Buildings of Massachusetts:
Metropolitan Boston |
| Keith N. Morgan, with Richard M. Candee, Naomi Miller, Roger
G. Reed, and Contributors |
| 704 pages, 7 x 10 |
| 465 b&w photographs, 72 maps |
| Cloth ISBN 978-0-8139-2709-1 $75.00 |
| Buildings of the
United States |
 |
This latest volume in the Society of Architectural Historians’
Buildings of the United States series analyzes the architecture,
landscape, and planning patterns of the capital of Massachusetts
and forty-one surrounding cities and towns that fan out from Boston
Harbor. The term “metropolitan” here emphasizes both
the range of the project and the importance of this area in introducing
regional planning to the United States. Extensively illustrated
with photographs and maps, and supplemented with a glossary and
bibliography, the book assesses built form from initial colonial
settlement in the 1630s through twenty-first-century additions
to the Boston area landscape. The authors selected both exemplary
and representative buildings and sites for inclusion. Here are
structures of international reputation and buildings that characterize
the vernacular housing patterns of the region. Because of the
exceptional importance of the Boston area to the history of landscape
architecture and city planning, those issues have been addressed
in both the narrative introduction and the building entries. In
contrast to other existing architectural guides, which do not
move beyond central Boston and Cambridge, The Buildings of
Massachusetts: Metropolitan Boston canvasses the twelve sections
of central Boston, its eight annexed neighborhoods, five sections
of Cambridge (the district’s second-largest municipality),
and forty surrounding communities. This volume has been designed
to complement a second guidebook in the Buildings of the United
States series that will focus on the buildings of Massachusetts
from Cape Cod to the Berkshires.
Keith N. Morgan is Professor of Art History
at Boston University and the coauthor, with Naomi Miller, of Boston
Architecture, 1975–1990. Richard M. Candee
is Professor Emeritus in American and New England Studies at Boston
University and author of Building Portsmouth: The Neighborhoods
and Architecture of New Hampshire’s Oldest City. Naomi
Miller is Professor Emerita of Art History at Boston
University. Roger G. Reed is an Architectural
Historian for the National Register of Historic Places at the
National Park Service and author of Building Victorian Boston:
The Architecture of Gridley J. F. Bryant.