Abstract

Low-altitude, oblique-angle aerial photography offers easily understood documentation of town character and cultural landscape history. Aerial photography shows scale relationships well, and is especially useful for visualizing resources in older towns. Guilford, Connecticut, founded in 1639, offers an example of a town with four historic districts threatened by automobile-scale sprawl. Our website makes broad dissemination of color aerial photographs affordable. It carries extensive text and maps as well to encourage debate on land use among citizens, planners, and elected officials.

Authors

Dolores Hayden is Professor of Architecture, Urbanism, and American Studies at Yale University. She is an urban historian and architect, the author of several award-winning books on the history of American cities, most recently her account of downtown Los Angeles, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (The MIT Press, 1995). She serves on the Boston Post Road Design Study Committee in Guilford, Connecticut. (P.O. Box 208342, New Haven, CT 06520. dolores.hayden@yale.edu)

Alex MacLean is an aerial photographer and aviator whose photographs of American landscapes have been shown in many American museums and galleries. He published Look at the Land: Aerial Reflections on America (Rizzoli, 1993) and, with James Corner, Taking Measures Across the American Landscape (Yale, 1996). (Landslides, 33 Richdale Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02140. maclean@tiac.net)

Acknowlegments

This research project was supported by an initial grant from the Graham Foundation in 1998, and by subsequent financial support from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and from Yale University. Special thanks to Rosalind Greenstein and Armando Carbonell of the Lincoln Institute, Ruth Knack of Planning, Shirley Girioni of Guilford Preservation Association, Gerry Silbert of the Guilford Conservation Commission, Marnie Sandweiss of Amherst College, and Jock Reynolds, Director of the Yale University Art Gallery for their advice and encouragement. Thanks to Peter Marris of Yale University for editorial help. And thanks to architects Fabrizio Gallanti and Stefano Boeri at the Milan Triennale; art historian Bob Bruegmann at the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle, NEH summer institute on Built Environment and Culture; and planner Lawrence Vale and urban historian Sam Bass Warner at MIT. All of them invited preliminary papers touching on some of these issues.

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