Architecture and Meat: Building, Working In, and Living With the 18th C Smokehouse, with Michael Olmert, April 23, 7:00 pm

On April 23, the feast of Shakespeare and St. George, Michael Olmert will be speaking at Tudor Place, a 1805-09 house and grounds in Georgetown, D.C.

For a thousand years, the work of a “meat house” changed little. Starting from medieval illustrations and working its way to the pyramidal-roofed smokehouse at Tudor Place, Professor Michael Olmert will discuss the basic design of these structures and the purposes they served. The author of Kitchens, Smokehouses, and Privies: Outbuildings and the Architecture of Daily Life in the Eighteenth-Century Mid-Atlantic, he will place the smokehouse in context in the Tidewater region in the 17th through the very early 19th centuries, examining their standard design elements, and imparting key tricks to identifying these essential early American structures.

The talk celebrates conservation, to be completed in 2014, of the authentic original smokehouse at Tudor Place.