Consultant Team Selected for First Phase of SurveyLA

The Office of Historic Resources and the Getty Conservation Institute have selected a team of historic preservation consultants and historians, led by the Los Angeles office of the firm Jones and Stokes, to spearhead the development of the SurveyLA Citywide Historic Context Statement and Field Guide to Survey Evaluation.

The Historic Context Statement and Field Guide

The Historic Context Statement and Field Guide will be what make it possible to conduct a survey in a city with the size and complexity of Los Angeles. State and Federal guidelines on historic resource surveys recommend preparation of context statements to structure citywide surveys. A survey of the entire City of Los Angeles cannot merely proceed neighborhood by neighborhood and look at each property in a vacuum; the use of a context statement enables a more methodical, thematic approach that will streamline the survey process.

These products will provide survey teams with a consistent framework within which to identify, evaluate and document historic resources during the survey’s fieldwork phase. The Historic Context Statement will include a narrative that distills the entire historic evolution and architectural development of Los Angeles into specific themes and historic contexts.

The consultant team will develop contexts and themes representing "property types" found in Los Angeles’ residential, commercial, industrial, and institutional development. For example, a Historic Context Statement section on residential architecture will include analyses of Craftsman, Period Revival, Modern, and California Ranch style residences.

Each property type will then include a summary of character-defining features and specific "eligibility standards" – those qualities that would or would not make a particular example of that property type eligible to meet local, State, and Federal criteria for historic designation.

The Field Guide, which will be both a written manual and a computerized database, will translate the Historic Context Statement information into usable guidance for field survey professionals. For example, when survey teams are in the field evaluating a 1920s bungalow court, they will have in front of them a computer field interface containing detailed information on contexts and themes relating to bungalow courts throughout the city. This will assist them in determining whether the particular example meets specific eligibility standards. The Field Guide will be critical to ensuring that large survey teams apply consistent, objective evaluation criteria across the entire city.

The Team

Following a nationwide search, the OHR and GCI selected a team led by the firm of Jones and Stokes, under the direction of Richard Starzak, who offers 27 years of experience in conducting Los Angeles historic resources surveys. The written narrative portion of the Historic Context Statement will be overseen by Christy McAvoy of Historic Resources Group, who brings three decades of experience in the field.

The project team from Jones and Stokes and Historic Resources Group 

The Jones and Stokes team also includes a remarkable collection of more than two dozen professional and academic experts on architectural history and on the study of Los Angeles, including Robert Winter (a leading expert on Craftsman architecture and co-author of Los Angeles: An Architectural Guide), longtime UCLA Architectural History professor Thomas Hines, USC historians George Sanchez and Greg Hise, Kevin Roderick (author of books on the San Fernando Valley and Wilshire Boulevard, and editor of the LA Observed web site), author and architectural critic Alan Hess, Richard Longstreth (professor of American Civilization at George Washington University and a noted expert on the commercial development of Los Angeles), and architecture and urban design critic Sam Hall Kaplan.

The Historic Context Statement and Field Guide will be proceeding on an aggressive schedule, with early drafts available to the OHR during 2007 in order to shape pilot survey work that will test the methodology of the future field survey. The final Context Statement and Field Guide will be completed by the end of 2008.