Society of Architectural Historians Receives NEH Grant for SAH Archipedia

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The Society of Architectural Historians has been awarded a third major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to commission new content and site enhancements to SAH Archipedia, a media-rich online encyclopedia of American architecture developed by SAH in collaboration with the University of Virginia Press. The $205,000 outright and matching grant will help support improvements to SAH Archipedia in its two formats: SAH Archipedia Classic Buildings, a comprehensive, open access online educational resource that will contain 100 of the most representative buildings, landscapes and cityscapes in all 50 states, as well as SAH Archipedia, a larger online library subscription resource containing additional essays and building entries.

“We are extremely grateful to NEH for funding a third phase of development for SAH Archipedia. This online resource, which has been under development since 2010, has become a valuable resource for educators, students, historic preservationists and all who want to learn more about the rich and diverse history of American architecture, landscapes and urbanism,” said SAH Executive Director Pauline Saliga, “We are also very grateful to the hundreds of architectural historians, architects, grad students and others who have written articles for SAH Archipedia, making it a large-scale project of lasting value in the tradition of the WPA Writer’s Project of the 1930s.”

Funded by two previous NEH grants and launched in 2012, SAH Archipedia now contains thousands of illustrated and mapped histories of America’s most significant and representative buildings, landscapes and cityscapes. SAH will use the third NEH grant to commission leading historians to create new scholarly, born-digital research on the built environment in the U.S. and to update and reinterpret existing SAH Archipedia content. Other planned site enhancements include developing humanities-focused K-12 teaching materials and public lectures, providing mobile access to high-quality humanities content, and providing open access to documentary and interpretive content on the history of the built environment in the U.S.

For more information on SAH Archipedia, visit sah.org/sah-archipedia. SAH Archipedia Classic Buildings is available to the public at sah-archipedia.org.

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SAH Archipedia is a nationally significant collaborative project, bringing together a learned society (Society of Architectural Historians), a university press (University of Virginia Press) and teams of well-established technologists, and editors and scholars from across the US. From the outset, this research project is designed to facilitate collaboration, sharing, exchange, and interoperability of humanities information and scholarship with the American and international public.Together SAH’s award-winning Buildings of the United States (BUS) series and both versions of SAH Archipedia are the leading long-term, comprehensive research publications to document and interpret the history of the built environment of the entire U.S. on a national scale.

The Society of Architectural Historians is a nonprofit membership organization that promotes the study, interpretation and conservation of architecture, design, landscapes and urbanism worldwide. Founded in 1940, SAH serves a network of local, national and international institutions and individuals who, by profession or interest, focus on the history of the built environment and its role in shaping contemporary life. SAH promotes meaningful public engagement with the history of the built environment through advocacy efforts, print and online publications, and local, national and international programs. Learn more at sah.org.