(2012) How Do Cities Grow?

2012-11-14T14:00:00 (Creation date: 2012-11-14T14:00:00)

Dr. Kathryn Holliday

How do cities grow? Why do we build them the way we do? Who decides what buildings get built - where they are and what they look like? What does the architecture of our cities tell us about our own cultural histories? As an architecture historian, Kathryn Holliday asks and answers these kinds of questions. She is the author most recently of the book "Ralph Walker: Architect of the Century" (Rizzoli, 2012) and serves as Director of the David Dillon Center for Texas Architecture, an initiative of the School of Architecture to research and promote public dialogue about architecture and urbanism in North Texas. This lecture is part of the GIS Day annual event, so Dr. Holliday will discuss a current project focused on the history of Dallas and Fort Worth as stored in maps and images. For the past three years, Dr. Holliday and the students in her course, "The Life of Cities: Modernism in Context," have taken scans of maps from UT Arlington Library's Special Collections and georeferenced them using ArcGIS software. By overlaying these georeferenced maps atop each other, students and other researchers can piece together a broader architectural history of the region. Once the maps were georeferenced, Dr. Holliday's students compiled metadata and converted the maps into Google Earth format. During fall, 2012, UCLA's Hypercities Project, a leader in digital humanities resources, began to spotlight these DFW maps.

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Communications