Architecture of Place Class Visit

Last week we did an instruction session, tour of SEAA's current exhibit "The Modernism of Albert C. Ledner", and a tour of our stacks for Professor Laura Blokker's Architecture of Place class. We showed the students examples of what they might use in SEAA by presenting materials documenting the demolished French Opera (1859-1919) in New Orleans. We showed the class an original 1859 watercolor perspective drawing by Marie Adrien Persac for the architect of the building, James Gallier, Jr., an 1876 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map to give them an idea of the opera's neighborhood in it's heyday, drawings dating from the 1920s to document the opera not long after it was destroyed by fire in 1919, and drawings for various proposals to rebuild it in the 1940s through the 1960s. We included photographs and prints from the late-19th to the early-20th centuries, and photos from the fire of 1919.