James Marston Fitch

James Marston Fitch (born May 8, 1909 in Washington, DC ; † April 10, 2000 ) was an architect and is considered the founder of monument preservation in the United States. Jane Jacobs , author of The Life and Death of Great American Cities , said of him: "He was the main character who made the preservation of historic buildings practicable and well known".

During the Depression Era, Fitch served as the director of population statistics for the Tennessee State Planning Board .

In 1933 he published his first article, "The Houses We Live In," which caught the attention of Henry Saylor . Saylor made him an editor for Architectural Record magazine .

In 1942 Fitch was drafted into the army, where he worked in the meteorological service. The connections between architecture and climate that he could observe there led him to publish the book American Building: The Environmental Forces that Shape It after the war .

He founded the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University , which produced many graduates in the conservation field. He later worked at the architecture firm Beyer Blinder Belle as director of the conservation department .

Works

• American Building: The Environmental Forces that Shape It (1947)
• Walter Gropius (1962)
• Four centuries of building in the USA (1968)
• Historic Preservation: Curatorial Management of the Built World (1982)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ James Marston Fitch , US Social Security Death Directory (SSDI), accessed June 16, 2017
2. ↑ ^{a b} Fitch Foundation ( Memento of the original dated December 30, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
3. ^ Architecture, vol. 68, pp. 213-218, October, 1933
4. ^ Remarkable Columbians: James Marston Fitch