CHAD COLLECTION
Historic buildings and landscapes cannot always be saved, whether lost to demolition by neglect or to sprawl and urban redevelopment. The last resort of the preservationist is to capture buildings and sites in photographs and measured architectural drawings, preserving them at least on paper and film. In the 1980s, CHAD began documenting historic structures destroyed or threatened by development.
Since then, CHAD faculty, staff and students have drawn, photographed and researched more than 4,000 buildings and landscapes, from the industrial complexes of Wilmington to the agricultural buildings and landscapes of southern Delaware and elsewhere in the Mid-Atlantic region.
An estimated three-quarters of these resources are now demolished and lost to neglect, and the CHAD collection stands as the only record of a significant part of the vanished historic architecture landscape of Delaware.
The CHAD Collection includes hundreds of hand-drawn and computer-generated architectural drawings and thousands of large-format black-and-white photographs of historic structures and landscapes. The materials illustrate both the artistry and practicality of the builders, craftsmen and occupants of these sites.
They are also evocative of the region's changing landscapes and lifestyles. The materials are of high quality since they were created according to the standards of the Historic American Buildings Survey and Historic American Engineering Record, recognized as the world standard for documenting historic resources.
In the last few years, CHAD has begun to transform what was an inaccessible repository of documentary materials into a working research collection and archive.
It has done this partly because of a growing demand by preservation professionals to use the collection, as well to make the academic community and public aware of this record of their past and to communicate the quality and extent of what has been lost through exhibits, publications and other means.
The CHAD Collection includes:
- Architectural drawings
- Photographs
- Maps
- Property files
- In-house publications
- Primary and secondary research materials
- Architectural study collection (fragments and building material supplies)
With funding from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), CHAD began digitizing materials from this Collection and making them available to the public through two open-access portals.
Through a JSTOR Forum portal, users can search within the CHAD Collection by fields and keywords for specific properties or sets of properties that fit specific criteria. Images associated with each property record can be accessed and downloaded cost-free for educational and research purposes.
In 2024, CHAD received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to hire a digital archivist and add born-digital materials from more recent field projects to the online archive.
Please note that the CHAD map is currently under construction and not available at this time. We encourage website visitors to continue checking back.
Contact us
The CHAD Collection is available by appointment for students, faculty, staff and the public. To inquire about the collection or get support with reports that do not appear in UDSpace, please contact Catherine Morrissey, Associate Director of CHAD.
