Creating Keystones: The Building Pennsylvania Oral History Project

Part of the 2025 Fall Speaker Series

Creating Keystones: The Building Pennsylvania Oral History Project

In the 2000s and 2010s, Hyman Myers and Bruce Laverty began to record oral history interviews with senior design professionals who lived or worked in the Greater Philadelphia region. Myers was then nearing retirement from the VITETTA Group and UPenn’s Architecture Department. Laverty was the Gladys Brooks Curator of Architecture at The Athenaeum of Philadelphia. Many of their interview subjects were of international renown and made an indelible mark on the region’s built environment. Others were influential specialists in fields such as lighting and interior design, structural engineering and landscape architecture. Together, the interviews provide remarkable insight on what it has meant to live and work as a building and design professional in twentieth-century Philadelphia. Thanks to a grant from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s Historical & Archival Records Care program that the Athenaeum received in 2025, a team led by Kristina Wilson and Kevin Block has started to process the Keystone oral history collection and prepare for the collection’s development. In this talk, Wilson and Block will describe the archiving process, the relationship between architectural and oral history, and provide a preview of what researchers might learn from the collection in the future.

Kristina Wilson is the Gladys Brooks Curator of Architecture at The Athenaeum of Philadelphia. Kevin Block is historian of the built environment and a historic preservation professional.

Q&A and refreshments to follow. 

$35 for Members: PAGP Member discount will be automatically applied at checkout when logged in. If you are a member of the Athenaeum, please enter the promo code provided by the Athenaeum at checkout.