 Hello everyone welcome I can't believe this is our last lecture of the fall series my goodness where has time gone. I want to take this opportunity to thank every single one of you for being supportive this fall we really appreciate it. Without you we wouldn't exist. I also want to thank CCTV. And of course I want to thank our program committee because again they're invaluable for bringing us all these fabulous lectures. So with that in mind is Beth online, Beth would who's our program chair Beth are you here. I don't know where she is. Oh goodness. Well, Britta, maybe you could give us a little of little background for us Britta time and what I think is familiar to you, we're in for a real treat if you haven't seen her before and even so Britta, take it away. And it's wonderful to be back here I love these presentations so much and I always get to talk about things that I'm so passionate about, which is great so as some of you may know. I'm an architectural historian and local historian, I work for a company called php as the director of cultural resources doing historic preservation planning. And I also serve on the Vermont advisory council on historic preservation so very active in the historic preservation world locally and statewide and today I'll be presenting about the Redstone historic district on the University of Vermont campus. Oh there's Beth. Hello, sorry I have trouble signing in. That's okay. I gave a little bit of a background on myself but feel free if you wanted to do an introduction. Okay. And I don't know if Carol mentioned two quick things that we're going to be sending out an evaluation to members soon to Carol mentioned that. This is our last lecture of the fall series and welcome everyone, and probably within the next day or so our members will be receiving by email, a feedback form, and we'd really really appreciate your thoughts if you could return that to us in the next week we really do take your thoughts into consideration and appreciate hearing back from you. Also, our speakers really also welcome your lack your questions during the q&a period, and actually you can enter and type in your questions anytime during the lecture, or during the q&a, but they do really look forward to them so please do submit your questions. Hopefully I'll be quick here and won't repeat too much of what Brita said. And she's spoken to us a number of times and brought us on a number of wonderful armchair tours around the Burlington area and we're, we're in for another one today that will be a real treat I'm sure. Brita earned her bachelor's in the history of art and architecture from Middlebury College, her master's in historic preservation from the University of Vermont, and she has worked in that field for well over a decade. She's documented as she maybe mentioned to you hundreds of historic buildings and districts throughout Vermont, including one that she's going to tell us about today. She works as an architectural historian and preservation planner for a local planning and engineering firm. And she was appointed by the governor to serve as the architectural historian on the Vermont's advice on Vermont's advisory council on historic preservation. So it's a great pleasure to welcome back Brita. Thank you so much, Beth, and just want to make sure you can see my screen now correct my hand. Okay, great. Okay, so today I'm talking about the redstone historic district so this is the redstone portion of the University of Vermont campus. And I'm sure a lot of you are familiar where this is if you're not it's located on the east side of South Prospect Street. South of Main Street so you know about where Cliff Street comes up and enters and has the intersection with South Prospect Street so I'm going to give a little bit of a background on the development of this campus as an estate historically in the 1880s and then talk a little bit about women at UVM as students and sort of talk about the development of this campus and some of the architecture we see. And what I want to say is that this lecture actually comes out of a large project I worked on last year. I did an update to the National Register nomination for the redstone historic district it had been written in 1996 and at the time it was a, you know, it very thoroughly documented all the buildings and structures that were 50 years old since that time to buildings on in this historic district at the redstone campus Coolidge Hall and you know, Blundell House have since turned 50 years old so this update in part was done to be able to incorporate them as contributing resources to this historic district and this project actually came out of some alterations that are in the music building which is a 1974 edition of Southwood Call I'll talk about it a little bit. But this is this project is mitigation for alterations to that building which although it's not yet 50 years old is actually considered architecturally significant and I will talk about that in a little while. And what are we are looking at here is a view looking east across the redstone campus as it looked in 1939. We are missing a couple buildings that were built after this Coolidge Hall at the corner here between Southwick and what is known as Robinson Hall the old carriage barn for the estate and the 1960s Blundell House which is over here today, and you can see the water towers you can see the estate building, the original redstone Hall, and you can also see a complex of barns that once existed to the east of Robinson Hall and this is slade hall right here, gives you a sense of how rural this area of campus was pretty much through the 60s once a lot of development occurred to the east with the construction of the athletic campus and to the south with the construction of several dormitories. Okay, so here we see a view today looking towards the redstone campus from South Prospect Street and one of the striking things that you see first when you're looking this way is this jagged wall now that is an 1888 feature. It's local redstone that some of it came actually from the property right here and then some of it came from a quarry that was down on off of South Willard Street near ledge road where intersect Shelburne Road so it's just a really unique wall with this we call it jagged coping kind of, you know one of the themes for the development of this estate was to keep it sort of rustic and natural and allow it to sort of blend into its surroundings and I'll talk a little bit more about that when we see some close ups of the buildings and how it achieved that. So next slide. Um, so the redstone estate was developed in about 1888 so what we're looking at here is an 1869 map of the area so in the right half of the circle to the east of South Prospect Street which at the time was actually called Tuttle Street, this would be the area where the redstone estate was developed. So Andrew and Margaret Buell in 1888 purchased a hundred and twenty acre parcel from Franklin Hendy and that's whose name you see here associated with a small house small structure for $25,000 that's the equivalent of about $700,000 today. Hendy was a merchant who returned to or who turned to farming in his retirement so he owned a lot of this was mostly agricultural lands. Um, so the property stood opposite Overlake Park so Overlake Park was a really expansive estate owned by a railroad tycoon LeGrand B Cannon he was also a banker capitalist and and you know owned a steamboat companies. The estate of Cannon, which was called Overlake is no longer standing but there are a couple of buildings still at the corner of Cliff Street and South Prospect Street caretakers cottage and a carriage barn that are still there. His estate burned down and was redeveloped as the Overlake Park neighborhood in Burlington in like the 20s and 30s. Um, and here now we are looking at an 1890 map. And at this point the Buell estate which would become the redstone campus was developed so here we see the main house this is the carriage barn and this is called redstone lodge which is a little caretakers cottage but it gives you a sense of, of some of the, the things that that wrapped around the central one is where guests would go and enter the estate we have this one off to the side going into the back which was more of the, the service drive for employees and for deliveries and whatnot. And here is Overlake so you can get a sense of how expensive cannon's property was. So, there is some speculation that Buell decided to build his estate here on ground that was actually higher than Overlake to sort of compete with Cannon and say well you might have a bigger estate mine is higher up and has more sweeping views west across the lake. So, let's talk about the Buells briefly, and we have Andrew Andrew Buell and the left and Margaret Buell his wife on the right. Andrew was born in Whitehall in 1841 and began working in lumber mills there and he climbed the ladder of the industry and eventually just amassed a huge fortune by having involvement with some really prominent American and Canadian lumber companies, some of which he ran. He arrived in Burlington in 1886, although his primary business was in Buffalo, even at that time so it's thought that he might have built Redstone as sort of like a summer home and he was maybe for a little while traveling between Buffalo and Burlington but eventually would come to settle in Burlington and own a lumber company here. And the Buells hired a relatively prominent architect Herbert Burdette to design the mansion house and G. N. Willard of the Willard Torrey which I talked about down the road actually completed all the all the masonry work himself and provided most of the stone. And here we're seeing the main house on the left, the carriage barn here at the bottom right and we see the lodge which was the caretakers cottage in the upper right, and you get a sense of how open so if you see Redstone today. There are a lot of trees, a lot of vegetation, we still have an open lawn, but this is really you know, because it was agricultural land. It was quite open at the time when they developed the estate. And the Burdette's actual architectural style that he was well versed in was the Richard Sony and Romanesque and he actually worked for Henry Hobson Richardson who developed that style in the 1880s. So we can really see Richardson's influence here and that is in the use of natural stone to add a kind of rustic patterning to the facades of buildings the use of towers of steep roof lines with small dormers and these Romanesque style arches. And, you know, these images here really show how the landscape evolved over time over several decades with the help of the caretaker and gardeners. This is really developed into a very verdant property there were extensive gardens stands of woods tree so this is the northern entrance this is the caretakers cottage again and here we see the landscape already transforming into a into a much more vegetated place. So, as I mentioned before, maybe a little bit we have that drive kind of enter the back of the building so this, this estate was designed very intentionally to have the main buildings front and center. There were ancillary buildings no longer standing to the east of the main building, redstone halls such as a laundry building storage facilities sheds barns and another complex of barns behind the carriage barn. In 1917, actually, the estate was put up for sale by the Buell's daughter after her parents had died in 1916 and 1917 and this is what the real estate listing describe the estate as redstone overlooking Lake Champlain there are extensive barns a large orchard and bearing state and two groves of pine trees a large garden plot has been planted for flowers and vegetables. The buildings comprise a house garage and stables with house for chauffeur or coachmen and lodge other houses are a farmer's cottage ice house greenhouse toolhouse and hay barns, everything in first class condition. So Buell's daughter was not actually successful in selling the house in 1917 when she listed it for sale but it would eventually be sold in 1921 to UVM but I will talk more about that in a little bit. I want to just quickly mention the two water towers here. And these are, I think personally pretty fascinating bits of infrastructure a lot of people see them they wonder what they are there. They see this one on the right covered in cell phone antennas which is is much more recent alteration to it in addition to it. This one here on the left the brick round structure was built in 1881 it actually predated the construction and development of the redstone estate. It was intended to improve and expand Burlington's existing water work system, and it was leveraging this hilltop setting and an existing pump house and reservoir that were built in the 1860s and expanded in the 1880s over on Main Street. There was a cross from where moral hall is and and it was connected to water lines there. And there was a steel holding tank inside this brick structure so this is really just a covering for for the actual tank inside water would be released in a consistent and reliable manner to the surrounding neighborhood and the UVM campus so this really enabled the campus as well. It would constantly be refilled by water that was pumped from the reservoir, and you know we have this really beautiful picturesque form. That was really a testament to the popularity of the Queen Anne style at the time and sort of understanding that infrastructure like this was really quite new and modern and they wanted to sort of memorialize it through a building that was that was beautiful and had some aesthetic appeal. The new more modern one we see to the right here was built in 1934 to 35. And it was more efficient than the old one so it was really built to replace this old one the old one would still hold water for emergencies. And it was the primary source of, of, you know, dispersing water to the neighborhoods and it really did allow for the growth of the UVM redstone campus which I'll talk about in a little bit. It was erected by the Pittsburgh Des Moines Steel Company, which was a national supplier of steel particularly used for water towers. This is a map to explain this this is on the left the 1890 map we see the round water tower here. The reservoir is located up here on main street in the little pump house so the water lines this is, we're exactly following this red line but you see how they were connected. In 1932 this map on the right we see the round water tower there, but the metal one has been built here and that's the primary one being used. Here's just an example this is actually Alabama of another Pittsburgh Des Moines steel water tower just to show you that this was a pretty standardized design and pretty iconic design for water towers you'll see them all over the country, looking like this. One fact is that in 1936, right when one of the main buildings on the campus. New buildings was built the Southwood call McKinney and white who are relatively prominent architecture firm from New York City. They were really adept at designing buildings in the colonial revival style. They wanted to cover the steel water tower with this sort of nicer looking beautiful brick tower that had this kind of colonial revival monumental look. This is another proposal and you can actually see the the steel water tower on there. It never got built. But it's fun when I found that. So 1945 view here of the campus so gives you a sense of what it looked like so this is Southwick building which is built in the 30s I'll talk more about that in a little bit built to the east of red or excuse me to the south of redstone. This is plans for Coolidge Hall that was built in the mid 1940s so that is their standing today. So just a little background on the development of the women's campus, as it became used for so in 1921 UVM bought the estate from Buells daughter and son in law for $50,000 with the purpose of creating a women's so the overall layout of the campus and really preserved the landscape and the layout of the redstone estate it wasn't actually changed all that much other than the addition of a few buildings on the outskirts to preserve that open green space. So the purchase of this campus was the same year so kind of interesting 1921 it was the same year that Vermont ratified the 19th amendment that happened on February 8 of 1921, and it was exactly 50 years after women were first admitted to So the establishment of the redstone campus it followed in the tradition of other prominent northeastern universities that were starting their own really segregated female colleges think of Radcliffe College at Harvard that was established in 1894 Barnard College at Columbia in 1889. And to give you a sense of, and I'll explain this a little more in detail what, you know, women's education was sort of thought of at that time that this was that the women's college was established at UVM so the Burlington Free Press article, declare that the new redstone campus would provide unparalleled education for the quote future mothers of Vermont. So, women at UVM. I mentioned that women were first submitted in 1871 and while this marked an important step forward in recognizing the academic capability of women and giving them opportunities that were, you know, previously only afforded to men. They were typically treated as second class students and you know based upon that quote in the Burlington Free Press really education was sort of an interim activity before marriage or preparation for marriage so women initially were housed in some they lived in private houses in 1891 grass mount here which is on Main Street was converted into a women's dormitory. These pictures here are the first two women to graduate to enter and graduate from UVM Ellen Hamilton and Lita Mason and they were also the first women in the United States to be admitted into Phi Beta Kappa honor society and these are their tags that they were awarded through that. So just to give a little bit of context on, you know, women entering sort of the realm of higher education in the 20s as you imagine there was a lot going on at that time and, you know, the establishment and these development and the development of these women's campuses and really, you know, promoting higher education for women came out of the involvement that women had professionally in the workforce and socially during their home front activities in World War One, when you know women fulfilled roles that were typically only associated with men, for example, a woman led the UVM newspaper she was the publisher the interim publisher while many of the students were away either at war or training. Once they got back of course they took back her position even though she was highly capable at it and of course the 19th Amendment being ratified on February 8 1921 in Vermont. The same year that Redstone campus was purchased to very prominent suffragists actually spoke at UVM in the fall of 1921. And it was a citizenship convocation that was put on by the League of Women Voters, and the League of Women Voters was founded in 1921 1920 1921 as a way of continuing to promote the involvement of women in in civics and social life. And it was led by Mod Wood Park. And she was the national, she was the chairman at the time of the National League of Women Voters she was formerly the congressional chairwoman of the National American Women's Suffrage Association and she really was very active in lobbying for the 19th Amendment. And she came to speak at UVM during the citizenship convocation, along with Catherine Luddington, who was also a prominent suffragist from Connecticut who was one of the founders of the League of Women Voters as well. So this is a pretty remarkable event that happened I've been desperately trying to find photographs of it and I have not found them yet. And I'm thinking I will at some point because I'm really curious I believe the event was held at the Royal Tyler Theater, which at the time was the gymnasium. But here is a little clip from the newspaper article talking about it. So the citizenship convocation is to remove limitations on women's contribution to civilization so just a couple really interesting quotes from that, from that event. Catherine Luddington said, quote the purpose of the women's movement. The reason that we have been working all these years is to remove the artificial limitations that we may have full power and equal status to render to civilization our contribution as women. And Mod Wood Park said quote you girls in this university are going to have greater opportunity than the girls of my day and age to write in the book of opportunity which is open to you. What use are you going to make of it. And so really this is, you know, they are celebrating to the establishment of the women's campus and Mod Wood Park was also known for really trying to recruit women to join the League of Women Voters and it sounds like her remarks are in part, you know, doing that and it's just really interesting that they came to speak at UVM right at this time when UVM was making a real concerted effort to increase involvement of women in higher education. So, early on talk a little bit about women's activities and their education at UVM in the early 20th century. And even as women as female enrollment was increasing and there was all this talk about women, you know, entering realms that were previously only occupied by men. They were still limited in what they were studying. UVM developed its own separate course of study for women during this time, which really began decades of physical and academic segregation segregation between male and female students. Women were typically directed to courses of study that involved home making or teaching that would be an interim profession before marriage in 1911 UVM established the Department of Home Economics. After the American Home Economics Association was founded by the American Association of University women in 1908. So Bertha Terrell was the founder of UVM's program and she was really almost solely responsible for developing it. And really the idea is that it was treating home making as a science and training women and appropriate practical approaches to domesticity. Although eventually over the course of the 20th century it really modernized. I see 1915 a group of women learning how to effectively cook something it appears on a little Bunsen type burners. This is the previous location of women's coursework in home economics which was at the corner of I believe Summit Street and Main Street before the Redstone campus was established and actually women were would continue to be educated in this building for quite a long time even after Redstone was established. And in 1921 a teacher training program was founded and in 1927 a four year elementary education program was started. The Redstone campus after it opened up really became the center for women's activities at UVM and it even hosted, you know, not only social activities but athletics. The Women's Athletic Association was founded in 1913. And many of the sports were track hockey dance basketball rifle shooting here we see a 1920s image on the right of women I think it looks like they're standing in front of possibly in front of Robinson Hall which is the old carriage barn with their rifles this is the rifle practice. And women though were engaging in some co educational activities in which it is has been documented that they really excelled in comparison to their male counterparts. Those included debating drama and participation in academic societies. One thing that's important to note is that women were not actually educated at Redstone so it was where they lived it was where they ate it's where they socialized but their courses were still and their classes were on the main campus which is where the men live so they had to make their way from Redstone to the main campus every day. And regardless of the weather, they were probably not wearing exactly very rugged clothing, you know, to get through the snow because they were just expected to dress a certain way. So it was still, it was still difficult for them I mean there were barriers, for sure, and that was physical that they had to travel to where the men were to take their courses. So I'm going to go now through some of the buildings at Redstone and just talk about the buildings themselves and how they how they related to the women's campus. So this is now we see a closer up of Redstone Hall originally developed for the Redstone estate by the Beowles. So this was the primary dormitory for women. In 1922, it underwent quite an extensive renovation. These renovations were completed by a relatively well known Vermont architect Louis Sheldon Newton who actually specialized in rehabilitating older buildings and a more contemporary colonial revival style. And some of the alterations he made were creating these dormer windows up here in the attic story so that there could be room for dormitories up there. And then he enclosed this previous open patio and made it sort of like a sleeping porch. And women in these dormitories would be under the supervision of what they call the house mother so she would have her own apartment downstairs. And she kind of oversaw, you know the activities of women which included enforcing strict curfews and temperance. And here we see Redstone Hall today remarkably unchanged. The only change is that there's a circular addition which you can see the roof of it kind of pointing up here next to the Paul chimney and that accommodates an elevator. And this is Robinson Hall so as I mentioned earlier this is the former carriage barn built by the Beowles as part of the original estate that was here. And again Louis Newton did in a pretty probably more extensive renovation here than he did at Redstone. There used to be a series of small little dormers he made one large dormer here again to convert this upper story into more dormitory space and these were the original big carriage barn openings that became windows. And this kind of Palladian window up here in the attic story was added that's a very typical feature of the colonial revival style. So Robinson Hall housed the cafeteria for women and dormitory rooms. This is Redstone Lodge right here so Redstone Lodge is right at the entrance to the property the North entrance and this was the gardeners or caretakers cottage when this was still owned by the Beowles family. And after UVN purchased the property it became faculty housing. So the first faculty member to be housed here was Hovey Jordan and his wife Ursula he was a professor of histology and embryology. And eventually it became the home of philosophy professor George Dyke housing exactly how to pronounce that and his family from 1933 through the 1980s so they were there for five decades living there. And you know what one thing I've thought about is, you know it's great that they offered faculty housing here but none of the faculty how housed here actually really were connected to women's academic study at all. But that this building has hardly changed at all. It went through a recent renovation but that was really it's very historically intact still and here we see it being a really interesting example of the Romanesque style. I talked about this is called an eyebrow dormer here this sort of rounded dormer. You see that a lot on Henry Hobson Richardson's buildings here we see the tower dormers and you know these these arches here and just this really interesting textured facade which is really the only ornamentation on the building itself. Here we have Slade Hall Slade Hall was built in 1929 and it was the first new building constructed on the on the redstone campus so Slade Hall is to the south is kind of in the southwest portion of campus. And it was designed by McKim Meaden White so I've talked about them before and I've probably talked to mention them in quite a few past lectures because they were such prominent designers and they were based out of New York City. And they were very adept at designing in the colonial revival style they designed their firm designed City Hall in Burlington. They're responsible for Ira Allen Chapel on the main UVM campus and Waterman building. So Slade Hall is a really nice example of a Dutch colonial revival building and you can see the gambrel roof is what's really gives it the Dutch colonial feel. So it was a 25 room dormitory it opened in 1929 and at originally house 26 women in single rooms in addition to containing the matron sweep. And here we have an example of what it looks like very, very close to the original plans Slade Hall just about a year ago went through or maybe it was two years ago went through a really, really lovely renovation windows were restored the base and the machinery was was cleaned and repaired. And then there were some alterations made to the basement right down here to provide some egress and some lighting and converting that into a more usable space. Slade Hall today houses the houses students who have interest and studies in environmental various, you know, environmental sciences. This is Mabel Louise Southwick Memorial Hall. Most people call it just Southwick Hall. It houses the music department today was built in 1936, another McKinney and white firm building. And we could probably see some similarities to read to Slade Hall, just this colonial revival style that was really popular at the time. And it actually received partial funding for its construction through a grant from the Public Works Administration as part of the New Deal program so the New Deal program was offering money for the development of schools both for, you know, elementary secondary education and higher education. The rest of the funding came from the estate of John Leonard Southwick who was a former editor of the Burlington Free Press, and whose deceased daughter Mabel Louise Southwick had graduated from UVM in 1906. When it was built it served as the women's student union building so it provided the first dedicated space for physical education performances and meeting spaces so it had a gymnasium on the ground level and a performance hall up above in the back. And here's what it looks like today. Very intact although that little medallion here is, I'm not sure if that was never constructed or if it has since been removed. I just was looking for photos of women of women gathered at UVM redstone campus didn't find a lot except for this, but it was seasonally appropriate it's a costume party that was at in the Southwick Hall gymnasium undated I'm not sure probably. Maybe it's 1940s. I have to say exactly. So now we have the music building addition to the back of Southwick Hall that's that brutalist sort of modern structure that I referenced earlier built in 1974. And construction began in 1973 and it was designed by a local architecture firm Burlington associates they also designed the Episcopal Church on Cherry Street in Burlington at cherry and Pearl Street, or excuse me cherry and battery street which is also brutalist style building. This is considered one of the best examples of brutalism in the state so love it or hate it I feel like people loved it to dislike brutalism. It's dark, it's contrast to Southwick Memorial Hall is pretty remarkable, but it's interesting to know the background of it, and why it became a style at the time and what why did it even exist and what was its purpose and what was its design So it emerged in 1950s in England. It was very popular, pretty quickly when it arrived in the United States day in the 1960s is when when you really saw it crop up here popular and college campus buildings and part of that is because these buildings were did have a low cost of construction because they are not fancy and they are using pretty plain everyday materials such as steel and concrete. It was almost more of a philosophical approach to architecture rather than an actual style so the idea was creating simple honest functional buildings that accommodated their purpose, the inhabitants and the location to the greatest extent possible they were efficient buildings and the design was really more of a reflection of the functionality of the spaces inside and sort of almost this reverence for the materials being used to not try to hide the fact that this is a concrete building. What's kind of neat and I don't know that everyone sees this is this undulating sort of glass curtain wall. This is the side that faces faces east with these rounded pillars here so that's attached to Southwick and I mentioned early on that an addition was put onto this building recently and that prompted this whole rewrite of the National Register nomination so here you see a picture of the addition here on the right and this was from probably a year ago so now it is actually completed fully and I sort of love this view so maybe you appreciate it a little more I think this courtyard is a lovely space I actually love the way this building interacts with the historic buildings around it it kind of received to the background and that was one of the ideas of brutalism. They're not necessarily going to overpower a historic building unless they're very their sizes out of scale. So a couple more buildings I'm going to talk about before we wrap up Brace Goodhue Coolidge Hall built in 1946 also designed by McKim, Mead and White. But at this point the original founders of the firm are no longer involved these were subsequent principles and architects of the firm. So during World War Two women actually had to vacate the campus and find accommodations elsewhere when hundreds of Air Corps troops arrived in 1943 for academic study and basic military training. This is a bit of backstory for this building so after the war though UVM enrollment spiked like crazy and women returned to Redstone and to accommodate the growing student population for new dormitories were designed by McKim, Mead and White three of them have been demolished for a new construction that's east of the Fleming Museum. This was the largest of the four built. And it's it's in in commemoration of Grace Goodhue Coolidge who was then 1902 UVM graduate and the wife of President Calvin Coolidge the first lady so it could have 158 women and 65 double and 28 single rooms and it's angled and the shape is interesting because it allowed it to sort of you know recede to the background and not overtake space within the green area and sort of frames that southeast corner of the drive that circles the that circles the redstone green so in some ways it really even helps to define the green as being this open space in the center of the campus. And the last building I'm going to talk about today is Blundell House so this was built in 1966 and I think when people think about buildings being listed in the National Register this is maybe not the type of building that initially comes to mind. It is now 50 years old and that, you know, that fact plus the fact that it retains quite a quite a lot of historic integrity means that is absolutely a National Register eligible building also because it was designed by Freeman French Freeman, who were one of the premier architectural firms working in the state on designing modernist buildings with Ruth Freeman, being responsible for many of the designs themselves which was significant because here we had a female architect really asserting herself and and being very influential at a time when there were very few women working in the field of architecture. So, this was built as the new home economics program building. So, at the time, by the mid 20th century. You know the home economics program which I described earlier had really evolved and by the 1950s there were three areas of concentration textiles education and dietary study, which occurred alongside force work and practical experience with home making. And when this building was designed for this program that newspapers called it quote the last word in modern living and a totally electric home. They intended to provide women with practical experience that would help them meet the challenges of home economics as a profession, both in and out of the house so seniors would live there for seven and a half weeks each semester, or other They would care for the house and they would gain experience with taking care of a house and experiencing various materials like fabrics flooring home furnishings design they would have experience cleaning these materials. It was designed to promote efficiencies in home making like you know there'd be space saving labor saving time saving measures like shallow cabinets to eliminate hard to reach storage. By the late 1960s the purpose of the home economics program really veered away from home making and more towards professional training and real rigorous academic study, including areas of concentration that included clothing textiles design, economics and consumer education, early childhood and human development and pre professional social work, and finally food and nutrition by 1980 the school was officially disbanded and some of these areas of study got incorporated into other departments. So this is blended house today, and it looks very much like it did when it was built. Today, currently it's housing the zatic Thompson zoological collections, which were rescued from the fire and Tory Hall in 2017 on they were previously in Tory Hall so this is I think a temporary place for them until Tory Hall gets renovated Tory halls on the main campus. So, interesting to kind of tie up and conclude this presentation is that in the fall of 1969 the first co educational dorm was created on the UVM campus and that was converse hall. In 1971 the buildings on the redstone campus transitioned into co educational dormitories so there's just need to think that's exactly 100 years after women were first admitted to UVM exactly 50 years after redstone campus was developed. So if you think about it and you think wow it took 100 years since the time that women first entered UVM to be able to get this place to this place where they were integrated fully into into the academic and social life of UVM. So that concludes my presentation and I am really happy now to take some questions that I think that's what it's going to, going to bring to me from the chat. Hi, brother and yes, thank you that as always you've helped us to see and think about buildings that we often drive by and new and different ways so thank you for that. Our first question for you. Are there other buildings in the area with similar elements to the original redstone buildings. I would say redstone was pretty unique when it was built there's not a lot of Richard Sonia Romanesque architecture and the fact that Henry bird at actually studied under Richardson was very significant and why we see such a really good example of it. The King's library on the sense on the UVM green was designed by Henry Hobson Richardson so that is in the same style designed by the actual originator of the style himself. Another example I can think of is downtown in Burlington, that would be the BC a art center next to city hall, and that is. Originally the firehouse and that was designed by a local architect who was inspired by this style but if you're thinking about other estate buildings. We don't really have that many more examples of any that are still surviving today, definitely none of which looks like redstone hall and a lot of the old estate buildings in Burlington have been lost. Okay. As redstone has evolved in modern times, are there any elements in the new buildings that carry over from the original building that redstone. There are and the interiors of many of them are quite intact if you walk into Southwick through the front entrance there it's pretty stunning you have these beautiful tiled floor and these two giant marble staircases curved staircases that go up on either side and they come up to the performance space upstairs which is still technically a performance space today I think it's mostly used as a practice room but it is really beautiful the layout of Southwick has not changed at all you still have the large room downstairs that was the gymnasium. The redstone hall is quite intact on the interior as well so is Blundell house has hardly changed. I'm not sure I imagine that Slade and Coolidge have their original dormitory configurations I'm not sure. I think Robinson hall was altered on the interior to create offices. But yeah, that's, you know, not only do these buildings look a lot like they did on the outside but I think the at least the interior configuration of spaces is quite intact with most of them. And how about them, the modern buildings that are further down on redstone campus are there any elements that they make any attempt to tie those in with any elements that reflect the original buildings. Oh, so like Blundell house or Coolidge hall. No, like Patterson. Oh, those modern very well modern dorms from what the 60s. Yeah, okay. I'm not sure that there was a lot of it that that was a driving force behind their design. I think they were driven by efficiency this era of the 60s the baby boomers are entering college there is just a building boom and so much so much new building that these were designed to be very efficient buildings first and foremost. There was less consideration of course they they do exhibit sort of modernist aesthetic which was popular at their time. But I wouldn't say that they were necessarily designed to, to really interact or reflect what was happening on the redstone campus. Okay, did the architect that designed the Emma Willard school and Troy New York also design any buildings at UVM. I don't remember who that architect was. If I knew the name of the Emma Willard school architect I could tell you. Well we'll see if it maybe appears in the chat as we go along and yeah if something back to that was, I could tell you. Okay, I know that before I just can't remember who it was. Okay, when were the two chapels added to the back of redstone campus. Oh, those. I believe the first one was late 60s maybe but heavily renovated and I did know this and I can't remember the exact dates they were never really considered part of the redstone campus they were sort of a their own separate area and they were not included in the original National Register nomination. I evaluated whether they should be included in this updated nomination talked about it with Devin Coleman the state architectural historian and we decided not to expand the boundary to include them because they're sort of context for where they came to be and where they were located but it's not really connected to the development and the continued development of the women's college at at the redstone campus so I don't have the exact dates offhand but they were in the second half of the 20th century. Okay. Let's explain a bit about the process that you go through for documenting historic buildings or districts. Yeah, that's a great question so I'm the first preliminary documentation we do is we fill out what's called a Vermont architectural resource inventory form and this form. And for each building. It records baseline information about the building, the materials use when it was constructed who the architect was if we know it the address the owner. What sort of features it has someone like a checklist and then there are several sections one is a full architectural description of the building. There's a section called the statement of significance and in that we create a historic context or architectural context for understanding the building and how it might have architectural or historic significance we also talk a little bit about the history of the building itself in these forms, and we evaluate how much historic integrity it has and that really means physically. How intact is it since from when it was first built, and then that information gets folded into the national register nomination which is structured a little differently but a lot of the important part of the national register nomination is for making the case why this district is significant and it could be there could be many themes that relate to its significance in this case we have social history with with the women's college. We have architecture of course we have landscape architecture actually as an important theme because of the green and the end of and how well preserved the landscape is so. And community planning, or excuse me, engineering we use as a theme because of the water towers and how innovative their engineering was so this all gets kind of compiled into a national register nomination. That's in a nutshell, but we do. That's very helpful. Thank you. And we do have the name of the architect. Oh yeah, Willard School in Toronto York, Fred and Cummings. And I'm aware of any buildings on the UVM campus that are designed by Fred and Cummings and I know I've heard of him before I don't remember where he's from but I've studied now all of redstone campus and the main campus at UVM surrounding University green because of I did a presentation on that before and did a national register nomination there too so that encompasses most buildings on the campus and none of them were designed by Fred Cummings. And one will probably be our last question because we're approaching three o'clock. We've learned today that the dorms Hamilton and Mason were likely named for the first women graduates. You know, if the, if UVM has any policy or procedure it goes through in terms of naming buildings, I know some are named for donors, but is there any effort made to sort of balance male female names or any process they have for choosing names for new buildings. That's a really good question and I don't know the answer to that. I do know that many buildings are named for former presidents of the college, some of which have been controversial recently because of involvement in, and, for example, eugenics movement. The library, the Bailey Hall Library. And so, I don't know that there is a strict policy for naming the buildings but typically it's either to commemorate someone after a donor, you know, in the name of, or commemorate the name of someone per a donor's request. That's most of the buildings I can think of. Well, thank you, this has been really enlightening as always, and I think you're here with the last word. Yes, Britta thank you what fun, we always enjoy having you. I do want to thank everyone again for the fall semester, I want you to look for those feedback forms which you should be getting hopefully this weekend or the beginning of the week over your email. And wish you happy holidays we're looking forward to seeing you in the spring. Our program committee is working diligently to bring terrific programs starting in early February, hopefully. So, thank you everyone have a wonderful winter.