SAH Archipedia: Arkansas Content Added

We’re pleased to announce that the content of the recently published Buildings of Arkansas has been added to SAH Archipedia, to mark the book’s launch tonight at the University of Arkansas’s Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design.

The volume’s 478 entries—the result of a lifetime's research and fieldwork by the esteemed historian and preservationist Cyrus A. Sutherland, along with a team of his dedicated colleagues—capture the range and richness of the state's buildings and landscapes, from Fayetteville, Little Rock, and Hot Springs to Jonesboro, El Dorado, Arkadelphia, Texarkana, and scores of places in between. Encompassing the state's major regions—the Ozark Plateau, the Arkansas River Valley, the Ouachita Mountains, the West Gulf Coastal Plain, and the Mississippi Alluvial Plain (commonly known as the Delta), the places canvassed include everything from works by Arkansas natives E. Fay Jones and Edward Durell Stone to Sam Walton's Five-and-Ten and Alice Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art to Bill Clinton's birthplace and presidential library. Profusely illustrated by the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program, along with the volume authors, the assembled entries offer compelling accounts of sites from the well to the lesser known—the magnificent Toltec Mounds near Scott, the New Deal–era Dyess Colony, Tyronza's Southern Tenant Farmers Museum, the Rohwer Relocation Center and McGehee Japanese American Internment Museum, Central High School in Little Rock—and considers modern buildings that herald a renaissance in the state's cultural, economic, and political history.

Cyrus A. Sutherland was Professor Emeritus of Architecture at the University of Arkansas, a leader in the movement to preserve the state's historic buildings, and the coproducer (with H. Gordon Brooks) of the three-part film series Arkansas: Its Architectural Heritage. The volume’s content, edited and updated by his colleagues Gregory Herman (University of Arkansas), Claudia Shannon (Shannon Design Enterprises, Inc.), Jean Sizemore (University of Arkansas at Little Rock), and Jeannie M. Whayne (University of Arkansas), embodies his lifelong knowledge of and devotion to the architectural history of his native state.

Images (L-R): Stoneflower; Arkansas Historic Preservation Progarm, A Division of the Department of Arkansas Heritage,  Rachel Patton, photographer. Mildred B. Cooper Memorial Chapel; courtesy Mildred B. Cooper Memorial Chapel, Joe Wittkop, photographer. Thorncrown Chapel; courtesy Thorncrown Chapel, Whit Slemmons, photographer.