Ball State Tau Eric James was part of a winning team of students awarded the prestigious Historic American Landscape Survey (HALS) Award this fall.
HALS is a group made up of representatives from the ASLA (American Society of Landscape Architects), the National Park Service, and the Library of Congress. HALS began in 2001 and was made a permanent federal program in 2010. The mission of HALS is to recruit anyone with design skills or historic preservation to find landscapes in America and record them through highly detailed design-style drawings, written histories of why they are significant, photographs, and many other techniques so that if tomorrow the landscape should be ruined, it will be forever preserved through these documents.
Brother Eric was part of a team of students from the Ball State University College of Architecture and Planning (CAP) that completed a series of HALS projects on historic Negro League Baseball Stadiums and their surrounding landscapes. While most of the team worked on sites in and around Bush Stadium in Indianapolis, Eric worked by himself on Hamtramck Stadium in Detroit, Michigan. Eric completed the entire submission packet for this stadium by himself, all hand-drawn and accompanied by a nine page history about the stadium. Among the facts about the stadium, it was originally configured for football; Ty Cobb threw out the first pitch shortly after its dedication on May 11, 1930; and it hosted the Detroit area's first professional night baseball game on June 28, 1930 vs. the Kansas City Monarchs.
The team submitted packets on the stadiums and in October was told they had won second place nationally in the annual HALS competition. The Ball State University CAP Team was the only student team to place in the top three of the competition. They were publicly recognized at the HALS Meeting during the American Society of Landscape Architects Conference held in San Diego. The team’s work has now been filed in the Library of Congress for historic preservation.
Click here for the National Park Service Press Release announcing the award.
Click here for the Ball State University Press Release.