The Library of Congress in conjunction with the National Park Service has announced the 2017 recipient of Leicester B. Holland Prize, honoring an outstanding historic building, structure or landscape drawing.
A drawing by Jean-Guy Tanner Dubé from Oxnard, Calif., of the historic 19th-century Wallace Libbey Hardison House Barn in Santa Paula, Calif., is the 2017 Holland Prize winner. Dubé, who received a honorable mention in 2014, will receive a $1,000 cash prize and a certificate of recognition. The barn is part of the Hardison House estate, which was built on 19 acres in 1884 by Wallace Libbey Hardison, a founder of Union Oil Co., and Limoneira, an agribusiness company.
The Holland Prize recognizes the best single-sheet, measured drawing of a historic building, structure or landscape prepared to the standards of the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) or the Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS). It is an annual competition administered by the Heritage Documentation Programs of the National Park Service. The competition’s jury recommends winners to a program, the Center for Architecture, Design and Engineering, in the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, which supports the prize through the Paul Rudolph Trust.
This year’s honorable mention was a drawing of The Jose Celso Barbosa House in Bayamón municipality, Puerto Rico, by a team of students from Universidad Politécnica de Puerto Rico. Student team members included Lysanne Guerrios, Laurie Modesto, Armando Perez, Natalie Medina, Gabriel Khoury, Jean G. Cortez, Ginelis Vergara, Enrique Soto, Kevin Vega, Karla Rodriguez, Miguel Grau and Felix Osorio. Their faculty sponsors are professors Claudia Rosa Lopez and Jose Lorenzo Torres.
The house is the birthplace of Dr. José Celso Barbosa, known within Puerto Rico as the father of the statehood for Puerto Rico movement, and the first Puerto Rican to earn a medical degree in the U.S. The house was added to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places in 1984.
Honorable-mention recipients each receive a merit award of $500 and certificates of recognition. For information on how to participate in the Holland Prize competition, visit the National Park Service official contest website.
The Holland Prize is intended to increase awareness, knowledge and appreciation of historic sites, structures and landscapes throughout the U.S., and to encourage the submission of drawings by professionals and students. All the drawings accepted for the competition will be added to the permanent HABS, HAER and HALS Collection in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. Visit this site for images of Holland Prize drawings.
The prize honors Leicester B. Holland (1882-1952), who was a fellow of the American Institute of Architects (FAIA), chairman of the American Institute of Architects’ Committee on Historic Buildings, head of the Fine Arts Division of the Library of Congress and first curator of the HABS collection, a co-founder of the HABS program in the 1930s, and the first chair of the HABS Advisory Board.