Drawings of what may be the oldest buildings near Dallas, Texas created by a team of students and faculty from Texas A&M University’s Center for Heritage Conservation won honorable mention in the 2008 Charles E. Peterson Prize competition.
The Texas A&M team, seven from architecture and two from anthropology, won the award for their 2007 documentation of the Sharrock-Niblo farm 15 miles southwest of downtown Dallas. Built in the 1850s, the farmstead includes a barn with two stalls for cattle or feed and a one-room log house with a hand-dug well and a root cellar.
The prize honors the best-measured drawings prepared to Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) standards. HABS, which began in 1933, as one of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal initiatives, was devised by a young National Park Service employee, Charles E. Peterson, as a way to employ one thousand architects who had lost their jobs as a result of the Great Depression. They were charged with documenting what Peterson called, “America’s antique buildings.” Today, HABS is the only Works Progress Administration program still in operation.
The Peterson Prize was established to honor the HABS founder and to increase awareness and knowledge of historic American buildings while adding to the permanent HABS collection of measured drawing in the Library of Congress.
The Peterson jury described this year’s contest as “the most competitive in recent memory,” said David Woodcock, professor of architecture at Texas A&M, who served as principal investigator on the project. Woodcock is a fellow in the American Institute of Architects, the Society of Antiquaries of London and the Association for Preservation Technology International.
The recognition is part of a longstanding tradition of Aggie success in the contest, as Texas A&M teams finished first in 1997, 1991 and 1990, and finished among the finalists in 2005, 2004, 1999, 1996, 1994, and 1984.
Each of the winning teams will receive partial support to travel to Washington, D.C. Nov. 14 for an awards presentation at the Department of the Interior Museum, part of a one-day symposium at the Library of Congress celebrating the 75th anniversary of HABS.
Woodcock will be making a presentation at the symposium and, as chairman of the AIA’s HABS Coordinating Committee, will serve as master of ceremonies at the awards event.
The Sharrock-Niblo farmstead drawings also netted Texas A&M’s team the Kenneth Anderson Prize, established to honor the late chief of HABS, awarded annually to the best submission from a Texas school. The Aggie team will share the prize with a team from Texas Tech University, which documented the Channing Headquarters at the XIT Ranch.
The Sharrock-Niblo project, a contract with Quimby McCoy Preservation Architecture, LLP of Dallas, was funded in the amount of $28,667 through the Center for Heritage Conservation’s Research Foundation.
The Charles E. Peterson Prize competition is sponsored by HABS, the Athenaeum of Philadelphia and the American Institute of Architects.
