From Native American sites in New Mexico and Arizona to the ancient earthworks of the Mississippi Valley to the most fashionable contemporary buildings of Chicago and New York, American architecture is incredibly varied. In this revolutionary interpretation, Upton examines American architecture in relation to five themes: community, nature, technology, money, and art. 109 illustrations. 40 linecuts. Map.
Classic study by noted authority traces Spanish architectural influence in Florida, the Gulf Coast, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. 195 photographs and 50 measured drawings.
The classical revival style of architecture made famous by the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago left its mark on one of the most sustained classical building movements in American architectural history: the Christian Science church building movement. By 1920 every major American city and many smaller towns contained an example of this architecture, financed by the followers of Mary Baker Eddy, the church's founder. These buildings represented a new, burgeoning American institution that appealed to business people and to young men and women working to succeed. Characterized by middle-class congregations that in the early part of the century were over 75 percent women, Christian Science suggested radical civic reform solutions based on an idealistic and pragmatic individualism. It attracted criticism from traditional churches and from the medical establishment due to its rapid growth and to its reinstatement of primitive Christianity's lost elements of physical healing and moral regeneration. Prayers in Stone spins out the close connections between Christian Science church architecture and its social context. This architecture served as a focal point for debates over the possibilities for a new twentieth-century urban architecture that proponents believed would positively shape the behavior of citizens. Thus these buildings played a critical role in discussions concerning religious and secular architecture as major elements of religious and social reform. Drawing on a wide range of documentary evidence, including material from the archives of the Mother Church in Boston, Paul Ivey uses Christian Science architecture to explore the social implications of architecturalstyles and new building technologies, to illuminate class-based notions of civic reform and beautification, and to investigate the use of architecture to bring about religious and social change. In addition, the book explores complex gender issues, including early attempts to define a professional space for women as Christian Science practitioners. Lavishly illustrated, Prayers in Stone focuses on four major city arenas of Christian Science building -- Boston, Chicago, New York, and the San Francisco Bay area -- to demonstrate the vital intersection of architecture and religion at the so-called margins of American society.
Houses of God is the first broad survey of American religious architecture, a cultural cross-country expedition that will benefit travelers as much as scholars. Beautifully illustrated with over 100 photographs — some by well-known photographers such as Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange — this handsome book provides a highly accessible look at how Americans shape their places of worship into multifaceted reflections of their culture, beliefs, and times.
This study traces the development of American architecture from the age of Jefferson to the antebellum era, providing a survey of this important period. W. Barksdale Maynard overturns the long-accepted notions that the chief theme of early 19th-century American architecture was a patriotic desire to escape from European influence and that competing styles chiefly reflected the American struggle for cultural uniqueness. Instead, deep and consistent aesthetic ties, especially with England, shaped American architecture and house designs. Maynard shows that the Greek Revival in particular was an international phenomenon, with American achievements inspired by British example and with taste taking precedence over patriotism.
Architecture is a challenging profession. The education is rigorous and the licensing process lengthy; the industry is volatile and compensation lags behind other professions. All architects make a huge investment to be able to practice, but additional obstacles are placed in the way of women and people of color. Structural Inequality relates this disparity through the stories of twenty black architects from around the United States and examines the sociological context of architectural practice. Through these experiences, research, and observation, Victoria Kaplan explores the role systemic racism plays in an occupation commonly referred to as the 'white gentlemen's profession.' Given the shifting demographics of the United States, Kaplan demonstrates that it is incumbent on the profession to act now to create a multicultural field of practitioners who mirror the changing client base. Structural Inequality provides the context to inform and facilitate the necessary conversation on increasing diversity in architecture.
One of the country's largest and most important postwar architectural projects, the United States Air Force Academy opened in 1958. With its spectacular natural setting and stunning Modernist design, the Academy was quickly hailed as a national landmark and attracts over a million visitors each year. The contributors to this volume (Jory Johnson, Robert Nauman, Sheri Olson, James Russell, and Kristen Schaffer) and editor Robert Bruegmann chronicle the complex history of the planning, design, and construction of the Air Force Academy. As the most conspicuous commission of the American military at the height of the Cold War, the design of the Academy generated intense popular interest and was a lightning rod for conflicting values in postwar society. The design, by architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, has been hailed as the final triumph of the International Style and as a monument to military bureaucracy.
Rhode Island is the smallest state in the union: slightly more than 1,200 square miles, 14 percent of which is taken up by the waters of Narragansett Bay. Yet this tiny enclave contains one of the richest concentrations of important historical architecture to be found anywhere in the United States. Buildings of Rhode Island, the ninth volume in the Society of Architectural Historians' Buildings of the United States series, is a guide to this heritage. Covering the state's thirty-nine cities and towns in some 900 building entries accompanied by approximately 330 illustrations and 55 maps, it combines the comprehensive approach that is a hallmark of the series with a special perspective on Rhode Island's built environment. It is one of the last works of esteemed historian of American architecture William H. Jordy, edited and updated by two of his collaborators and contributors for the volume, Ronald J. Onorato and William McKenzie Woodward. lThe volume covers not only Rhode Island's most important architecture, but also a substantial selection of lesser structures chosen for their distinction or uniqueness. It traces the legacy of nineteenth-century industrialists from their Providence mansions to the cultural and educational institutions they financed to the mills that generated their fortunes to the communities that they built (and in some cases designed) for their workers. Extensive entries on Newport's civic buildings and palatial "cottages" follow finely tuned comparisons among examples of modest vernacular building types found in villages and rural areas throughout Rhode Island. The book also tours the lighthouses, coastal fortifications, and summer enclaves of the Ocean State. The individual entries of Buildings of Rhode Island accumulate as a compelling narrative rooted in William Jordy's years of intimate association with the state and its architecture. Rich in substance, luminous and lucid in insights, his observations also have a lively immediacy that gives a sense of direct encounter with the buildings. We experience their qualities as though standing before the building, then moving around it and sometimes through it. In such a compact territory, fascinating interrelationships among building histories, including links among the architects and clients responsible for the state's building heritage, are especially evident. THE BUILDINGS OF THE UNITED STATES SERIES Sponsored by the Society of Architectural Historians, Buildings of the United States is a series that the New York Times called "one of the most ambitious in publishing history." This is the ninth volume to be published; the full series will include fifty-eight volumes, organized on a state-by-state basis, that together will serve as a valuable resource for scholarship in American architectural history, teaching, preservation, and urban planning and as an indispensable guidebook for general readers interested in their architectural surroundings.
Bennington County -- Rutland County -- Addison County -- Chittenden County -- Grand Isle County -- Franklin County -- Lamoille County -- Orleans County -- Essex County -- Caledonia County -- Washington County -- Orange County -- Windsor County -- Windham County.
