August Perez III

New Orleans architect August "Augie" Perez III (born Mardi Gras Day 1933) passed away on Friday, December 5th at the age of 81. A 1956 graduate of Tulane University's School of Architecture and once the business manager of the school's student publication, Perez was the son of architect August "Gus" Perez, Jr. (1906-98).

First licensed to practice architecture in 1957, Augie Perez joined the American Institute of Architects in 1960. He served on the board of directors of the Investors' Homestead Association, was a member of the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce, the Metairie Country Club and the Le Moyne de Bienville Club. As spokesperson for August Perez and Associates, he frequently promoted the firm's innovations to business professionals and the media. Upon his father's retirement in 1980, he took over the practice and incorporated it, at the same time hiring a "hotshot stable of talented young architects."(1)

Under Augie's direction, the firm won the public competition to supervise the planning of the Louisiana World Exposition (1984). Responding to the honor, Perez emphasized:

"'The architectural statement made by the World's Fair will be the most important definition of New Orleans to be made by its own citizens during the 20th century. The World's Fair will be a challenge to open the riverfront as it has never been done before and to show that no American city can more perfectly restore and preserve the past than can New Orleans.'"(2)

The Perez firm garnered international attention and supervised the construction of projects designed by other architects such as Frank Gehry, Charles Moore, and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.


(1)Jeanette Hardy. "August Perez Retires--Leaves Tall Legacy." The Times-Picayune 27 July 1980.

(2)Allan Katz.  "Master Planners Selected for World's Fair." The Times-Picayune/The States-Item 16 December 1980.


Image above: August Perez and Associates. Le Pavillon Hotel, 833 Poydras Street, New Orleans, LA. 1970. [Addition to and modernization of the old De Soto Hotel, originally built as the Hotel Denechaud for Justin Denechaud by New Orleans architects Toledano & Wogan. 1905.] Perez Associates Office Records, Southeastern Architectural Archive, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.

Reproduction & Preservation

We have mentioned in an earlier post the relationship between architectural reprographic processes and jazz music in New Orleans. Tulane University's Hogan Jazz Archive retains the blueprint-laden manuscript collection of local musician John Hyman, aka Johnny Wiggs.

For those interested in large format duplication processes, catalogs published by the Eugene Dietzgen Company provide considerable information. Product number 4310B (top image) was a sheet washer for developing blueprints and negative prints in running water. A clamping device fixed the drawing into a near-vertical position for the washing process. Wet prints could be dried on the rack attached to the top of the washer.

Dietzgen vacuum print frames were sold individually (bottom image) or with high power arc lamps (central image). The company recommended the individual print frame for both electric and sun printing. The frame's vacuum pump connected to a rubber blanket designed to keep the sensitized paper and the trace material firmly in position against the glass plate.

When the vacuum print frame was coupled with the lamps, Dietzgen recommended its use for processing Vandykes and Edco process prints. The latter was the company's method of reproducing original tracings by making a Vandyke negative of the original tracing and then placing the intermediate directly atop a sensitized cloth (called Edco Process Cloth) and exposing the sheets to light as one would do in the development of a blueprint. After the Edco Process Cloth was exposed, the technician would rinse it with water, apply a developing liquid, rinse it a second time, and hang the print out to dry.

Companies such as Dietzgen encouraged architectural and engineering businesses to make duplicates of original tracings for preservation purposes: "This is the best insurance known, for the duplicate may be filed away in a vault, or elsewhere, safe from loss or damage by fire."(1)

(1)Catalog of Eugene Dietzgen Co., Manufacturers Blue Print Papers/Drafting Room supplies/Survey Instruments/and Accessories/Measuring Tapes. Chicago: Eugene Dietzgen Co., 1931, p. 33.

Images above:  Catalog of Eugene Dietzgen Co., Manufacturers Blue Print Papers/Drafting Room supplies/Survey Instruments/and Accessories/Measuring Tapes. Chicago: Eugene Dietzgen Co., 1931.
Southeastern Architectural Archive, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.

CFP: Preservation

Journal of the Future is now accepting articles and opinion pieces on the focus of preservation of items of historical value in the world today whether pertaining to personal, social, political, the future of humankind without preservation, or a combination of these areas. Articles should be closely related to this subject. The goal of this journal is to present these articles for all to access without hindrances. Journal of the Future: Preservation is a publication that is free for all to read in its electronic form.

Article Deadline: August 31, 2011

Acceptances/Rejections Prepared by: September 30, 2011

Anticipated Publication Date: November 2011

For other guidelines, see: http://journalofthefuture.wordpress.com/preservation/

Field Trip: Wisconsin

Wisconsin has a long tradition of roadside "outsider" art -- from Roman Catholic grottoes filled with geodes to concrete animals to forest murals. For over thirty years, the Wisconsin-based Kohler Foundation (yep, the household faucets people) has assisted in conserving the works of Wisconsin's (and other states) quirky self-taught artists including Emery Blagdon, Billie Logan and Ellie Reed, and Fred Smith.

My favorite Wisconsin site (image above) is located in the back of Delaney's Junkyard. Considered the world's largest scrap metal sculpture and incorporating bits from Wisconsin breweries and munition factories, Dr. Evermor's Forevertron is the machine by which the imaginative may listen to celestial music. Surrounded by hybrid ornithological-musical creatures, the Forevertron stands over fifty feet tall and is surmounted by an egg-shaped space capsule. Tom Every, a Wisconsin native and demolition expert, created the pseudo-Victorian fantasia along with his alternative persona, a nineteenth-century scientist named "Dr. Evermor."

Read Jeffrey Hayes's homage to the demolitions preservationist here.

Image above: "Power Station" from Dr. Evermor's Forevertron outside Baraboo (North Freedom Township), Wisconsin. Posted on Wikimedia Commons at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HPIM8818_1.JPG

Preservation of Architectural Drawings

The Fabrica
The New York Chapter of the Guild of Book Workers presents:

The Fabrication and Preservation of Architectural Drawings
An afternoon lecture with Lois Olcott Price
March 16th, 2010, 1-5 pm
Wood Auditorium, Avery Hall, Columbia University

Co-Sponsored by the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University

Because architectural drawings are not created as an end in themselves, but as graphic documents to construct a building, sell a project or explore a design concept, the materials and techniques chosen by the drafter are particular to the function of the drawing as well as the period in which it was created. The interpretation and preservation of architectural drawings depends upon an understanding of their functions in architectural practice and on a working knowledge of drafting materials and techniques. This lecture will include tracing the use of supports, media and photo-reproductive processes used to create architectural drawings in the 18th to 20th centuries, accompanied by examples. The emphasis will be on identification and understanding of materials and processes, and participants will have the opportunity to examine samples and ask questions. Building from this understanding of materials and using the available examples, we will also discuss housing and treatment options for these collections.

Lois Olcott Price is Director of Conservation at the Winterthur Museum, Gardens and Library near Wilmington, DE and assistant Winterthur Professor of Art Conservation in the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation. In 1994, she was senior conservator at the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts in Philadelphia, PA. As increasing numbers of architectural drawings arrived at CCAHA for treatment, unanswered questions about the materials and techniques used to fabricate them piqued her interest and resulted in research that has now spanned almost two decades. Lois has published, lectured and consulted widely about architectural drawings. She has received several grants to support her research resulting in a monograph, “Line Shade and Shadow, The Fabrication and Preservation of Architectural Drawings,” to be published by Oak Knoll in the spring of 2010.

To register for the lecture or for more information, please contact Clare Manias at newyork@guildofbookworkers.org The fee for the lecture is $20 for Guild of Book Workers members, $30 for non-members. Special admission for Columbia students, faculty and staff with ID.

Wood Auditorium is located on the lower level of Avery Hall at Columbia University. Columbia University is located at 116th Street and Broadway in Manhattan. For directions to Avery Hall, please see http://www.columbia.edu/about_columbia/map/avery.html.

Images in Glass

The Southeastern Architectural Archive retains several collections that contain fragile glass media: glass transparencies, glass lantern slides, and glass negatives. These range chronologically from the mid-nineteeenth to the mid-twentieth century and in scale from 2 1/4" x 3 1/4" to 11 x 14".

The item reproduced above formerly resided in the Tulane School of Architecture's Slide Library, part of a large collection of glass lantern slides that were used by faculty for teaching purposes. Photographer/musician Guy F. Bernard (1906-1982) took the photograph of the E. Lacroix Tomb Gate in St. Lous Cemetery No. III. The gate's ornamental cast iron with weeping willow, lambs and doves once evidenced the white polychromy shown here.

New Orleans modernist architect Albert C. Ledner took the second image while visiting Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin in 1948. What you see above is a digital reproduction of a 2 1/4 x 3 1/4 color transparency sandwiched into a Jiffy Mount. The New York city-based Diamant Products Company trademarked the Jiffy Mount, envisioning it as a means of preserving color transparencies and negatives indefinitely.

This last digital reproduction has been taken from an 8 x 10" glass plate negative by photographer George Francois Mugnier (1855-1936) and depicts a Bird's Eye View of the New Orleans levee. Its source is a gelatin dry plate negative, a process that was invented in 1871 by Richard Leach Maddox. The gelatin dry plates were commercially produced and became quite popular by 1880, only to be superceded by gelatin silver paper negatives and gelatin silver celluloid negatives in the 1920s.

First Image: Guy F. Bernard, photographer. Cast Iron Gate, undated lantern slide. Tulane School of Architecture Lantern Slides Collection.

Second Image: Albert C. Ledner, photographer. Taliesin Entrance, Spring Green, Wisconsin, 1948. Albert C. Ledner Office Records Collection.

Third Image: George Francois Mugnier, photographer. Bird's Eye View of the Levee. undated gelatin dry plate negative.

All three items reside in the Southeastern Architectural Archive, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.

Public Meeting: Fate of Curtis & Davis School

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has announced a public meeting scheduled for Wednesday 23 September from 6:00-8:30 pm at C.J. Peete Community Center (2514 Washington Street) to discuss the proposed demolition and replacement of Curtis and Davis's Thomy Lafon Elementary School.

FEMA is requesting that participants be prepared to speak out either in support of preservation or demolition. Parties supporting preservation should be able to present a related proposal; parties supporting demolition should present a proposal for the school's commemoration.

To read more about Thomy Lafon (1810-1893), consult the following resources available through Tulane University Libraries:

Joseph, James A. "Thomy Lafon: Black Aristocracy and Benevolent Wealth," chapter in Remaking America: How the Benevolent Traditions of Many Cultures are Transforming our National Life. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995.

Rankin, David C. "The Origins of Black Leadership in New Orleans during Reconstruction." The Journal of Southern History 40:3 (Aug 1974): 417-440 & other articles available through JSTOR.

To read more about Curtis and Davis's architecture, see:

Curtis, Nathaniel. Nathaniel Curtis, FAIA: My Life in Modern Architecture. New Orleans: University of New Orleans, 2002.

Davis, Arthur. It Happened by Design: The Life and Work of Arthur Q. Davis. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2009.

"School on Stilts." Architectural Forum 101 (November 1954): 148-151.

Image above: Detail from presentation board: Thomy Lafon School: Small Site in a Congested Neighborhood.Curtis & Davis Collection, Southeastern Architectural Archive, Tulane University Libraries.

Public Meeting: Fate of Colbert School

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has announced a public meeting scheduled for Tuesday 22 September from 6:30-9:00 pm at Sojourner Truth Neighborhood Center to discuss the proposed demolition and replacement of Charles Colbert's Phillis Wheatley Elementary School. Previous posts have addressed the Orleans Parish School Board's Master Plan for its schools, as well as Charles Colbert's role in modernizing the city's public school buildings.

FEMA is requesting that participants be prepared to speak out either in support of preservation or demolition. Parties supporting preservation should be able to present a related proposal; parties supporting demolition should present a proposal for the school's commemoration.

To read more about Phillis Wheatley (1753-84), a colonial-era poet, Tulane University Libraries maintain the following resources:

The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Gates, Henry Louis. The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America's First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2003.

The Poems of Phillis Wheatley. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.

To read more about Charles Colbert's architecture, see:

Blodgett, Omer. "Welded Cantilevered Trusses Frame Elevated School." Progressive Architecture 30 (Aug 1958): 138-141.

Colbert, Charles. Idea: The Shaping Force. Metairie, LA: Pendaya Publications, 1987.

New Schools for New Education: A Report from Ann Arbor. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Educational Facilities Laboratories, Inc., 1959. Made available at Texas A & M University here.

Samuel Wilson's Quest

During the late 1950s, New Orleans architectural historian Samuel Wilson, Jr. participated in a coordinated effort to develop a national architectural archive system. Based on an initial proposal from Mrs. Eric Mendelsohn to develop an American architectural museum, a small group of architects convened informally to discuss such an endeavor and how it related to architectural archives. A preliminary program was developed and presented to the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Executive Committee in late 1955. The AIA then organized a Joint Committee on Architectural Archives consisting of members from the AIA, the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), the College Art Association (CAA), the American Historical Association (AHA), the American Association of Architectural Bibliographers, the Association of State and Local History, the Library of Congress and the National Park Service (NPS). The committee hoped to establish a means of preserving this nation's architectural records for future study and sought funds from the Council on Library Resources (established by the Ford Foundation) to determine the best methods for collecting, storing and servicing such records in both original and surrogate formats.

Wilson's committee stated the problem:

"Although ideally the architectural history of a country should be written in the main directly from its buildings, in practice this is not feasible. Buildings are subject to destruction all the time, they are immovable and have to be examined in situ, and many details are either not easily ascertainable or else have been greatly changed.

Consequently, it is necessary to rely in large measure on the written documentation of the building -- drawings, specifications, correspondence and printed contemporary descriptions. The drawings, however, offer peculiar problems of storage, cataloging and servicing in bulk, which must be satisfactorily resolved. Of even more importance is determining what should be saved since practical considerations of cost and space obviate the possibility of saving all such records." (undated, c. 1957)

Information gleaned from "Architectural Archives Problems/Investigation Committee." Box 3, Samuel Wilson, Jr. Papers Collection, Southeastern Architectural Archive, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.

Allegory of a City (1921)

In 1927, the American painter Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) was first commissioned to visually document the Ford Motor Company's River Rouge plant, and thereby established his reputation as an architectural photographer. Seven years earlier, Sheeler had collaborated with photographer Paul Strand (1890-1976) to develop an homage to New York City, a short film called Manhatta. Their work, considered the first American avant-garde film, has recently been digitally restored with a new score by Donald Sosin. To watch the pre-restored film via the Metropolitan Museum of Art's portal, click here. To see the new restoration, you need to go to the Museum of Modern Art November 14th or 15th.

The creation of the restored version -- conducted by Lowry Digital Images of Burbank, California -- was dependent upon the use of the earliest extant copy, a 35-mm duplicate made in England in 1949. According to the Library of Congress, nearly 80% of the American silent era films have either been permanently lost or the extant copy is in unrestorable condition.

Image above: Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand. Film still from Manhatta (1921).

When Disaster Strikes: Resources

Architectural records damaged in New Orleans during Hurricane Gustav. 09.2008 by K. Rylance

The Southeastern Architectural Archive received many calls after Hurricane Katrina and more recently after Hurricane Gustav from architects and engineers whose office records were damaged by wind and/or water. For those seeking resources and supplies, the following information may be beneficial:

For Appraisals: The American Society of Appraisers maintains a directory of certified appraisers. Why might one desire a professional appraisal? Many insurance companies require appraisal by a certified specialist. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) also requires appraisals by qualified appraisers for tax reporting purposes.

For Mold Remediation: Document Reprocessors, Munters and Belfor are companies that provide disaster mitigation services. Tulane University Libraries hired Belfor to vacuum freeze-dry, gamma-irradiate, and process Hurricane Katrina flood-damaged books and documents.

For Conservation: The American Institute for Conservation (AIC) has an emergency response team and maintains an online guide to finding a conservator.

On 29 August 2008, the Library of Congress announced its new "Learning from Katrina" webpage that features seven interviews with conservators who lent their assistance in 2005. The site includes additional resources and tips related to hurricane response and recovery. Heritage Emergency National Task Force also maintains a website for current disaster information related to 2008 hurricanes and tropical storms. One feature is Heritage Preservation's ten-minute film "Coping with Water Damage."

Carol Turchan's 1988 article "The Chicago Historical Society Flood: Recovery Analysis Two Years Later" provides experience-based insights for coping with sodden architectural drawings.

For Archival Materials: University Products, Talas, Gaylord, and Hollinger Metal Edge all sell archival storage and conservation products.

For Archival Flat File Cabinets:

Mayline Group 619 N. Commerce P.O.Box 728 Sheboygan, WI 53082-0728 Telephone: (920) 457-5537 Fax: (920) 457-7388	Ulrich Planfiles 2120 Fourth Avenue Lakewood, NY 14750 Telephone: (800) 346-2875 Fax: (716) 763-1818
Bradford Systems Corporate Office 8700 Waukegan Rd., Suite 110 Morton Grove, IL 60053-210 Telephone: (847) 965-5070 Fax: (847) 965-5247	Safco Products, Inc. 9300 W. Research Center Rd New Hope, MN 55428 Telephone: (800) 328-3020