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utah drawings from the western regional architecture program collection, UNIVERSITY OF UTAH, 1982-2016
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studying the unstudied:
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They say timing is everything, and certainly this is the case with my career in architectural history. I was finishing my graduate studies at Indiana University’s Folklore Institute just as the first wave of federal historic preservation funding hit during the mid-1970s.1 A good deal of the money was directed toward identifying existing resources, since most state historic preservation office (SHPO) staff members had little or no idea what they had in the way of buildings, significant or otherwise. Surveyors were needed, and, because the demand was great, even folklorists could get hired. I got a summer job surveying the old buildings of Bloomington, Indiana, and found that both in terms of temperament and skills, the work suited me well.2
Meng “Matrix” Li, Katja Lund, and Kate Hovanes recording a miner’s workshop/garage in Park City for the Vernacular Architecture Forum conference held in Salt Lake City in June 2017.
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It may seem an odd fit, folklore and architectural survey, but again there is the timing thing—the meeting of a particular need at a particular point in time. SHPO surveys were intended to be comprehensive. That is, they had to include all the buildings in any given area, not just a special few judged to be superior in design and pedigree. Architectural historians had studied this latter group—the elite or high style segment of the landscape—but had largely ignored the more commonplace vernacular buildings that constituted the bulk of what had to be surveyed. To be honest, at the time no one really knew much about vernacular architecture be-
