Every historic building has a story to tell
I’ve been at home since the middle of last week. First with a sick baby, then I fell ill, and my husband followed suit. So I’ve had ample opportunity to consider the walls around me. Not the literal walls, but the walls of the house type known as a bungalow. Built across America with zeal (read more)
Categories: Historic architecture, Kentucky architecture, Vernacular architecture
Tags: Bungalows, Clay Lancaster, porches
I’ve never tried to estimate how many photographs I’ve taken since Gardens to Gables came into existence (springing from my mind like Athena from the head of Zeus!). Digital photography has made photography more accessible and cheaper, but the ability to take so many photos sometimes causes me fits. The fits, though, are not as (read more)
Every profession has its own language and often, its own genre of books. I may be a bit partial, but the books I’ve known and loved dealing with architectural history must be among the best non-fiction tomes ever published. Naming just a small selection of those books is agony (there are so many! I love (read more)
There is a very short and magical period in the Bluegrass where, if you are a gardener, all is right with the world. For me, that time is right now. The aching heat of summer has not yet engulfed us; the frenetic activity associated with the vegetable garden has not yet begun; the nights are (read more)
Long before its association with clothing, chocolates, or the civil disobedience of actor Woody Harrelson, hemp (without the prefix “industrial”) was a mainstay of Kentucky agriculture. One of my ancestors grew hemp on his Montgomery County farm decades before the Civil War, and in 1869 Kentucky produced 7,777 tons of hemp fiber – over half of the country’s (read more)
From my earliest days as a denizen of backseat land, watching the world unfold from the car window, I’ve been a careful observer of place names.* Road signs, heralding a waterway or community, were carefully transcribed by me in my ever-present sketch pad or notebook, to serve as the root of many a daydream when it (read more)
My perception of barns took a sharp detour during the short time I lived north of the Mason-Dixon line in Pennsylvania. There, the complexity, grandeur, and beauty of what is known as the Pennsylvania barn* completely changed my understanding of this most visible of agricultural outbuildings. I felt the same way with my first glimpse of (read more)
The vernacular front gable church with two entry doors has great appeal to a wide audience. I love the simplistic, almost austere beauty of these buildings. As a historic type, they were built in Kentucky through almost every stylistic period and decade, up into the 20th century. The Ghent Baptist Church, constructed in 1843, is (read more)
Historic communities are, by their very existence, full of contrast – even if that diversity goes unseen by the modern viewer. I imagine there are many people who see West Louisville as a single neighborhood, unified only by economic disparity, fear of violence, and boarded-up buildings with openings left expressionless by sheets of plywood. This is (read more)
I entered the world of historic preservation fresh from college, armed with my English and Art History degree, a love of old houses – and not much else. I knew virtually nothing. Worse, I really had no concept of how buildings work. Fortunately, I met Scot Walters before I bumbled too far. Scot, with his architecture school (read more)
Category: Architecture
Tags: #frankfortky, #housedoctor, #scotwalters
Interested in a specific topic? Check out some popular categories below, or enter your search terms in the box.