Attention, book lovers, bargain hunters, and history buffs! Don’t miss the great deals at the University of Virginia Press Warehouse Sale. Thousands of first-quality books in Virginiana, history, literature, African American studies, founding fathers, the Civil War, and more will be on sale. Hours are Friday, September 27, from 10 am to 6 pm, and Saturday, September 28, from 10 am to 2 pm at the Press Warehouse, 500 Edgemont Road, three blocks west of McCormick and Alderman (driveway located off McCormick Road). For more information, please email stephanie.lovegrove@virginia.edu or call 434-924-6070.

Encompassing the architecture of the Upper and Lower peninsulas, which are surrounded by four of the Great Lakes, the newly incorporated material from the revised edition of Buildings of Michigan explores the state’s history and surveys the architecture of Detroit and many other cities and villages. The range of buildings and places includes early inns and houses along the Sauk Trail, the mine locations of the Copper and Iron ranges, the sandstone architecture of the Lake Superior region, the concrete buildings of Alpena, lighthouses and lifesaving stations of the Upper Great Lakes, the state’s numerous bridges, the great houses of automobile industrialists in Grosse Pointe, the factories of Albert Kahn, the mid-twentieth-century buildings of Alden B. Dow and Minoru Yamasaki, and contributions of numerous local architects who have added to Michigan’s architectural heritage. The up-to-date content introduces sites from the recent past and the present; discusses broad sweeping cultural landscapes, historical parks, greenways, and linear parks; and showcases triumphs in historic preservation.

Over 500 entries from other states in the BUS series have been added following review of geocoding, and metadata has been reviewed and corrected for 2400 additional entries. SAH Archipedia now contains a total of 11736 building entries.

Photographs contributed by former BUS editor in chief Damie Stillman have been added to illustrate building entries from Colorado, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and the District of Columbia.

The celebrated modernist architect Richard Neutra (1892-1970) figures prominently in several recently published UVa Press volumes, and with his work we are faced with the enduring questions of how we define, honor, and struggle with history.

Neutra’s Kaufmann House in Palm Springs was the western retreat for the family that commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. In 1937, he designed a modern house—his first outside California—for Pan Am pilot and executive George Kraigher in Brownsville, Texas. The subject of an entry in the just-released Buildings of Texas: Central, South, and Gulf Coast (written by Gerald Moorhead with seven prominent coauthors), the Kraigher House is a preservationist’s success story. Derelict and decaying, this luminous home was carefully rehabilitated by the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College in 2007, to welcome and inspire a new generation of architects, historians, and visitors.

The fifty-year history of one of Neutra’s most important non-residential commissions, the Cyclorama Center in Gettysburg, is recounted at length in Christine Madrid French’s essay in Public Nature: Scenery, History, and Park Design, a new volume edited by Ethan Carr, Shaun Eyring, and Richard Guy Wilson. Carefully positioned in Ziegler’s Grove on Cemetery Ridge, its rooftop ramp allowed visitors to scan the landscape from south to north, from the sites of the repulse of Pickett’s Charge to the dais from which Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address echoed. The center recalled “the essential link between the mass battle of 1863 and the mass culture of the present,” as succinctly summarized in Buildings of Pennsylvania: Philadelphia and Eastern Pennsylvania, by George Thomas and his five coauthors. Here too a battle ensued, this time between preservationists and Civil War historians, who struggled with which history should be safeguarded. Following a protracted lawsuit, the Cyclorama was razed this past month, just shy of the 150th anniversary of the conflict that saved the Union.

How to reconcile these diametrically opposed outcomes? The Kraigher and Kaufmann houses speak to our fascination with the recent past, as evidenced in the popularity and the settings of such shows as “Mad Men,” while the Cyclorama’s demolition privileges our longer national story. If both are worthy of attention, there are clearly no easy answers here.

As a freshman at Gettysburg College in the late 1970s, I spent a fair amount of time exploring the battlefield, walking the length of Cemetery Ridge and the rise of the Cyclorama ramp. For me, the Neutra center was warm and welcoming, an expanse of glass and terrazzo leading to a large cast-cement drum that housed Paul Philippoteaux’s circular panorama painting of the battle. This is how I’ll always recall the place, graced by that modernist memorial, no more intrusive than the Beaux-Arts marble mass of the Pennsylvania Monument to the south. And though historians of our great national conflict may applaud the landscape’s restoration, at least to its late-nineteenth-century appearance, something intangible, perhaps our generation’s rediscovery of the enduring significance of that conflict, has nonetheless been sadly and irrevocably lost.

Drawn from the award-winning Buildings of the United States (BUS) series, SAH Archipedia includes histories and thematic essays on Massachusetts (Metropolitan Boston), Rhode Island, Pennsylvania (Eastern and Western), the District of Columbia, Virginia (Tidewater and Piedmont), West Virginia, Michigan, Iowa, Colorado, Nevada, and Alaska. This cross-section of the country demonstrates the richness and diversity of architecture and building practice across many centuries, from mud brick to steel, from ancient cliff dwellings to contemporary office towers.

“SAH Archipedia is an innovative new online publication that we hope will be used by everyone who is interested in exploring the history of American architecture,” said Pauline Saliga, Executive Director of the Society of Architectural Historians. “The University of Virginia Press has once again shown why it is considered the leading university press in pursuit of innovation in the digital humanities.”

Published by Rotunda—the digital imprint of the University of Virginia Press— SAH Archipedia contains more than 8,500 building entries, 6,000 photographs and drawings, 4,300 individual architects and firms, 1,300 unique building types, and hundreds of periods, styles, and building materials, each tagged as a search facet for discovery. All search results and individual entries appear on dynamically generated maps. The site also includes the interpretive introductions from the first twelve volumes published in print. This legacy material from the BUS volumes will be supplemented with original digital content created and edited in an online authoring environment, yielding entries that will ultimately encompass all 50 states.

“SAH Archipedia incorporates the spatial turn in digital humanities for the first time in a Rotunda publication,” said Mark Saunders, Interim Director of the University of Virginia Press. “As a collaboration between a university press and a scholarly society, it represents a new chapter in scholarly communications. From a publishing perspective, the project will be released in a hybrid model, blending licensed and free material, with a commitment to open metadata.”

SAH Archipedia will be released in two complementary versions: a scholars edition for license to libraries, and a free website, SAH Archipedia Classic Buildings, which features over 100 open-access entries on the most important buildings for each state.

“The launch of SAH Archipedia is another step in the development of online scholarly resources that incorporates peer review, contextual information such as maps and satellite images, and tagging that provides further historical context,” said Ann Whiteside, Librarian and Assistant Dean for Information Resources, Frances Loeb Library, Harvard Graduate School of Design. “SAH Archipedia has the potential to transform how architectural history is studied because of the way in which it marries imagery, scholarly rigor, and database searchability within a single resource.”

Libraries interested in acquiring SAH Archipedia for long-term access, please contact Jason Coleman at jcoleman@virginia.edu or 434-924-1450. Press inquiries, please contact Emily Grandstaff at egrandstaff@virginia.edu or 434-982-2932.

Ten Little Rabbits has the simplest of plots. Mino the Magician produces a rabbit from his hat. And another… and another. The ostensible job of this little book (literally little: it measures 2.5″ x 3.5″) is to teach kids to count to ten. Mino, overrun by rabbits, finally begins making them disappear, until he is back to none. Children could learn to count from ten backwards, a skill particularly handy for blast-offs. This was the Apollo era, after all.

The nearly hour-long conversation touches on the terrific diversity of the Chesapeake region, as well as the authors’ hope that people can see past the political issues, which in the nearby metropolises of Washington and Baltimore tend to dominate all discussions of the bay, and enjoy what is still an awesome display of nature. Davidson also addresses the difficulty of his highly specialized brand of photography, which finds him in aircraft ranging from planes at 8,500 feet to low-flying helicopters slowed down to 40 knots per hour. Most people will be surprised to find it really is simply a matter of a harnessed human leaning out of the open door and snapping away. (Trade secret for butterflies in the stomach: eat a bagel before you go up, it soaks up the stomach acid.) In addition to the broadcast itself, the episode’s web page includes a video showing him at work above the Chesapeake. The page also offers a gallery of photos from the book, complete with captions.

Davidson is very active online, keeping both a blog and a state-of-the-art professional site, which includes an extensive portfolio.

Chesapeake: The Aerial Photography of Cameron Davidson is available now.