ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH), the oldest and most widely read journal of architectural history in the United States. As with all the journals in this study, a complex history is compressed into a comparatively small space. This is particularly the case with the JSAH, which has been in existence for at least three decades longer than any of the other journals examined here. The JSAH is also (in the technical terms of library scientists) a “field journal” that strives for comprehensive representation of the activities of an entire discipline, rather than to represent the specialized research of one part of a field. It is therefore quite different from the other journals in this study because of its length and breadth of publication. But it is also the only journal that is administered by a nationally based learned society, with its own headquarters and staff. The JSAH is published by the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), an organization founded in 1940 to advance the cause of architectural history in the United States. Beginning as a small, regionally based organization, the Society has evolved into a well-established institution with a staff of seven, whose national headquarters are located in a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in Chicago’s elite “Gold Coast” district.1 In addition to publishing the JSAH, the Society organizes study tours, holds an annual national conference, and adjudicates awards for books on architectural history, among other activities. Its base in a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright is, as I will suggest below, emblematic of the leading role both the Society and journal have played in identifying, promoting and preserving significant works of American modern architecture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
