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In “Something prety out of very little”: Graniteville Mill Village, 1848, Lisa Goff describes how Charleston entrepreneur William Gregg built Graniteville, South Carolina, to prove the viability of southern manufacturing, which he believed could help avert war between South and North, and to quell planters’ fears that industry would mar the beauty of the South. The village's whitewashed Carpenter Gothic cottages, with matching hotel, school, and church designed by Richard Upjohn, were intended to instill virtues of hard work, clean living, and respect for authority in a white workforce drawn from surrounding farms. Gregg exercised a patriarch's control over his industrial utopia, but the nicknames workers gave the place, and what they told visiting missionaries, show that they experienced Gregg's Gothic hamlet on their own terms. An avid gardener and horticulturist active in the Episcopal Church, Gregg would have been aware of the claims to moral superiority associated with the Gothic Revival style. Goff's analysis of letters, published articles, corporate reports, and advertisements in local newspapers reveals that Gregg's strategies of social contol—adapted from his study of Robert Owen and David Dale—had sinister underpinnings: programmed for hard work at low wages by the “ethical” architecture and orderly “natural” landscape, a white, largely female workforce would insulate the Graniteville Mill from the effects of abolition, should it come.

Martin Bressani. Architecture and the Historical Imagination: Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, 1814–1879 Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2014, 624 pp., 86 color and 64 b/w illus. $114.95, ISBN 9780754633402 When the French architect, theorist, and ardent medievalist Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc taught at the Parisian Ecole des Beaux-Arts, he was met by the sneers of students, a reception that ultimately led him to resign after his seventh lecture on 18 March 1864. Scarcely four months earlier, he had been appointed to the newly minted chair of art history and aesthetics at France's stronghold of academic tradition. He had already published most of the volumes of his influential Dictionnaire raisonne de l'architecture francaise du XIe au XVIe siecle ( Dictionary of French Architecture from the Eleventh to the Sixteen Century ) and Entretiens sur l'architecture ( Lectures on Architecture ).1 He was also overseeing the restoration of a number of significant medieval monuments under the auspices of the French government's Commission des Monuments Historiques. At the height of his career, he had developed the modern conception of restoration and helped establish Gothic architecture as France's national style. But his hostile reception at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts was scarcely surprising. He was unconventionally trained, having been mentored from a young age by his uncle, the art critic Etienne Delecluze, and had forgone formal architectural instruction. His short-lived appointment at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts was part of sweeping reforms to the school that the Second Empire government supported by imperial decree in an attempt to dislodge the institution's notorious insularity. To students and academicians, Viollet-le-Duc, whose medievalist focus challenged academic doctrine, may have appeared to be a pawn of the state. Nevertheless, this affair has attained a rather mythical status. John Summerson, for example, hailed Viollet-le-Duc's lectures as nothing less than an important touchstone in the development of modernist architecture.2 Summerson conceived of Viollet-le-Duc as a structural rationalist concerned above all else with the expressive logic of building materials and methods of construction, …

Chanchal B. Dadlani From Stone to Paper: Architecture as History in the Late Mughal Empire New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2018, 232 pp., 97 color and 22 b/w illus. $65 (cloth), ISBN 9780300233179 Chanchal B. Dadlani has produced the first full-length book on late Mughal architecture, a topic often dismissed in older scholarship and in popular literature as essentially unworthy of study. Her richly illustrated volume From Stone to Paper , full of reproductions in superb color, provides deep insights into this period, making us rethink our understandings of the later Mughals and of how Mughal architecture came to be defined. As Dadlani says in her conclusion, “This book has centered on the fundamental question of how the concept of Mughal architecture emerged over the course of the long eighteenth century” (175). An evaluation of its contents provides a response to that question. In the book's introduction, “The Mughal Eighteenth Century,” Dadlani argues that it was during this fraught period that the architectural style now called Mughal emerged. It was the result of architects and patrons looking to the past—that is, to the seventeenth century—for a new architectural style appropriate for their present. She suggests that this process was ongoing throughout the long eighteenth century, although her book's final three chapters make clear that it continued into the mid-nineteenth century, when the Mughal Empire dissolved. In the rest of the introduction Dadlani discusses trends in scholarship on late Mughal architecture as well as the wide variety of sources she used in her study. Chapter 1, “Between Experimentation and Regulation: The Foundations of an Eighteenth-Century Style,” focuses on architecture built during the late seventeenth century under Mughal emperor Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707). Here Dadlani introduces the concept of istiqbāl , …

Robert Bork Late Gothic Architecture: Its Evolution, Extinction, and Reception Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2018, 552 pp., 32 color and 337 b/w illus. $119, ISBN 9782503568942 Robert Bork has written a remarkable book that in its scope has no competition. He offers a detailed analysis of late Gothic architecture, tracing its long history and examining the ultimately successful challenge to the style made by classicizing architecture from Italy. Bork reminds us that the years just prior to this challenge witnessed some of the most dazzling and wondrous inventions of Gothic architecture. Nave vaults were equipped with looping ribs resembling the petals of flowers. Smaller chapels displayed hanging ribs, miraculously suspended several feet below the webbing of the vaults. Tracery fields became ever larger and more complex, veiling broad segments of facades. Artful filigree towers of intricate design rose far above the pavement. Gothic elements became increasingly mimetic, imitating vegetal forms and other objects, such as the enormous buckle dressing the buttress at the Portuguese monastery of Tomar. Yet by the middle of the sixteenth century, the Gothic was in decline. For much of the previous century the Gothic's innovative building techniques had led architects such as Filarete to call it the modo moderno ; by 1550 this was no longer the case. Giorgio Vasari changed the nomenclature, referring to classicizing approaches as modern and the northern tradition as barbarous, German, Gothic. This extensive volume has numerous strengths. Bork deals with both northern and Italian buildings, Gothic and antique, and discusses the complex interplay between practices on both sides of the Alps. He charts the Gothic's origins and trajectory, including the High Gothic of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, noted for its supposed rationality, an aesthetic opposed to later manifestations. He offers the most detailed account to date of how the late Gothic evolved from …

Jason M. Barr Building the Skyline: The Birth and Growth of Manhattan's Skyscrapers New York: Oxford University Press, 2016, 456 pp., 86 b/w illus. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 9780199344369 Cass Gilbert described the skyscraper as “a machine that makes the land pay” in 1900, twenty-three years before Le Corbusier famously designated the house as “a machine for living in.”1 Yet despite its publication a full generation earlier, the former declaration has received arguably less attention than the latter. Jason M. Barr does yeoman's work closing that gap in his new book, Building the Skyline: The Birth and Growth of Manhattan's Skyscrapers . Readers of all disciplines will likely be persuaded by his main argument, supported by copious data, that the locations and heights of Manhattan's twentieth-century skyscrapers were largely determined by the way in which the island's urban landscape evolved in the years just before the Civil War. Architectural historians, in particular, will appreciate Barr's insights into how skyscraper businessmen have historically thought about their machines that make the land pay, insights that could certainly lead to new kinds of questions in future research. The most important thing architectural historians will want to know before reading this book is that its author is an economist working with historical data rather than a storyteller per se. This is not immediately apparent from the book's title, which emphasizes the physical manifestations of the culture of the building business that Barr studies rather than that culture's less tangible fiscal operations. And while the publisher's dust jacket summary describes the project as an economic history, it also promises content in “chronicle” form, setting up the expectation that Manhattan's important skyscraper-building events will be described in the order in which they occurred. In reality, Barr's economics-inflected historiographic style does not enable his ideas to unfold like those in the relatively straightforward narratives typical of scholars in the history disciplines. As such, while Building the Skyline has much to offer, the extent to which …

Architecture of Independence: African Modernism Vitra Design Museum Gallery, Weil am Rhein 20 February–31 May 2015 Graham Foundation, Chicago 29 January–16 April 2016 Maison de l'Architecture, Geneva 20 May–30 June 2016 Architecture of Independence: African Modernism was curated by Manuel Herz, with photography by Iwan Baan and Alexia Webster. The exhibition's title situated the buildings displayed in the West African postcolonial period, spanning the decades from the end of World War II to the late 1970s and early 1980s, when all West African states attained self-rule or independence from colonial rule. This era was dominated by an architectural shift from the typical colonial “public works department” style to the International Style. This architectural movement was espoused in Africa mainly by groups of young expatriates, including a few indigenous architects whose Western training had been influenced by the design theories of Bauhaus pedagogues such as Walter Gropius, the manifestos of CIAM, and the architecture of Le Corbusier. In the tropical climate zone, which comprises much of Africa and Southeast Asia, this new version of the International Style was adapted to respond to the climatic concerns of these warmer regions; it became known as tropical modernism, a theme echoed in this exhibition's title. The exhibition was unusual in that it followed from the curator's similarly titled 2015 book.1 This edited volume gives a more comprehensive account of Herz's examination of African modernism, comprising a set of essays that support the book's pictorial content. The exhibition therefore provided a curated set of photographs and supporting exhibits from the more extensive material to be found in the book. The main exhibition, as mounted by the Graham Foundation, consisted of a series of curated pictures arranged by country across different rooms and floors of the foundation's building. Most of the photographs …

Status and Mimicry: African Colonial Period Architecture in Coastal Ghana looks at Anomabo, a historically significant port, as a case study to examine hybrid African colonial period architecture in coastal Ghana, formerly known as the Gold Coast Colony. Between the 1870s and 1920s, numerous residences with façades inspired by British styles were built for and by Africans in Anomabo. Courtnay Micots examines these houses as reflections of a deliberately constructed hybrid style of architecture with exteriors appropriated from the Italianate and Queen Anne styles of nineteenth-century England and interior plans utilizing borrowed and local elements. This hybrid architecture in colonial Ghana reflects status, modernity, and resistance to British hegemony. Through close analysis of five residences and the potential motivations of their patrons, Micots shows these houses to be markers of selfhood and cultural belonging, local forms that were refashioned to counter the growing authority of the British administration.

SubUrbanisms: Casino Urbanization, Chinatowns, and the Contested American Landscape Museum of Chinese in America, New York 24 September 2015–27 March 2016 Chinese Style: Rediscovering the Architecture of Poy Gum Lee, 1923–1968 Museum of Chinese in America, New York 24 September 2015–27 March 2016 If the United States, sprawling and diverse, can be difficult to see, the milieu of new immigrants, especially poor ones, is even less visible. A pair of exhibitions at the Museum of Chinese in America helped bring that world into focus: SubUrbanisms , which explored the lives of Chinese immigrants in twenty-first-century Norwich, Connecticut; and Chinese Style , which documented the mid-twentieth-century career of Chinatown-born architect Poy Gum Lee. SubUrbanisms , curated by Stephen Fan, a young Chinese American architect who grew up, in part, in Norwich, told the fascinating story of Chinese workers lured from New York City beginning around 2001 to work at Mohegan Sun, the massive casino complex developed by the Mohegan Tribe in the late 1990s on the site of a shuttered plant that made components for nuclear reactors. Norwich, like much of southeastern New England, industrialized early. A century ago, its bustling mills attracted thousands of new immigrants from the Lower East Side, mostly Italians and Jews (including several of my great-grandparents). As industry waned, however, downtown faded, and those who remained, like Americans coast to coast, spread out to a new ring of tract houses and commercial strips. It is here, rather than …

Palladian Design: The Good, the Bad and the Unexpected The Architecture Gallery, Royal Institute of British Architects, London 9 September 2015–9 January 2016 This exhibition, as its title indicates, was intended to challenge its audience. The challenge was elaborated further in the initial wall panel, which, after explaining that the exhibits were chosen to “provoke debate,” went on to pose such questions as whether the repetition and adaptation of Andrea Palladio's works undermines their original meaning and “uniqueness” and whether a “Renaissance design approach” can still be valid today. The seventy-two exhibits were then laid out in a broadly chronological sequence, beginning with schemes by Palladio himself and ending—emphatically—with a wide range of works dating from very recent times. These various items were clustered under such headings as “Reinventing Antiquity,” “Spreading the Word,” “Statement Architecture,” “Postmodern Palladianism,” and “Abstract Palladianism,” which also appear in the accompanying catalogue. The contention, therefore, was that “Palladianism” is not just a historical style or period that formed an important part of the classical tradition (particularly in England) but a phenomenon that continues to find wide expression today. A large number of the exhibits were drawn from the RIBA's own collections, which happen to be extremely well furnished with drawings by Palladio and the English “Palladians.” This coverage was augmented by early architectural publications as well as by facsimiles of other drawings and photographs of buildings. Pride of place went to two large and spectacular models, one of 1721 for James Gibbs's …

John A. Pinto Speaking Ruins: Piranesi, Architects, and Antiquity in Eighteenth-Century Rome Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012, 352 pp., 192 b/w illus. $65 (cloth), ISBN 9780472118212 John Wilton-Ely Piranesi, Paestum & Soane Munich: Prestel, 2013, 120 pp., 58 color illus. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 9783791348063 A letter of 1774 from William Chambers to a former student living in Rome draws attention to that city’s seminal importance in architectural education. “Converse much with Artists of All Countrys particularly foreigners,” Chambers wrote. “Seek for those who have most reputation. … Amongst which forget not Piranesi, who you may See in my name, he is full of Matter, extravagant ’tis true, often Absurd, but from his overflowings You may gather much information. … Form if you can a style of Your own,” he urged, “in which endeavour to avoid the faults and blend the Perfections of all.”1 Thus Chambers advocated an eclectic design process for which the Rome of Giovanni Battista Piranesi furnished the crucible. Both books discussed in this review reinforce the wisdom of Chambers’s remarks and elucidate the role played by publications of new archaeological finds. Prestel’s handsome second edition of John Wilton-Ely’s Piranesi, Paestum & Soane of 2002 definitely improves upon the original softbound version published by Azimuth Editions. Larger format, more durable binding, and higher quality color reproductions enhance the contents, notably the illustrations featured in the central section: Piranesi’s seventeen magnificent drawings of the three antique Doric temples at Paestum (Greek Poseidonia) in southern Italy. In most other respects, the editions are identical except that noted Piranesi specialist Wilton-Ely updates notes 48–74 and the bibliography to reflect advances in scholarship. Puzzlingly, nowhere except in the acknowledgments does any mention of the Azimuth first edition occur. And the dust jacket blurb describes Soane as Piranesi’s “contemporary, friend, and colleague,” belying the scant evidence of any such close personal relationship presented inside the covers. This caveat and bibliographic questions aside, the second edition makes an insightful and visually appealing contribution to the literature. Wilton-Ely’s nine chapters start with one titled “Piranesi, Paestum & Soane,” in …

The National Central Museum in Nanjing (1935–48) was co-designed by the most distinguished architectural historian in twentieth-century China—Liang Sicheng. It has long been regarded, however, as a representative work of “conservative revivalism” in modern Chinese architectural history. Idealizing a Chinese Style: Rethinking Early Writings on Chinese Architecture and the Design of the National Central Museum in Nanjing attempts to demonstrate the creativity of the design process, Lin Huiyin, and the architects’ ideal for a Chinese-style modern architecture. This ideal, Delin Lai argues, is profoundly rooted in the expectation of Chinese intellectuals for a “Chinese renaissance,” for which the Chinese architectural past was studied, evaluated, and more importantly, redefined through a dialogue with the contemporary architectural discourses and historiography formed in the West. The National Central Museum epitomizes this search for an ideal.

Joseph Siry Beth Sholom Synagogue: Frank Lloyd Wright and Modern Religious Architecture Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011, 736 pp., 10 color and 295 b/w illus. $70 (cloth), ISBN 9780226761404 Walter C. Leedy Jr. and Sara Jane Pearman Eric Mendelsohn’s Park Synagogue: Architecture and Community Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2012, 192 pp., 59 b/w illus. $45 (cloth), ISBN 9781606350850 Beginning in the late 1940s, a number of Jewish intellectuals and organizations began to focus attention on Jewish art and architecture, raising the questions: How could the synagogue building better express contemporary American Judaism? What was the role, if any, of historical architectural tradition? Prominent commentators like art historian Rachel Wischnitzer-Bernstein and architect Percival Goodman noted that, although an ancient building type, the synagogue has never developed a characteristic form or style. The reasons for such an absence of uniformity are many, including the Jews’ peripatetic existence, laws prohibiting land ownership, the synagogue’s egalitarian nature and its multivalent role, and the desire to assimilate. The lack of architectural traditions led designers to borrow and adapt from what they saw around them, including mosques in the Middle East and Christian churches in the West. Greek-, Byzantine-, and Moorish-styled synagogues predominated in Europe, and immigrants brought these traditions with them to the United States. Both Wischnitzer-Bernstein and Goodman proposed modernist architecture as a fruitful new direction, emphasizing its functionalism and freedom from historical associations. Two of America’s most famous synagogues, both constructed in the 1950s and both explorations in the modernist style, are the subjects of recent books of varying depth. As its title indicates, Joseph Siry’s Beth Sholom Synagogue , from the Sacred Landmarks series published by the University of Chicago Press, is about more than Frank Lloyd Wright’s Beth Sholom synagogue in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania (1954–59). The story of that commission and design is the culmination of six initial chapters that provide context for Wright’s ideas about modern synagogue design. Siry begins his book by examining the relationship between Judaism and Chicago’s liberal Unitarians (led by Wright’s uncle the Reverend Jenkin Lloyd Jones), focusing on the ways in which Wright’s view of Judaism was colored by the Unitarian engagement with …

Roger Stalley, ed. Irish Gothic Architecture: Construction, Decay and Reinvention Dublin: Wordwell, 2012, 226 pp., 75 color and 75 b/w illus. €29.99 (paper), ISBN 9781905569700 The marginalization of the study of late medieval architecture in Ireland results from a series of coincidences, including the treatment of Ireland as peripheral to mainstream European developments; the perception of the Gothic style as a foreign imposition when compared to indigenous forms of earlier eras; the relative unfamiliarity of scholars outside Ireland with the complexities of Irish history; and the limited scale of Irish Gothic construction in a discipline that has traditionally prized technological achievement. In the past, architectural historians structured the field to elevate the great French cathedrals as the standard for Gothic form and meaning, but the spread and popularity of Gothic design elements throughout late medieval Europe in innumerably varied circumstances mean that most Gothic deviates from the “rule.” Recent scholarship—for example, Colum Hourihane’s survey of late medieval artistic production, Gothic Art in Ireland, 1169–1550 (2003)—has attempted to reassess the situation, but the subject of Gothic architecture in Ireland still provides much to explore.1 Irish Gothic Architecture: Construction, Decay and Reinvention contributes to that process of exploration. The volume was produced by a team affiliated with the Department of the History of Art at Trinity College Dublin, and its title implies a survey, but the book is a series of connected studies that follow the erection and subsequent fate of Gothic buildings on Irish soil. The authors have the stated intention of producing a multifaceted study of Gothic, incorporating ideas of reception and postmedieval change. The consideration of the longue duree as it relates to buildings has become a useful methodology for scholars of medieval architecture in recent years, but given the political and religious oppression in Ireland since the Middle Ages, Irish buildings can assume charged but shifting symbolic functions that make this approach particularly fruitful here. Roger Stalley’s introduction provides a historiographical grounding …

Alexander Clement. Brutalism: Post-war British Architecture . Wiltshire, England: The Crowood Press, 2011, 160 pp., 150 color illus. £19.95 (cloth), ISBN 9781847972309 Mark Crinson and Claire Zimmerman, editors. Neo-avant-garde and Postmodern: Postwar Architecture in Britain and Beyond . New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010, 420 pp., 103 illus. incl. 76 in color. $65 (cloth), ISBN 9780300166187 Owen Hatherley. A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain . London and New York: Verso Books, 2010, 369 pp., $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 9781844676514 “For many years since the war we have continued in our habit of debasing the coinage of M. le Corbusier and have created a style—‘Contemporary’—easily recognizable by its misuse of traditional materials and its veneer of ‘modern’ details, frames, recessed plinths, decorative piloti,” Theo Crosby wrote in a 1955 editorial on the New Brutalism.1 For Crosby, “contemporary” functioned as shorthand for a bastardized version of modernism—a modernism that had already been liquidated of its ideals and reduced to nothing more than a style for up-to-date living. As an antidote to such degradation, Crosby positioned New Brutalism as an archaeology of the modern movement that would include a rigorous reevaluation of its key architects—Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe in particular—as well as a thorough reexamination of its programs and intents. New Brutalism, for example, would push modernism’s truth-to-materials rhetoric to its limit with its interest in the “as found” just as it would reaffirm the earlier movement’s commitment to housing and the social. Though Alison and Peter Smithson, the figureheads of New Brutalism along with the critic-historian Reyner Banham, first used the phrase in conjunction with their design for a single-family warehouse-like house for Soho, in the following years the term became most closely identified with institutional building, giving rise to schools, council flats, and city halls frequently cast of rough concrete. In an age of postwar reconstruction, Brutalism positioned itself as a new kind of civic language—more vernacular slang than received pronunciation—and in time more and more architects came to speak its language. As the word spread, however, the critical contours of Brutalism often lost their shape, and the term quickly transformed into yet another style. Indeed, Brutalism is often employed today as nothing more than a vague epithet lobbed at vast expanses of postwar institutional building—a …

Ryan K. Smith Robert Morris's Folly: The Architectural and Financial Failures of an American Founder New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2014, 346 pp., 56 b/w illus. $40, ISBN 9780300196047 The extraordinary house that Robert Morris left unfinished when he was taken to debtors’ prison in 1798 is at the center of one of the earliest and most significant stories of architectural failure in the United States. This unusual topic makes Ryan K. Smith's Robert Morris's Folly a surprising examination, but a welcome one, not only for its attention to the building's economic and architectural failings but also for its demonstration of broader social and political friction in the new country. Little known beyond an occasional mention in architectural histories that typically refer to its French baroque style's being out of step with the rising vogue for the crisp and sparing neoclassicism that would later be called the Federal style, the house is also infamous for its cost overruns, which allegedly ruined its patron. Precious little visual evidence survives for it, although its inclusion (as “An Unfinished House in Chestnut Street”) in William Russell Birch's famous Views of Philadelphia (1800) raises the question of why such a noteworthy spectacle is routinely ignored.1 Smith, a historian whose training in an American civilization program is evident in the breadth of this book, makes a convincing argument that this house manifested the virtual impossibility for Morris, a member of America's elite, to emulate the European taste that would evince high financial and social achievements while also striking a tone that could be understood to be adequately republican. Smith opens the book by establishing the significant status that Morris achieved as member of the Continental Congress, signer of the Declaration of Independence, and financier of …

Engineering the World: Ove Arup and the Philosophy of Total Design Victoria and Albert Museum, London 18 June–6 November 2016 Exhibitions about architecture are difficult, exhibitions about engineering more so. That's because no display can convey what its authors have most at heart, or even a direct representation of it, as drawings, models, and photographs can for what an architect does. Engineering is all about process. It can certainly have style, but that style is about means to an end—something not essentially visual. These thoughts are prompted by the Victoria and Albert Museum's show about Ove Arup, by common reckoning the most remarkable of British twentieth-century engineers. For any biographer, let alone exhibition organizer, Arup presents a challenge. Personally, he was the reverse of all the cliches about engineers. He was not a specially great designer. Nor was he thrusting and masculine like Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Robert Stephenson, or John A. Roebling, indeed he could be bumbling, diffident, self-effacing, sometimes comic even. Yet he had undoubted charisma, of that invaluable kind which draws the best out of others, notably fellow engineers and architects. An original and philosophical thinker with an intense belief in the value of the arts, …

Gothic architecture, revived and decorated with motifs borrowed from folk art, provided the foundation for the creation of a Croatian national style in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Dragan Damjanović explains how the Viennese architect Friedrich Schmidt and his student and collaborator Herman Bollé created the signature architecture of this movement, the brilliantly colored and boldly patterned tile roofs of St. Mark's church (restored 1875–82), Zagreb cathedral (restored 1878–1902), and the church of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Marija Bistrica (restored 1878–85). In Polychrome Roof Tiles and National Style in Nineteenth-century Croatia, this architecture is placed in the context of the Gothic Revival in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and the collecting and analysis of traditional textiles by the amateur ethnographer Felix (Srećko) Lay.

Entering the architectural dialogue in 1830, the term néo-grec came to characterize the stylistic movement represented by Henri Labrouste's Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, but the meaning of the term was always elusive. Josephine Grieder analyzes the confusing record of remarks by architects and the subsequent commentary by scholars and historians, noting the difficulty of aligning the terminology with visible architectural phenomena. The Search for the Néo-Grec in Second Empire Paris turns to contemporary books and journals for testimony about the visual characteristics of the style and traces the subtle shift in its meaning as néo-grec be-came inextricably linked with the urban transformation effected by Napoleon III and Haussmann.

Focusing on three nineteenth-century railroad lines in Norway, Mari Hvattum investigates the architectural and cultural significance of early railways. In Panoramas of Style: Railway Architecture in Nineteenth-century Norway, she argues that the seemingly frivolous historicism of mid-nineteenth-century railway architecture should be understood as an attempt to craft appropriate cultural associations for the new Norwegian nation state. Railway architects created an architecture that fused the local and the global, the modern and the traditional, into a new whole. They designed buildings with a mimetic and emblematic relationship to their surroundings, construing the railway journey as—to paraphrase the cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch—a “panorama of style.”

During the last weeks of his practice, Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr., wrote that the future of his firm depended on developing an appropriate landscape style for the arid West. Christine Edstrom O'Hara tells how his sons' firm, Olmsted Brothers, set out to reach that goal in their unbuilt proposal for the 1915 San Diego Panama-California Exposition, in what is now Balboa Park. The Panama-California Exposition, San Diego, 1915: The Olmsted Brothers' Ecological Park Typology is the story of their innovative embrace of regionalist aesthetics and a respect for local ecology, topography, and weather. The ideals of their design, however, were not taken up by their clients. The Olmsted firm was fired, and the fairgrounds that welcomed visitors to San Diego in 1915 had architecture that was more appropriate to large cities and a landscape better suited to a wet climate.

The New American Garden: The Landscape Architecture of Oehme, van Sweden National Building Museum, Washington, D.C. 17 October 2015–1 May 2016 Traditional garden design in the Mid-Atlantic states was fundamentally challenged in the late twentieth century with the work of the Washington, D.C.–based firm Oehme, van Sweden and Associates, established in 1975. This photographic exhibition illuminated unconventional garden making generated by the firm's two larger-than-life cofounders, Wolfgang Oehme (1930–2011) and James van Sweden (1935–2013). The exhibition celebrated the twenty-five-year anniversary of the 1990 publication of Bold Romantic Gardens , written by Oehme and van Sweden with Susan Rademacher, former executive director of Louisville Olmsted Parks Conservatory.1 The book introduced the world to the Oehme, van Sweden signature style of planting design defined by broad painterly strokes of hardy perennials and ornamental grasses set within strong architectural frameworks. Oehme, van Sweden's design sensibility was in sharp contrast to the lawn-centric landscapes of postwar suburban America. The firm's earliest clients were wealthy nonconformists with the self-confidence to make art statements with their gardens. Its first high-profile commission came in 1977 with the Federal Reserve Board Garden in Washington, D.C. (Figure 1). Just steps from Pennsylvania Avenue and the National Mall, this public …

Pevsner’s Architectural Glossary App New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press; Brighton, UK: Aimer Media, 2013, $4.99 Erudite detail is tempered by a certain popular appeal in Nikolaus Pevsner’s encyclopedic Buildings of England series. The forty-six volumes that Penguin first published between 1951 and 1974 were as thick as some editions of the Bible, and as authoritative—and nearly as readable. Embraced in the UK as modern lore, the architectural guides made an essential contribution to twentieth-century “topographic culture.”1 JSAH reviewer Alan Gowans praised the series in 1956, noting, “Scholarship at once meticulous and broad is combined with the informality of a personally conducted tour. … In such a program the essential thing is to hold a reader’s interest, to make him not only aware of facts, but interested in them, or … anxious to see, preserve, and perpetuate them.”2 Half a century later, a Guardian columnist similarly celebrated Pevsner’s “sparse, engaging style” for “making architecture accessible.”3 While it is true that Pevsner and his coauthors’ building descriptions were often terse—some of them no longer than a Tweet—readers sometimes had to work to parse the prose, the economy of which depended upon arcane art historical terms. Unlike Norval White’s AIA Guide to New York City , which first appeared in 1968 and which “did not require readers to know the difference between a volute and a voussoir,”4 the Pevsner guides are peppered with specialized terms. For example, a roundhouse in Essex is described as “Small round brick tower, crenellated, with turrets, and single-storey wings with stepped gables, hoodmoulded windows, and other folly-like features C19.”5A reader might flip to the twenty-five-page glossary in the back to look up hoodmould or crenellation , if not to review gable or folly . This slim glossary, a deceptively peripheral tool within a volume of up to 1,000 pages, was in fact crucial to the whole enterprise. …

In 1864 Edward Welby Pugin (eldest son of A.W.N. Pugin) was invited to submit plans for a new church for the English hospice and seminary in Rome, the Venerable English College. The project soon failed because the Victorian churches fashionable in the United Kingdom and in the north of Europe were judged to be inappropriate in Rome. In “Edward Pugin and English Catholic Identity: the New Church of the Venerable English College in Rome,” Carol M. Richardson uses previously unpublished documents and drawings to explore the conflict of identity between Old English Catholics and Ultramontanes, that was exposed by attempts to build a high Victorian Gothic church in Rome. Although in the 1850s senior members of the Catholic hierarchy in England argued that architectural style was unimportant, this case study demonstrates that the style in which new English Roman Catholic churches were built mattered a great deal.

The story of the design of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History belies its quietly restrained appearance. The building's architects, Hornblower & Marshall, were not responsible for the prominent Mall façade of the museum and its low Roman dome; rather, these were a secret effort of Charles Follen McKim, who, in turn, asked Daniel II. Burnham to add his ideas to the final composition. This history is entwined with McKim and Burnham's work on the Senate Park Commission (McMillan) plan of 1902. For them, the museum represented the model for all the buildings to be erected on the new National Mall. Although functional needs were an important part of the dialogue, Hornblower & Marshall and McKim and Burnham were most concerned with identifying the appropriate character for the new structure, the former admiring modern French style, the latter advocating a Roman Revival aesthetic. The finished building, the work of all these hands, demonstrates that many practicing architects at the turn of the century valued compromise and collaboration as least as much as they did creativity and independence.

High Victorian Gothic in England was an exotic style, and the importance of Italian Gothic precedents in its development has long been recognized, as has the interest in thirteenth-century French Gothic in the 1850s. What has received much less attention is the influence of the medieval buildings of Normandy. In this article, I examine the historical and cultural connections between England and Normandy, which were stimulated by the Napoleonic Wars and the threat of invasion, and were further encouraged by the ease of crossing the English Channel. Seeking the origins of English Gothic and Romanesque architecture, antiquaries and artists explored Normandy in the decades after Waterloo, anticipating the interest of architects. Whether the results of travel or study of a growing number of publications on the medieval architecture of Normandy, numerous midcentury buildings show intimate acquaintance with thirteenth-century churches in Normandy-old village churches with saddleback towers or distinctive spires, which, paradoxically, resemble High Victorian designs in their rugged austerity.

Christine Mengin. Guerre du toit et modernite architecturale: loger l'employe sous la republique de Weimar . Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2007, 540 pp., 32 color and 158 b/w illus. €45, ISBN 9782859445676 The introduction of a new style of architecture is often accompanied by conflicts, a sense of unease, even mistrust and disorientation. Conflicts about style appear to have arisen since antiquity. Vitruvius recounts that the ancient Greeks clashed over the use of different formal vocabularies. Vasari's writings reveal how Renaissance architects despised the Gothic style, and at the opposite end of the spectrum, Augustus W. N. Pugin produced drawings depicting the Gothic as the equivalent of heaven and classical architecture as the embodiment of hell at the beginning of the nineteenth century. One of the most impassioned style conflicts in twentieth-century architecture is the so-called Dacherkrieg (roof war), arising in response to the flat and pitched roofs lining the opposing sides of Am Fischtal, a long street in Berlin-Zehlendorf in 1928. The modernist, flat-roofed Onkel-Tom-Siedlung (Uncle Tom's Housing Estate), designed by a team led by Bruno Taut, occupied the eastern side of the street. An opposing team led by Heinrich Tessenow used more traditional, regional precedents—and sloping roofs—to design Am Fischtalgrund (on the Fischtal site) on the western side of Am Fischtal, touching off the notorious roof war. The research surrounding this incident is the subject of Christine Mengin's sprawling 540-page Guerre du toit et modernite architecturale: loger l'employe sous la republique de Weimar . A paperback with low-resolution black-and-white images integrated into the text, the book also includes 16 color plates that offer original views of the housing estates, reconstruction drawings made in the 1980s, and present-day impressions of the buildings. The book started out as a dissertation and was revised and published in the exclusive series Histoire de l'art–16 of the Universite Paris I Pantheon–Sorbonne. Mengin introduces her topic by explaining the stylistic development of architecture in Germany in the early twentieth century. She describes how architects who had …

Lechner: A Creative Genius Museum of Applied Arts, Budapest 20 November 2014–28 June 2015 Odon Lechner (1845–1914) is probably the best-known Hungarian architect among architectural historians outside Hungary. For more than a century, the complexity of Lechner’s experiment with a “Hungarian style” has generated fierce theoretical debates, often strongly influenced by contemporary politics. It is the sort of topic that inspires each new generation of scholars to explore anew the construction of nationalism in the fine arts. The centenary of Lechner’s death provided the impetus for the Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest, together with the Institute of Art History of the Academy of Sciences, to stage this valuable and stimulating show. The last time an exhibition had been devoted to Lechner was in 1985, a generation ago, so although he features in most subsequent publications focusing on Hungarian architecture around 1900, it was high time for another comprehensive look at his oeuvre. There was also another urgent agenda that made this exhibition highly significant: Hungary had applied to UNESCO to list five of Lechner’s major buildings as World Heritage Sites: the City Hall of Kecskemet (1893–97), the Kőbanya Parish Church (1894–97), the Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest (1893–96), the Geological Institute in Budapest (1897–99), and the Postal Savings Bank (1900–1901), likewise in Budapest. The urgency stemmed from the fact that some of Lechner’s buildings, especially the Museum of Applied Arts, are in very bad condition and require expert restoration. There are now plans to carry out such work, which will be combined with the construction of a …

Architectural history in China is neither an independent scholarly discipline nor a subfield of some broader intellectual discourse.1 Nor is it the passion of educated laymen's spare time. In the Chinese educational system, architecture most often is separate from history. Buildings from earlier times and the methods or principles by which they were constructed are investigated primarily by students of architectural design or structural engineering. Decoration on buildings, especially exterior ornament, is studied to a certain extent, as are styles of Chinese architecture, especially imperial on the one hand and regional on the other, mainly for the purpose of historic preservation. Architectural history is usually part of an architect's training. The study of buildings or cities as a means of understanding historical trends, social movements, or human experience-the kinds of issues that have led to the rise of urban studies programs in history departments in North America-are not part of the mainstream Chinese educational process. Architectural history usually is a requirement of architecture students from the B.Arch. through the Ph.D. level in China, but its mastery is optional in terms of a student's success.2 In the Chinese higher educational process, architectural history is perhaps well-characterized as a Western construct, for beginning only in the twentieth century can one find a Chinese equivalent for the words in this combination. Jianzhu is the word used in China today for architecture. This modern word is formed from the characterjian, which may mean to build, construct, erect, or establish, and zhu, which may also mean to build, but in its purer meaning refers to beating or ramming hard, a technique common in Chinese wall construction since the Neolithic period. Premodern Chinese (before around the mid-nineteenth century) employs the wordyingzao for what is best translated as construct. The first character (ying) takes as its primary meaning to regulate or manage, and zao can mean to build, but also may mean to institute.3 In premodern China, the government regulated important institutional and religious construction, and the books in which these regulations are preserved were commissioned by the court and written by scholar-officials.4 Inherent in the meaning ofyingzao, then, is the fundamental link between Chinese officialdom and architecture. History, translated as lishi (li meaning to calculate, pass through, or successive, and shi meaning chronicles or annals), is not a new concept in China: the Chinese are among the oldest cord-keeping civilizations. However, the word used for chitectural history in China today can be simplyjianzhu, architecture. University courses on architectural history a e dentifiable by the characters that precede the wordjianzhu. A course on Chinese architectural history is calle "Zh ngguoJianzhu" as often as "ZhongguoJianzhu Shi," and one on Western architecture, "XifangJianzhu," one on modern (ca. 1840-1949) architecture, "Jindai Jianzhu," and one on contemporary architecture, "Xiandai Jianzhu," as often as "Xifang Jianzhu Shi," "Jindai Jianzhu Shi," or "Xiandai Jianzhu Shi." The intent here is not philological digression. The names, I uggest, are precise and therefore very significant. A university course n Chinese architecture, Western architecture, or mode n architecture is primarily a look at the buildings of China, the West, or moder times. The subject matter is buildings first, in particular, how they are put together, with some attention given to the evolution of technology and stylistic features. The next directions of investigation, which, as we shall see below, are also reflected in co se titles, are ways that structures relate to environmental, geographic, or climatic issues. Historical background and its inte pretation are not systematically provided and not essential to the successful completion of this kind of course. Courses called "Zhongguo Jianzhu," in every program discussed below, are taught chronologically. The logic of the presentation sequence is development of form and style, and the justifications are the need to know how to evaluate a newly identified "old" building, how to restore it or others in need of preservation, and, occasionally, how to design a building for which an evocation of premoder architecture is sought. So far, topics such as "Building in the Age of the Huizong Emperor" or "Architecture in the Period of Dynastic Disunion" have not been taught in China. Even courses onjianzhu, buildings alone, of a time frame as specific as the Song dynasty (960-1279), in which the Huizong emperor reigned, or the period of Northern and Southern Dynasties (ca. the third through sixth centuries), when more than

Built around the mid-sixteenth century, the Carafa Chapel in Montecalvo Irpino is a rare example of Cinquecento architecture in the province of Campania. An analysis of its form and style reveals apparent connections to the architecture of Francesco di Giorgio Martini, in particular his works in Urbino. The study raises old questions about the influence of di Giorgio on sixteenth-century religious architecture in Naples and Campania and suggests that it was more profound than is usually believed. The direct influence of contemporary Neapolitan art and architecture is evident in the chapel9s relief decorations. The iconography of the decorations communicates the patron9s wish to commemorate the noble blood connections of his family without resorting to over-statement and artistic grandiosity. In its plan and proportions, the chapel suggests its designer knew Raphael9s Chigi Chapel in Rome. Yet unlike the polychrome decoration of the Roman chapel and the partiality for abundant decoration in sculpture and relief typical of contemporary chapels in Naples, the restrained articulation of the Carafa Chapel recalls earlier styles. The same artistic predilection was still dominant in the architecture of the greater churches built in Naples during the first half of the sixteenth century.

Abdallah Kahil . The Sultan Hasan Complex in Cairo 1357–1364: A Case Study in the Formation of Mamluk Style . Wurzburg: Ergon, 2008, 403 pp., 344 b/w and color illus. $90 (cloth), ISBN 9783899136432 When I began my academic career more than a quarter century ago, I had to explain the term "Mamluk" at the beginning of my talks in conferences; colleagues did not have to clarify terms like "baroque," "rococo," or even "Tudor," or "Georgian." But what was really frustrating was that I had also to cajole my audience into seeing Mamluk architecture for the sublime tradition it is. Things have not changed much since, even though Mamluk studies have acquired their own journal, Mamluk Studies Review, and books on Mamluk architecture are sometimes reviewed in journals such as our JSAH . Mamluk architecture is still largely unknown to the architectural community. This is truly unfortunate, for Mamluk architecture is one of the most spatially intricate, formally poised, and geometrically inventive medieval building traditions. It is also one of the most prolific and best documented. The Mamluks-for those readers still uninformed about them-were a foreign-born, military-slave elite that ruled Egypt and Syria between 1250 and 1517. They presided over a building expansion of unprecedented scale in every corner of the sultanate but especially in Cairo, where most of them lived and competed for influence and visibility.1 To judge by the number of Mamluk monuments still standing there today-and they constitute a fraction of the original total that can be computed from the sources-architecture definitely was the choice instrument for the exhibition, transfer, and symbolization of wealth and status.2 In the crowded city, where many monuments lined every major thoroughfare, Mamluk designers had to …

Scholars have located the origins of the Colonial Revival in the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, but have seldom explored its deep background in the intellectual life of the early nineteenth century. The revival of the 1870s was not wholly innovative but the culmination of trends of thought that reached back at least three generations. The Picturesque Movement as imported from England around 1800 brought with it all the elements needed for a positive reevaluation of colonial architecture: antiquarianism, a concern with the humble cottage, a nostalgic Old English mindset. Promulgated by poetry, travelogues, and villa books, the Picturesque joined with patriotism and nationalism to produce a sweeping change in opinion, as colonial architecture-long scorned and neglected-was gradually rediscovered, celebrated, preserved, and eventually imitated. The process of rediscovery was highly selective, the Picturesque always translating the colonial according to its own contemporary needs and predilections.

In a challenging but little-studied article published in Architectura in 1985, David B. Brownlee argued that the religious concept of the development of doctrine influenced the belief of architects in the Anglican Church in the 1840s that they should attempt to "develop" architecture in a radical new direction. The result was the style we now call "High Victorian." This article takes up Professor Brownlee's argument in two ways. First, it looks at how architects in the 1850s sought to create a progressive style by drawing on ideas and images from contemporary science, specifically geology, for which development was also a key word. Second, it addresses the question of why the idea of development fell so suddenly from favor in avant-garde architectural circles in the 1860s. It argues that as science and religion withdrew into their separate spheres, architects turned instead to an ideal based not on historical development but on the imitation of a stylistic paradigm. This approach was influenced by High Church belief that the sacraments, most importantly the Eucharist, were the material realization of a timeless supernatural reality. Changing attitudes to time and precedent had important consequences for the way architects viewed restoration, archaeology, and the use of historical models.

a byre beside the house and a pig lies near the front door, his snout just above the mud. A young woman cooks dinner on an open hearth in the family's principal living space, and in the adjoining chamber a suspended sheet keeps pieces of thatch from falling on well-kept beds. As she empties a bucket of waste water out the door, she explains that this was a superior house when first built about 1820. Indeed, many farmers in the north of Ireland lived in a single room, bringing their animals through the house to reach a byre. This evocation of a recently lost style of rural Ulster life takes place not in County Tyrone, where the farmhouse was originally built, but in the Shenandoah Valley, outside Staunton, Virginia (Figure 1). The speaker's easygoing but instructive remarks remind us that we are in a museum-the state-supported Frontier Culture Museum of Virginia-and not a private house. Variously called outdoor history exhibits, folk parks, and open-air museums, such places specialize in the re-creation of vanishing scenes of human life, often complete with animals, crops, and ancient vehicles. With buildings as their principal elements, these institutions have become a major venue for public encounters with architectural history, particularly the history of folk buildings. They also raise important questions of preservation and interpretation. Removing a variety of picturesque old buildings and furnishings from their real environments in order to set them up at convenient distances from one another in a safe and sanitized park sounds quintessentially American. Actually, open-air museums originated in Europe and have, in the last few decades, become an international phenomenon. Their numbers are now growing at a surprising rate, from Anwei Province in China to Salt Lake City, Utah. Enclaves of French farm buildings have been re-created next door to others still in use in the Dordogne countryside. Ancient Japanese buildings have been museumized in places like Takayama and Matsumoto. There are open-air museums in Jakarta and Pretoria, Seoul and Addis Ababa, as well as in Dallas, Texas, and Montgomery, Alabama. By their nature, most open-air museums are national or regional in focus, presenting aspects of native culture drawn from a single country or district. The earliest openair folk parks, like Skansen in Stockholm and the Norsk Folkmuseum in Oslo, grew out of late-nineteenth-century ethnographic studies of indigenous folk culture. They reflected the notion that conventional museum displays were too confining a medium for presenting rich cultural material. They also embodied the same sense of nationalism expressed in folk-revival design extending across Europe in the same period. That sense of nationalism may be responsible for the tendency in European museums to emphasize the unchanging nature of folkways. Often these institutions focus on subtle differences among regional cultures, using formal analysis of folk pottery, clothing, and-most visibly-houses

Saint Louis Conciergerie, Paris (organized by the Centre des Monuments Nationaux) 8 October 2014–11 January, 2015 Even among the colorful panoply of great medieval rulers, very few can match the legacy and regal charisma of Louis IX (1226–70). Admired and imitated by his contemporaries and successors in France and the courts of Europe, Louis seemed to epitomize the quintessential but often unattainable qualities of a Christian monarch in the High Middle Ages: he was a courtly and just ruler who consolidated his kingdom, a chivalric crusader, a devout and sophisticated patron, and, ultimately, a saint. The irresistible glamour of Louis IX’s reign not only attached itself to the king but also permeated the entire court and especially its seat, the city of Paris and the Ile-de-France. The dazzling quality of art produced in France in this period and the shift in architectural tastes to a particularly refined Gothic style known as Rayonnant inspired Robert Branner (editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians from 1964 to 1966) to introduce the term “court style” as a way of linking artistic innovations to royal projects, thereby unleashing decades of art historical debate.1 In Louis IX, art history has found an enlightened patron who not only defined thirteenth-century France but, through the dissemination of the Rayonnant style, also determined the course of European medieval architecture in the following century. It is thus fitting that the …

In the late nineteenth century American civil and structural engineers initiated a critique of architects that centered on their apparent inability to create a single style befitting the modern age. For many engineers, architecture had become anachronistic. Conversely, they asserted that their progressive, technological production was unquestionably modern. By the early twentieth century some architects looked to engineering for a path beyond the apparent impasse of eclecticism. They believed that their profession would regain its relevance if it could bridge the schism between architecture and engineering. One of the great building programs of the era, the bridge was elevated as the site and the metaphor for the reunification of architecture and engineering. From 1920 to 1927, Paul Cret served as the architect for the Delaware River Bridge in Philadelphia, the longest suspension bridge in the world when completed. Through his designs for this bridge, he asked what weight bridges were summoned to support when privileged as the point of professional reunion. In contrast to unification construed as total fusion, Cret asserted that bridging simultaneously generates connection and emphasizes separation. Acknowledging both aspects of bridging, Cret sought a form of collaboration that would preserve the limit between architecture and engineering. Our consciousness of limits, he insisted, separates us from other life forms and tragically renders us human. With his collaborative design for the Delaware River Bridge, Cret endeavored to stage this tragedy.

Adler and Sullivan's Auditorium Building in Chicago (1886-1890) is here analyzed in the context of Chicago's social history of the 1880s. Specifically, the building is seen as a capitalistic response to socialist and anarchist movements of the period. The Auditorium's principal patron, Ferdinand W. Peck, created a theater that was to give access to cultural and civic events for the city's workers, to draw them away from both politicized and nonpoliticized "low" urban entertainments. Adler and Sullivan's theater was to serve a mass audience, unlike opera houses of the period, which held multiple tiers of boxes for privileged patrons. This tradition was represented by the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City (1881-1883). Turning away from works like the Paris Opéra, Peck and his architects perhaps sought to emulate ideas of other European theaters of the period, such as Bayreuth's Festspielhaus (1872-1876). Sullivan's interior had an ornamental and iconographic program that was innovative relative to traditional opera houses. His design of the building's exterior was in a Romanesque style that recalled ancient Roman monuments. It is here compared with other Chicago buildings of its era that represented high capital's reaction to workers' culture, such as Burnham and Root's First Regiment Armory (1889-1891), Peck's own house (1887), and the Chicago Athenaeum (1890-1891). The Auditorium's story invites a view of the Chicago School that emphasizes the role of patrons' ideological agenda rather than modern structural expression.

The study of the rock-cut churches of Cappadocia has generally focused on painted churches to the neglect of the extensive complexes that surround them. Lyn Rodley9s systematic survey of over two dozen of the most important ensembles is an exception (Cave Monasteries of Byzantine Cappadocia [Cambridge, 1985]). Her monastic interpretation of the sites, however, is open to question. An examination of the planning of many of the Cappadocian complexes reveals a layout much more like that of a spacious and well-organized mansion than a monastery. Typically an inverted T-configuration governs the nucleus of the plan. The vertical of the T is the principal hall of the ensemble; the crossbar is the transverse entrance hall that precedes it and that opens onto the courtyard in front of it. This nucleus is developed with rooms placed right and left, often symmetrically. The church may be somewhat removed from the nucleus or even omitted altogether. This distinctive plan enjoyed a wide popularity in domestic architecture in Islamic lands, and its development in Syria, Egypt, North Africa, Sicily, and Spain demonstrates its wide flexibility. The use of the T-plan in the mansions of Cappadocia gives us a precious insight into the life style of the great landowners of Anatolia and their cosmopolitan, if not frankly Islamic, tastes. The mansions of Cappadocia fill a very conspicuous gap in Middle Byzantine architectural history.

The article explores the nature of architectural invention in Indian sacred structures by analyzing a group of eleventh-century sandstone temples in the Karnataka region of southern India. Identifying a variety of experiments in a closely related group, it refutes a commonly held scholarly assumption that Indian temples follow architectural norms ordained by India's religious traditions-an assumption fed by Western definitions of individuality and originality. These Karnataka temples demonstrate that their architects-while mostly unknown-fundamentally changed the formal as well as the conceptual basis of southern architecture they had inherited. Their formal choices, manipulating regional conventions as well as opening up their structures to include references from other regions, led to a new, consciously modern form of architecture whose modernity has been overlooked by scholars. Scholars have tended to call this new regional invention Vesara (Sanskrit "mule" or "hybrid"), defining it as a derivative style of temple created by mixing typical features of North Indian and South Indian architecture. The article traces the emergence of Vesara's conceptual logic in the eleventh century through architectural anomalies and daringly unprecedented play with the formal means of regional architecture, arguing that the makers of these temples exercised a level of inventiveness we have not been willing to credit them with so far.

Lewis Mumford's advocacy of European Modernism in architecture was the result of his relationship with Walter Curt Behrendt, the editor of the German Werkbund's journal Die Form from 1925 to 1927. Before they met in 1925 Mumford and Behrendt each worked to encourage a new vernacular style, which would use rural values and regional planning to remake the industrial city. The two united in their critique of the unrestricted urban development and industrial standardization which dominated American culture in the 1920s, and which in Germany was mythologized as Amerikanismus. In 1925 Behrendt recruited Mumford to write on American architecture for Die Form from an anti-Amerikanismus point of view. Yet when Behrendt expressed a new optimism about the machine's role in architecture, in his book Der Sieg des neuen Baustils (1927), Mumford began to emphasize functionalist, standardized forms as the key to organic design. The Werkbund's "New Era" publicity campaign of 1928-1932 convinced Mumford that the Modern Movement combined a naturally evolving vernacular style with artistic vanguardism, both in the service of cultural evolution. On this basis he supported both functionalist housing and Philip Johnson's "International Style" aestheticism after 1930.

During the 1830s, the English architect and perspectivist Joseph Gandy (1771-1843) produced a manuscript entitled "The Art, Philosophy, and Science of Architecture" and also exhibited a series of pictures at the Royal Academy under the running title of Comparative Architecture. These interrelated projects sought to present a world history of architecture in which theoretical issues concerning the origins, development, and advancement of architectural meaning could be explored. Bringing architectural theory into conjunction with the mythographic study of ancient art and religion in French and English scholarship of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Gandy's writings and pictures postulated that all architectural forms originally possessed "emblematical" significance relating to the formation of language and mythology. His treatise and architectural imagery delved not only into the origins and recovery of architecture as a religious semiotic system, but also into the status of architecture as a subject of natural history. By extending the cultural and intellectual concerns of late-Enlightenment antiquarianism and syncretic mythography into early Victorian debates about architectural eclecticism and the crisis of meaning and style in nineteenth-century design, Gandy contended with wideranging arguments about the historical evolution and signifying capacity of architecture that had also engaged his contemporaries, from John Soane and Richard Payne Knight to George Wightwick and A. W. N. Pugin.

Richard Aitken The Garden of Ideas: Four Centuries of Australian Style Melbourne: Miegunyah Press and the State Library of Victoria, 2010, xi + 244 pp., AU$64.99, ISBN 9780522857504 Architect Richard Aitken, author of The Garden of Ideas: Four Centuries of Australian Style , is well known to landscape architects and garden historians. As coeditor of The Oxford Companion to Australian Gardens (2002), author of several books, from Gardenesque (2004) to Seeds of Change (2006), and founder of the journal Australian Garden History , Aitken has done much to put Australian garden history on the map. His recent book continues that important work. In The Garden of Ideas , Aitken’s intention is “to open a conversation, one that results in a more profound understanding of our culture of garden-making, and one that leads to enhanced appreciation both of exceptional and representative examples of Australian garden-making” (xi). The book admirably accomplishes this in its survey of Australia’s ever-changing and complex garden styles. While there have been many fine studies on Australian garden history, until Aitken’s book, none has attempted such an ambitious overview from the eighteenth century to the present.1 None …

Ethan Matt Kavaler Renaissance Gothic: Architecture and the Arts in Northern Europe, 1470–1540 New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012, 344 pp., 80 color and 210 b/w illus. $75, ISBN 9780300167924 Ethan Matt Kavaler’s beautifully produced new book makes an extraordinary contribution to the growing discourse on “Late Gothic” artistic production in the last decades of the fifteenth and first decades of the sixteenth century. The very title chosen by the author—a “provocative oxymoron” (22)—complicates old notions of Gothic as a style that “develops” continuously over three centuries, entering into a period of “decline” before being swept aside by the Renaissance. The unruly and provocative material Kavaler deals with in this book is hard to cram into a traditional structure of chapter headings, and it has to be said that the introduction is disturbingly multifarious in its content. Yet the author’s argument is, for the most part, well served by the thematic organization into five chapters—“Ornament and Aesthetics,” “Flamboyant Forms,” “Microarchitecture,” “Natural Forms,” and, finally, “Deconstruction and Hybridity”—a sequence that conveniently allows the author to reserve his most original thinking for the later parts of the book. The introduction provides an overview of problems of taste and historiography: older historians of Gothic often professed a real dislike for this mode, which they considered to be “overcharged” with ornament of a kind that had broken loose from its old role of expressing architectural behavior. A few carefully chosen juxtapositions make the point: the “rational” forms of Saint-Maclou of Rouen (ca. 1440), in which slender filleted piers run smoothly into arches and ribs, is contrasted with the “jungle of overlapping shafts” (11) in the church at Brou, built some seventy-five years later for Margaret of Austria. Similarly juxtaposed, we see an austere geometric window (ca. 1300) from the nave of the minster at Freiburg im Breisgau with a window from the sixteenth-century choir where “designs have become fully emancipated from the mundane task of supporting the glass” (12). The coexistence of elements of …

In the cathedral of Sens, Saint-Lomer in Blois, Voulton, and Saint-Remi in Reims, the stonework together with documents demonstrates explicitly that flying buttresses were built or were intended before 1170. In another ten buildings, including Senlis cathedral and the choir of Notre-Dame in Paris, the lithic evidence is equivocal, yet the possibility that flyers were intended is made more likely by the evidence from the first four buildings. There are significant similarities in the capitals and architectural details in most of these fourteen buildings that highlight the connections among them. The documents and the foliate style of the capitals show that all were constructed before the nave of Notre-Dame in Paris.

Henry Hobson Richardson's design for the William Watts Sherman house, in Newport, Rhode Island, has long been considered an anomaly among his projects. While its living hall plan has always been credited to Richardson, the exterior has often been thought to have been the work of Richardson's assistant, Stanford White, drawing on the published work of Richard Norman Shaw. Study of surviving sketches, drawings, and other records, along with an examination of the house itself, shows that this explanation of the Sherman house is inadequate. Not only did Richardson control both plan and massing, but he must also be credited with the design of critical front gable, which did not derive from Shaw's work. Analysis of Richardson's sketches also offers clues to Richardson's typical architectural design method and compositional approach, as well as to his specific blending of English, Continental, and especially American colonial vernacular influences in the Sherman design. These influences also provide a basis for understanding why the house became such an important source for the development of multiple themes in American domestic architecture in succeeding decades, especially the Shingle Style.

Elizabeth Valdez del Alamo. Palace of the Mind: The Cloister of Silos and Spanish Sculpture of the Twelfth Century Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2012, xx + 532 pp., 16 color and 300 b/w illus. €150, ISBN 9782503517117 This large, attractive, and comprehensive book on the cloister of Santo Domingo de Silos, among the most familiar and most compelling of the major Romanesque sites in northern Spain, represents a significant contribution to the study of medieval art and architecture. The magnificent illustrations and rich bibliography alone would make the book an essential resource for the study of European visual culture from the decades around 1100, an astonishing period that witnessed a veritable explosion in architectural sculpture. The probable early date and remarkable creativity of the sculpture at Silos had already established the cloister as a focal point for the study of Romanesque art in the days of Arthur Kingsley Porter and Meyer Schapiro, and Elizabeth Valdez del Alamo’s thorough volume provides a useful, up-to-date compendium of primary and secondary sources that reflects the richness of the artwork and the scholarly tradition associated with it. Palace of the Mind also gives readers insightful discussions of the style, sources, and iconographic interpretation of the sculptures, presenting many ideas that will surely remain fundamental points of departure for future scholarship on this celebrated site. The book is well organized, opening with brief chapters on the historiography and history of Silos, and moving smoothly into a chronological presentation of the sculptures in their architectural context. Valdez del Alamo divides these discussions into two main parts, the first (“Cult Through Construction”) presenting the early history of the monastery at Silos, the rise of the cult of Santo Domingo, and a detailed discussion of the earliest surviving Romanesque cloister sculptures in three chapters. The second part (“The Era of Expansion”) turns to the somewhat later twelfth-century additions to the monastery and cloister, including discussions of the south transept, the newer portions of the cloister, and the portals (chapters 4–6). The closing chapter situates Silos …

Within the stylistic development of English Gothic architecture of the late thirteenth century, the nave of York Minster stands quite apart for its clear continental orientation. Only the great western window and the high vault-both inserted after the structural completion of the nave-conform to the standards of the Decorated Style that dominated English ecclesiastical buildings around 1300. The architecture of the nave itself has generally been regarded as an offspring of the French Rayonnant Gothic, although no specific building could be positively identified as its source; comparisons have dealt exclusively with individual architectural features instead of the system as a whole. Cologne Cathedral, however, never hitherto considered a possible source of influence for York Minster's nave, resembles the English church more than any French cathedral and accordingly must be taken as its main and perhaps only source of inspiration. This German orientation of York, unusual as it is in the history of English architecture, has its parallel in some rather close historical connections between the English court and the German emperor and, notably, his archchancellors, the archbishops of Cologne.

The chapel dedicated to Beata Lucia in the cathedral of Narni has been attributed to Nicola Michetti on the basis of both style and the fact that he had worked elsewhere for the patron, Cardinal Giuseppe Sacripante. The configuration of the altar surround, however, is not typical of Michetti's work. That structure, in fact, is by Carlo Rainaldi and originally stood in the chapel of S. Antonio di Padova in SS. Apostoli in Rome. Sacripante purchased the altar surround in October 1711 and had it set up in Narni sometime between 1712 and 1714. Michetti's contribution to the design of the chapel, therefore, is limited to the revetment of the walls, the windows, and the transverse oval dome. Rainaldi's altar surround is an important find. Conceived in 1652 and constructed between 1654 and c. 1656, it is the immediate forerunner of his urbanistic masterpieces of the early 1660s, S. Maria di Montesanto and S. Maria dei Miracoli, on piazza del Popolo.