Mediterranean in the long nineteenth century.

The Annual Fellowship provides funding for an area student to attend the Annual Society of Architectural Historians International Conference each year. For details on the 2025 Fellowship application see https://philachaptersah.org/index.php/about/

Culver & Rogers: Victorian Philadelphia Architects

October 26, 2024 / / 0 Comments

The Philadelphia Chapter Society of Architectural Historians presents
Culver & Rogers: Victorian Philadelphia Architects
by Greg Prichard
Wednesday, November 6 at 6:00 p.m.
Online via Zoom at this link:
https://Jefferson.zoom.us/j/94537050102
Free and open to all.

Some of the most notable Victorian landmarks of suburban Philadelphia came from the drawing boards of a firm barely remembered today. The partnership of Culver & Rogers produced a variety of public buildings, businesses, and homes for newly blossoming towns including Wayne, Devon, Berwyn, and Langhorne. Further afield, controversy still follows some of their restorations of historic structures, including Independence Hall.

Greg Prichard, Historic Preservation Planner for Lower Merion Township and board member of the Radnor Historical Society, has compiled numerous scattered references relating to the firm to form a fascinating narrative. His illustrated presentation will explore the sum of their extraordinary legacy.

Architectural Authorship and Authority: Denise Scott Brown In 1967

February 23, 2024 / / 0 Comments

Denise Scott Brown at Das Pathos das Funktionalismus (“The Pathos of Functionalism”), Berlin, 1974. Photograph IDZ Berlin/Christian Ahlers; Courtesy of Venturi Scott Brown Collection, The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania.

Architectural Authorship and Authority: Denise Scott Brown In 1967
by Denise Costanzo, Associate Professor of Architecture,
The Pennsylvania State University
Friday, March 15, 2024, at 5:30 p.m.
The Architectural Archives
Stuart Weitzman School of Design
University of Pennsylvania
220 South 34th Street at Smith Walk
(Lower Level of the Fisher Fine Arts Library building)
Philadelphia, PA 19104
Reservations requested at info@philachaptersah.org

The ongoing controversy over Denise Scott Brown’s exclusion from the individual Pritzker Prize awarded to Robert Venturi in 1991 hinges on issues of authorship, attribution, and equity in architectural partnerships, and in the wider profession. The Pritzker jury highlighted Venturi’s early, more seemingly independent work, including his sole-authored Complexity and Contradiction of 1966. Scott Brown, however, worked on her own ambitious book project during these same years, one whose different fate prefigured her distinct trajectory. Contextualizing Scott Brown’s decisions about the function of ambitious writing at a pivotal juncture humanize the complexities that followed.

Denise Costanzo is Associate Professor of Architecture at the Pennsylvania State University. She is co-editor (with Andrew Leach) of Italian Imprints on Twentieth Century Architecture (Bloomsbury, 2022) and author of What Architecture Means: Connecting Ideas and Design (Routledge 2015). Her essays on Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi have appeared in journals and books that including The Routledge Companion Guide to Fascist Italian Architecture: Reception and Legacy (Routledge, 2020); and Denise Scott Brown: In Others’ Eyes (Birkhaüser, 2022). Her current book project is Modern Architects and the Problem of the Postwar Rome Prize: France, Spain, America and Britain (University of Virginia Press).

Wildwood: Looking Back To America’s Promised Future

April 18, 2023 / / 0 Comments

The Society for Commercial Archeology presents
Wildwood: Looking Back To America’s Promised Future

photo by Mark Havens

with Daniel Vieyra and Mark Havens
Wednesday, May 17th 8:00 p.m.on Zoom
Free For members of SCA, Society of Architectural Historians Philadelphia Chapter, Docomomo-US-PHL, and Doo Wop Preservation League
please register here for the Zoom link
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/wildwood-looking-back-to-americas-promised-future-registration-562580151377

Join architect and preservationist Daniel Vieyra and photographer Mark Havens as they present the rich midcentury modern motel architecture of Wildwood, New Jersey from two distinct viewpoints. Vieyra will discuss his preservation work with Steven Izenour on the 1990s design studios that cataloged, analyzed and evaluated the motels. The project ultimately identified clusters that coherently told the story of Wildwood’s evolution while allowing areas in between for new development. Havens will discuss his decade-long photography project documenting these structures that resulted in the monograph entitled “Out of Season: The Vanishing Architecture of the Wildwoods”.