Seven Ball State University Historic Preservation graduate students completed a team project that was awarded second place in the national 2021 Charles E. Peterson Prize Competition. For this project, the students documented the Canal Pump House at Oldfields—an historic site in Indianapolis.
All of the students working on the Canal Pump House documentation project—Grace Bartko, Caitlin Lehman (’21), Bei Liu (’20), Abby Marshall (’21), Jade Moore, Lawrence Neumann, and Haley Swindle (’21)—were in the Master of Science in Historic Preservation program within Ball State’s R. Wayne Estopinal College of Architecture and Planning (CAP). They worked on this project as part of the “ARCH 606: Documentation Studio” course in Fall 2020, taught by Jonathan Spodek, professor of Architecture.
The Ball State students’ documentation project placed higher in the competition than projects completed by competitors on structures designed by famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright, Professor Spodek said, adding: “This speaks to the quality of the work of our MSHP (Masters of Science in Historic Preservation) students.”
A virtual awards ceremony is scheduled for tonight. The second-place prize is certificates for all participants plus a $3,000 check made out to the school. The prize money will go into the Historic Preservation program’s foundation account, proceeds from which are used to support educational enrichment for Ball State’s Historic Preservation students.
The Charles E. Peterson Prize Competition is sponsored by the National Park Service, the American Institute of Architects, and the Athenaeum of Philadelphia.