Professor Dr. Clifton Ellis, Associate Professor Dr. Brian Zugay, and Assistant Professor Dr. David Turturo contributed to the Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians (SESAH) 2023 Annual Conference that was held in Little Rock, Arkansas from September 27th through 30th. Founded in 1983, the Southeast Chapter of SESAH is a regional chapter of the national Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) and includes twelve states. Members are primarily based in the southeast region, but also reside throughout the U.S. as well as internationally. Each year, SESAH holds an annual conference, publishes a journal, Arris, offers funding for conference travel and research, and gives awards that recognize achievements in scholarly publication as well as preservation practice.
SESAH promotes scholarship on architecture and related subjects and serves as a forum for ideas among architectural historians, architects, preservationists, and others involved in professions related to the built environment.
Their annual peer-reviewed journal Arris launched in 1989, is published by University of North Carolina Press and is available on Project Muse.
The Sum of its Parts: Visualizing Architecture in Master Plans, Data Science, and Model Making
Moderator – Clifton Ellis
Model Making and Moral Architectural Instruction in the American Protestant Sunday School
Brian C.R. Zugay
Architectural model making was a new pedagogical tool introduced to American Protestant Sunday Schools at the turn of the twentieth century. Stressing practical “handwork” as a means to engage and interest children and young adolescents in their Biblical lessons, classes across the country crafted miniature Temples of Jerusalem, Tabernacles in the desert, and assorted other ancient structures, settings, and objects of daily life from the Holy Land.
These models became the focus of ceremonial and ritualized activities within both the Sunday School and the larger congregation, and they were frequently used as collection receptacles for religious and behavioral pledges, for weekly offerings, and for other fundraising activities.
This paper argues that the making of church models, the rise in use of church-shaped banks, and children’s programmed interaction with them were directly connected to efforts by denominational church-extension agencies to promote awareness of the material importance of the church building, educate about new standards for modern churches, encourage new projects, and raise funds to support construction locally and nationally.
The Courthouse Town as Vernacular Urbanism
David Turturo
The Texas Courthouse town is similar to other urban morphologies throughout the United States and around the world. Like the New England town green, the French bastide, and the Tuscan hill town, the Texas towns are oriented inward around a centralized open square. Typically, research into these towns focuses on the squares and their monumental structures for justice. By contrast, this paper will address the various configurations of urban fabric that extend beyond the square, reaching out into the diverse Texas landscape. This paper contributes to a larger project about the contested value of civic architecture in the U.S., studying how infrastructure space reinforces or undermines the civic aspirations of postbellum United States urbanism.