A Field Measure Survey of American Architecture, Jeffrey Ladd

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 imperilled.

Inspired 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.

Published by MACK Books
Softcover
368 pages
233 x 170 mm
ISBN 9781913620417