ABSTRACT

In 2013, the city of Savannah and the Savannah College of Art and Design's Architectural History Department played the gracious host to the Eighth Savannah Symposium where more than sixty scholars from a dozen countries presented their research on the broad themes of Modernity, Time, and Space. Recent efforts to create the image of a historic tourist destination have all but ignored Savannah's history as primarily an economic and industrial cog in the global economy from its founding in 1733. Savannah boasted vast iron and brick works, producing the materials for architecture as well as one of the largest railroad and shipping hubs in the Americas by the late nineteenth century. Indeed the formal description disguises a history of absence and erasure. For over two centuries, mostly slaves inhabited this property on the Isle of hope. Architecture is a mirror "held up to somehow reflect or represent world but instead enters directly into its constitution", yet it is also more.