Indoor Comfort, Thermal Indices, and Energy Assessment of Multi-Family Colonial Revival Style Buildings

Colonial Revival style residences have unique architectural features amongst others. They are common multi-family residences in the United States with no or limited information about their performance. The research purpose is to assess indoor comfort, energy performance, and thermal indices in multi-family Colonial Revival style residences. The research questions include (i) Do Colonial Revival style buildings perform better than other old buildings? (ii) Do the buildings consume additional electricity than typical and other old buildings? The research examined four case studies in Hartford County, Connecticut. The investigation explored comfort surveys, monitoring, collection of actual electricity usage, and assessed thermal indices using mathematical models. The average indoor temperature of 25.4 °C and relative humidity (RH) of 61.3% are reported. About 67% of the residents are thermally comfortable. The research noted significance between thermal sensation and other variables, excluding how occupants feel about the air movement. The average number of hours of temperature exceeds 28.0 °C and 30.0 °C marks for over 11.4% and 2.5% of the time, respectively, except in one of the buildings. The mean indoor temperatures are within the applicable bands of the adaptive comfort models. The averages of actual thermal sensation vote (TSV) ranged from 3.32 to 4.37 on a 7-point sensation scale. The mean neutral temperatures varied from 24.2–25.6 °C. The average monthly electricity bill is within the national average for residences in summer, excluding in August. The mean wet-bulb globe temperature (WBGT) of 21.1–22.3 °C and summer simmer index (SSI) of 30.1–32.4 °C are calculated as feasible bands for thermal indices in the buildings. The basements are more comfortable than other spaces within the case studies. The research outcomes can be used for future developments of Colonial Revival style and other similar buildings. The study recommends interventions such as retrofit to improve the performance of some existing Colonial Revival style buildings, especially the older ones that are less insulated with outdated equipment and appliances.

Courtyard Sisters: Settler Fantasy and Experiment at the International Institute of Los Angeles, 1914–1940

This article examines the history of the International Institute of Los Angeles, one of dozens of immigrant-serving agencies to open nationwide under the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) during the 1910s. Close reading of this branch reveals how related processes of domestication, democratization, and assimilation of immigrant groups buttressed the settler colonial making of the city. Through a study of the organization’s fieldwork, cultural programs, and architectural footprint, the author argues that the Institute preserved the racial fantasies of Anglo Angelenos with its efforts to Americanize women and girls in a Spanish Colonial Revival space. This article reframes the city’s institutional landscape during the interwar period, showing how social reformers helped maintain and police boundaries of belonging in western metropoles.

Housing History

The rise of a culture of consumption in the decades that bracketed the turn of the century created unprecedented opportunity for the dissemination of images, objects, and texts that engendered historical consciousness in the United States. Antiquarian impulses, once the province of social outliers, the wealthy, or the creative, and encoded in the poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) and the narrative paintings of Edward Lamson Henry (1841–1919), became normative behavior in the new middle-class America. Entrepreneurial individuals, such as the minister-turned-entrepreneur Wallace Nutting (1861–1941), employed the new platforms of advertising, publishing, department stores, and mail-order merchandising to create and fulfill middle-class desires for objects and myths that fulfilled social needs in an era of rapid economic and geographic change. Nutting, in commodifying the colonial revival, paved the way for postwar historicism in the built environment. This hybrid aesthetic prized idealized “ancestral” imagery as typified by the work of architect Royal Barry Wills (1895–1962), and it can be found coast to coast in the modern American suburb.

Collecting as Historical Practice and the Conundrum of the Unmoored Object

Collecting drives scholarship. Historians rely upon texts, preserved in libraries, archives, and private hands. Scholars of material culture seek out artifacts, whether held by museums, galleries, historical societies, or individual owners. Historians contemplating material culture evidence are justifiably wary of its frustrating ambiguity; especially recalcitrant are objects unmoored from their points of origin with no textual support. How can one tether these obdurate things to meaningful interpretive frameworks? By the late nineteenth century, Americana collectors were tackling—and meeting—this challenge, laying the foundation for US material culture studies. Their endeavors were significant forays into object-driven histories, exemplifying the constitutive interplay between collecting material culture and interpreting the past. One such collector-historian was George Dudley Seymour, a self-described “born antiquarian.” He sought out and studied early New England architecture and decorative arts, especially when associated with Nathan Hale, an American spy captured and hanged by British forces during the Revolutionary War. In the context of the Colonial Revival, a long-standing manifestation of US romantic nationalism, Seymour resurrected Hale’s faded memory countrywide. Initially lacking documentary sources, he succeeded by employing three material strategies—inscribed artifacts, space and place, and figural representation—illustrating the efficacy of integrating multiple approaches to interpreting history and material culture within a biographical framework.

9. America, Africa, and Australia

‘America, Africa, and Australia’ provides highlights of garden history in North America, Central America, South America, South Africa, and Australia. North America’s earliest traditional gardens were influenced by the settlers from Spain, France, the Netherlands, and England. After independence, garden design was transformed by designers such as Frederick Law Olmsted, the Colonial Revival movement, the Prairie School, and the California Style. The most important gardens in Central America are in Mexico and, in South America, the move away from European styles was led by the Brazilian plantsman and designer Roberto Burle Marx. Australia’s most important and influential garden designers have been William Guilfoyle and Edna Walling.