Drawing from the nearly half a million photographs and documents comprising the Historic American Buildings Survey held in the US Library of Congress, this book constructs a fictional ?one-way road trip? across the United States, weaving north and south across the Mason-Dixon line while tacking west. In A Field Measure Survey of American Architecture, Jeffrey Ladd uses the HABS archive as a surrogate in order to manifest a portrait of his former country at a moment when its democracy seems imperiled.00Inspired equally by the social documentary work of Walker Evans and the architectural interventions of Gordon Matta-Clark and others, Ladd embraces the muteness of photographs to create an ambiguous space where the sculptural, political, forensic, and fictional coalesce within a landscape of both beauty and fragility. What initially appears to be a single voice is revealed to belong to dozens of makers; what seems a description of the distant past is revealed to be closer to the present than expected. A Field Measure Survey sheds light not only on this remarkable archive but on the proliferate meanings that can be shaped from its images.

This new edition of the definitive guide to recording America's built environment provides a detailed reference to the re-cording methods and techniques that are fundamental tools for examining any existing structure. Edited by the Deputy Chief of the Historic American Building Survey/Historic American Engineering Record, this revised edition includes in-formation on recent technological advances such as laser scanning, new case studies, and expanded material on the docu-mentation of historic landscapes.

"The introduction, in narrative style, summarizes the history of government and economy, cultural life, education, parks, construction of the national capital, the war of 1812 and the growth of the city, the Great Depression, the war years, the civil rights movement, and urban problems. A chronology and substantial bibliography round out this work."--Jacket.