Recording More Than Data: Examining The Historic American Buildings Survey’s First “field Notebooks”

In the 1930s, the Historic American Buildings Survey institutionalized the field notebook as a tool for informal “data” collection during site visits. District offices deposited notebooks as part of the Library of Congress’s permanent public records. Architects’ field notebooks initiated the recording of the nation’s cultural history which was motivated by the organization’s mission to “study, measure, and draw up the plans, elevations and details of the important antique buildings of the United States” so that “they should not pass into unrecorded oblivion.” At first glance, the HABS drawings appear to present self-evident “data” portraying existing buildings in measured outlines, profiles, surfaces, and construction details. Yet architectural drawing is a creative, iterative, and inventive process, even when applied to the recording of historical buildings. When we look at the trail of drawings left behind from the process of recording the built environment, what exactly are we looking at? This study identifies specific techniques present in the drawing process that indicate the architects’ figuration of the facts and the active transfiguration of eyewitness observations into measured images. How architects made measurements, created points, lines, and grids, calculated the congruences between building parts, and made compositional choices, omissions, fabrications, restorations, and rectifications will be discerned from the drawing phases in the Library of Congress’s permanent collection. Close comparisons of field notebook sketches by different district offices include examinations of a log house in California, a Virginia farm’s slave quarters, Spanish colonial missions in Arizona, and a fishing village in Massachusetts alongside the final drawing records of each site. Looking closely will bring into focus how the resultant images display pensive and interpretive qualities in addition to the intended “data” collected. Through the architect’s figuration of an existing building into images it becomes understood as a form of construction and conceptualized as a historical subject. This close reading of images calls attention to the intelligence inherent in architectural drawing as a unique form of visual record making that undergirds heritage recording. This study also prompts critical reflection on the wider history of heritage documentation and the images that continue to shape our understanding of the built environment.