In the 1930s, architects traveled across the United States with notebooks, pencils, and measuring tapes, sketching buildings in meticulous detail. SoA faculty member Dr. Lori Gibbs analyzed original Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) field notebooks at the Library of Congress to uncover how craft, observation, and creative judgment shaped precise drawings that became public records. A section of this research has been published in the peer-reviewed journal Change Over Time: An International Journal of Conservation and the Built Environment, in the article “Recording More than Data: Examining The Historic American Buildings Survey’s First ‘Field Notebooks.'”
Gibbs’s research addresses the question: “When we look at the trail of drawings left behind from the process of recording the built environment, what exactly are we looking at?” Her findings highlight the early role of architectural drawing practices in HABS, in which architects worked alongside photographers and historians to transform field observations into structured documentation. Supported by a Faculty Fellowship Award from the SoA Dean’s Office, Gibbs, who teaches in the Undergraduate Architecture program, shows that even “data” carries human interpretation — offering a close look at the skill and imagination behind recording the built environment. The fellowship also supported the production of high-resolution scans of notebook sketches, which are now incorporated into the HABS digitization project and are publicly accessible through the Library of Congress.
This publication is derived from Gibbs’s dissertation, Making Measurements and Crafting Evidence: The Architect-as-Surveyor in the 1920s–1940s, which situates architectural drawing methods within a transnational context of knowledge exchange.
Publication Citation: Lori Gibbs, “Examining the Historic American Buildings Survey’s First ‘Field Notebooks,’” Change Over Time: An International Journal of Conservation and the Built Environment (Early Access Release), University of Pennsylvania Press, https://doi.org/10.1353/cot.0.a984623.