Learning Center: Expert in the Built Environment

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The Value of Using Primary Sources
for the
HISTORIAN OF THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT

Richard H. Engeman
Historian and Archivist

The study of the history of the built environment is interdisciplinary, engaging aspects of history, historical geography, and art history. In my own career, I have combined academic education in these three fields with professional training and work as an archivist, specializing in the administration of collections of historical photographs, architectural plans and drawings, historical maps, and other visual resources such as artwork and graphics. Historians of the built environment use these visual research materials in conjunction with traditional written sources and the study of actual buildings and structures.

The built environment is made up of buildings and structures, but the term broadly encompasses towns and highways, dams and power transmission lines: in other words, it includes the landscape as it has been changed and shaped by human activity. With sufficient background knowledge, the historian of the built environment can “read” a building or landscape.  Reading a building or landscape includes recognizing the materials with which it is constructed, understanding its purpose and how it is put together, finding the clues that indicate changes to it over time, and identifying elements of architectural style that suggest the esthetic ideas of particular times and cultures.

Written records, photographs, and other evidence can supplement the information that is most concretely expressed by the structures themselves. That evidence must stand in for the structures if they no longer exist. Studying the built environment requires using a challenging combination of skills that involve geography, history, and art. The reward is a clearer understanding of the connections between life today and the in the past, connections that are made through the threads of the built environment: through materials, purpose, method, and artistic ideas.

• Elementary School Lesson Plan in the Built Environment
• Middle School Lesson Plan in the Built Environment
• High School Lesson Plan in the Built Environment
• Bibliography in the Built Environment
• Glossary of Architectural Terms

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