During the summer of 1940, a group of architects, archaeologists, architectural historians, and graduate students (among them G. Holmes Perkins, Kenneth Conant, George M. A. Hanfman and Turpin C. Bannister) gathered regularly at the Harvard Faculty Club for dinners, lectures, and conversation and to plan "inspection trips" to New England architecture. On 31 July that year, twenty-five of them, after a particularly spirited meeting (the minutes note hecklers in the audience urging Professor Herbert Bloch, lecturing on Roman bricks, to demonstrate his "famous tasting method for dating" bricks—which he declined) founded the American Society of Architectural Historians. (The word "American" was dropped in 1947 when the Society was officially incorporated.) Their goal was "to foster the understanding and appreciation of architectural history among both professional scholars and laymen" and the publication of an "unpretentious journal."1 Perhaps they imagined something like the eighteenth-century Society of Dilettanti—young British enthusiasts who shared...
University of California Press