Viewpoint: Teaching Buildings and Landscapes to Today’s UndergraduatesBeyond the Classroom Gretchen Townsend Buggeln (bio) Architectural historians, preservationists, and cultural resource managers accomplish great work every day for the sake of our built environment and communities. But let’s face it: these are tough times. Out on the front lines of preservation and advocacy, practitioners struggle to do their important work with shrinking resources. Within the academy, scholars and teachers of architectural history face both economic and ideological challenges. Particularly in the sphere of undergraduate education, the humanities as a whole are waging a battle against the trending, widespread idea that higher education, now an unprecedented expense, should be almost exclusively for job preparation. The current intense focus on the STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) crowds out other academic pursuits. Called to accountability, administrators attend to cost–benefit analyses and measurable student learning objectives. Students, understandably concerned about a difficult job market, shrewdly pursue marketable skills as opposed to broad, humanistic—less quantifiable—aspects of their education. Enrollments in humanities courses, even at elite liberal arts colleges, have fallen noticeably.1 Our field of architecture and landscape history and preservation depends on good teaching to a broad audience. Not only do teachers train future professionals, but in an equally essential way, they introduce the next generation of citizens to the importance of the built environment. Teaching nonspecialist undergraduate students to look beyond their computer screens at buildings, landscapes, and objects with educated attention is a special opportunity and a vital aspect of our calling as architectural historians.2 Our students will become the audience for the future work of historians and preservationists; here is an opportunity to open their eyes and lead them to care about the built environment. Might the current criticism of higher education, especially at the undergraduate level, productively challenge us to be more creative and effective teachers of our subject? How can we take our subject’s natural assets and teach in ways that engage even tentative and skeptical students while addressing the legitimate concerns of administrators and the wider culture? What, after all, are we hoping to accomplish with and for our students? We need not only to defend the importance of our particular corner of the humanities but also to think about what we teach undergraduates, how we teach it, and for what end. My engagement with these questions began in earnest about a decade ago. In 2004 I left a position training graduate students in material culture and museum studies for a job at a small midwestern university. My new post required me to teach general interdisciplinary humanities to undergraduates in a comprehensive program grounded in the close reading of texts. When teaching graduate students, I had taken for granted that they were interested in material culture studies, perhaps even architectural history. My new students, however, were aspiring engineers, nurses, and teachers who took humanities courses because they enjoyed asking the “big” questions and, frankly, because they had general education requirements to fulfill. This was new [End Page 1] territory for me. I began speaking to audiences I could not assume placed any value on the research and writing I so enjoy. The burden has since been on me to find ways to bring questions of the built environment into this setting. One of the things I quickly learned was that these students needed conceptual ideas as much as—perhaps even more than—the delivery of information. They are inundated with information in their coursework and via the digital media they avidly consume. They come to the humanities classroom looking for a break from a certain type of data-centered instruction but also seeking frameworks for processing experience. They want to exercise their minds in different ways. My department’s intensive type of seminar teaching requires careful listening. As a consequence, I have come to understand my students better—what they value, what motivates them, and what questions compel their attention. Here and there, I sneak in objects and spaces to remind students that the material conditions of life matter. My chance to remain a bona fide architectural historian in the classroom, however, has been in occasional upper-division seminars...

Journal Article Margaret M. Grubiak. White Elephants on Campus: The Decline of the University Chapel in America, 1920–1960. Get access Margaret M. Grubiak. White Elephants on Campus: The Decline of the University Chapel in America, 1920–1960. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014. Pp. xii, 167. $28.00. Gretchen Townsend Buggeln Gretchen Townsend Buggeln Valparaiso University gretchen.buggeln@valpo.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 120, Issue 1, February 2015, Pages 273–274, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/120.1.273 Published: 09 February 2015

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewPeter Benes. Meetinghouses of Early New England. Amherst: Unversity of Massachusetts Press, 2012. 512 pp.; 102 black-and-white illustrations, appendixes, notes, works cited, index. $49.95.Gretchen BuggelnGretchen BuggelnValparaiso University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Winterthur Portfolio Volume 48, Number 4Winter 2014 Published for the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Inc. Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/678583 Views: 25Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

"Sacred concrete the churches of le corbusier, Samuel, Flora and Linder-Gaillard." Material Religion, 10(2), pp. 245–246

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Reviewed by: American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture Gretchen Buggeln (bio) Alice T. Friedman American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. 272 pages. 125 black-and-white plus 40 color illustrations. ISBN 978-0300116540, $65.00 HB At the outset of Alice Friedman's wonderful and important book American Glamour, the author captures the complexity of her subject. Because "Mid-Century Modern" architecture contains "widely divergent" examples, she writes, "it is impossible to create a meaningful historical category or a style label that will have lasting value" (5). A surface similarity—buildings that have that "postwar modern" feel—at closer observation dissolves into a surprising multiplicity of forms, materials, and audiences. "The difficulty in relating specific buildings (and in many cases their furnishings as well) not only to each other but to modern architecture as a movement," Friedman writes, "has proved a formidable challenge" (5). Those of us who have attempted to make sense of the ordinary buildings of this period will quickly recognize these problems. Although we might not want to drop structures into style categories, we have our own definitional problems. What exactly marks something as "vernacular" or "commonplace" in a period when well-trained architects might capture the campy glitz of Hollywood or replicate Mount Vernon on a suburban street? What really distinguishes a Levittown ranch house from a modernist pile in the Hamptons, or a suburban grocery store from a resort hotel? Should we make distinctions based on cost, function, client, or reception? What holds the architecture of this period together, and where do we find the tensions and fissures? Sidestepping stylistic and typological questions, Friedman has given us an interdisciplinary work that draws disparate architects and buildings together under a central idea—glamour. In part, Friedman uses this concept as a means to recover the significance of American buildings that, although designed by high-profile architects, met with severe criticism in the architectural press because of their engagement with popular culture and their frank, middle-class consumer appeal. Friedman shows us how the cool, rational humanism of the modern movement was overtaken by a "yearning for a humanization," resulting in an architecture that offered both psychic and physical comfort (30). By focusing on how these spaces harmonized with postwar dreams and ambitions, she explains why they were successful in their own day and why they continue to appeal today. Glamour, she argues, is found less in the form of these diverse buildings than in the "experiences and moods" they suggest, and their shared approach to "representation, image-making, and audience" (5). These cosmopolitan buildings show "an increasingly self-conscious approach to the styling of architectural imagery through siting, framing, lighting, and handing of surface details." They appeal to the "viewing habits . . . and sensory expectations shared by a broad cross section of American consumers accustomed to looking at photographs and watching movies" (5). Friedman suggests that we look at these buildings as the consumer objects they were, because [End Page 130] "their success or failure lay as much in the image and experience they delivered as in their function or use" (6). Friedman's emphasis on the importance of the experience of these glamorous buildings leans heavily on their storytelling capabilities, particularly the way that architectural photography shaped and enhanced the encounter with designed spaces. She begins with Julius Shulman's iconic photograph of two women perched on sleek modern furniture in the glass-box living room of Pierre Koenig's Case Study House No. 22, hovering on the edge of a hillside overlooking the sparkling evening lights of Los Angeles. This image, and so many like it, offered an architecture that promised freedom, personal transformation, and glamour. Indeed, the lavish and beautiful illustrations in this book contribute to Friedman's argument as much as the text. The well-known architects here considered—Philip Johnson, Richard Neutra, Eero Saarinen, Morris Lapidus, and Frank Lloyd Wright—all identified with international modernism. Yet, Friedman notes, there is something about their work that is particularly reflective of the context of a "new, glamorous, and powerful"—confident, even superior—1950s postwar America (8). These highly visible modernists attended also to vernacular...