Historic Muncie Students Shoot Architectural Drawings for Immersive Learning Project

Last week the Drawings + Documents Archive welcomed back film and historic preservation students in Prof. Chris Flook's Historic Muncie: Preserving Middletown's Neighborhoods Immersive Learning class. Offered for the first time last year, students created a website to chronicle their discoveries as well as a documentary film Stories and Legends: Historic Preservation in Muncie, Indiana that was just shown at this year's Heartland Film festival in Indianapolis.

The research and film project has been garnering much praise for the students' work and it has just been announced that the group will be awarded the Governor's Award for the Preservation of Historic Places, presented by the Division of Historic Preservation and Archaeology, Indiana Division of Natural Resources. We're thrilled to see the students and faculty rewarded for their hard work and proud to be an on-campus contributer to the project.

This year's class focused their research on Beech Grove Cemetery and the Old West End neighborhood of Muncie. They spent the earlier part of the semester researching our collections of original drawings and Historic American Building Survey (HABS) drawings, and returned Friday to film the drawings and drawing tools for use in their upcoming documentary.

Both the drawings and the tools you see in the photograph, above, are from our extensive Kibele & Garrard Collection. Prominent gas-boom era architects Cuno Kibele (1866-1927) and Carl W. Garrard (1889-1981) established the firm in downtown Muncie and built many of the town's extraordinary structures, including Ball Gymnasium, Masonic Temple (now Cornerstone Center for the Arts), and Ball Memorial Hospital (now IU Hospital). The collection is rather unusual for its large amount of historic drawing implements, such as pencils, watercolor sets, technical tools, papers, eraser shields, and measuring tools dating from the early 1900s.

Image: Historic Muncie students filming in the Archives, October 26, 2012, photo by Carol Street.

Louis Sullivan

The film showing of Louis Sullivan: The Struggle for American Architecture last night at the College of Architecture and Planning was an overwhelming success for students and members of the community who came out to see it and meet the filmmaker, Mark Richard Smith. Many thanks to Mark and our sponsors, the Friends of the Alexander M. Bracken Library and the College of Architecture and Planning, for a fascinating and educational evening. It was particularly gratifying to see the exploration of Sullivan's techniques, theory and practice using his original drawings.

It was also thrilling to see the soaring panoramas of Sullivan's detailed facades and then be able to look closely at the Chicago Stock Exchange cornice on display in Architecture Professor Michele Chiuini's exhibit DiCSX, the Digital Chicago Stock Exchange.

No one should underestimate the role food plays in any event on campus, and our Sullivan-inspired terracotta-esque cupcakes were quite a hit.

Photos by Amy Trendler and Carol Street