An Interview with Richard Longstreth

Historians of the built environment record physical places with an eye toward capturing the experiences of others. Yet they sometimes neglect the responsibility to document their own history. As the Vernacular Architecture Forum approached its four-decade mark, the organization recognized the need to record the accounts of its early members with an oral history project begun in 2018. The project is only the beginning of an evolving process to collect and preserve the memories, printed materials, and other VAF-related documents of the early years of the organization’s history since its founding in 1979–80.

The VAF teamed up with the Cooperstown Graduate Program (CGP), a master’s program in museum studies offered by the State University of New York at Oneonta, to pilot the oral history collection process. The VAF board set aside funds to bring four CGP students to Alexandria, Virginia, to attend the 2018 annual meeting where they would conduct recorded interviews with a number of longtime VAF members. CGP’s history-track students are trained in the oral history process during a required course entitled Research and Fieldwork, which is taught by William Walker. Interested students applied to Cynthia Falk, who coordinated the VAF oral history project, to be part of the collection and transcription process. Upon acceptance, they completed readings to get a better sense of VAF’s history and culture, before reaching out to individuals identified by board members for the first round of interviews.

Georgia LaMair, Karina Kowalski, Mary Kate Kenney, and Lindsey Marshall, the four students selected to be interviewers for the pilot, developed broad, open-ended questions for their subjects. These included prompts concerning VAF’s history—especially events surrounding the organization’s founding—as well as VAF’s influence on the field, changes observed over time, and directions for the future. Each of the seven initial hour-long interviews took place during the annual meeting in Alexandria. After the conference, LaMair, Kowalski, Kenney, and Marshall transcribed the recorded interviews to provide a textual record of the digital audio files. The students undertook this time-consuming task on their own time during the summer following the conference. Transcriptions were then checked by Falk and by the interviewees for clarity and accuracy. The VAF is archiving both the audio files and these raw transcriptions with the other VAF materials deposited at Historic New England. Dissemination through the internet and print sources like Buildings & Landscapes is being undertaken to facilitate better access. The following interview is the first effort in that endeavor. B&L editor Carl Lounsbury compiled the photographs to accompany the text.

Richard Longstreth, the interviewee, is professor of American Studies, emeritus, at George Washington University (GW), where he taught architectural history and directed the Graduate Program in Historic Preservation from 1983 to 2018. Prior to that time he served on the faculty of the College of Architecture and Design at Kansas State University. He received an AB in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania in 1968 and a PhD in architectural history from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1978. While at GW, Longstreth directed sixteen dissertations and forty-six MA theses, and he served as a reader for many more. A number of his former students have gone on to achieve distinction in architectural history and in historic preservation, as well as in the museum field.

Since 1974 Longstreth has authored (in one instance, coauthored) ten books, four of which have won six national awards (including VAF’s Abbott Lowell Cummings Award), and has edited seven others, as well as contributing to nineteen additional volumes. Besides Buildings & Landscapes, his articles have appeared in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Journal of Planning History, Journal of Urban History, City & Society, ARRIS, Winterthur Portfolio, Harvard Architecture Review, Perspecta, APT Bulletin, CRM Journal, and Historic Preservation Forum. While much of his scholarly work has focused on twentieth-century commercial architecture and urbanism, the topics he has investigated encompass a much broader range, including campus design, housing, city planning, and preservation issues. Currently he is coediting, with Neil Levine, a collection of...