Art and Architecture

Early to mid-twentieth-century America was the heyday of a car culture that has been called an "automobile utopia." In American Autopia, Gabrielle Esperdy examines how the automobile influenced architectural and urban discourse in the United States from the earliest days of the auto industry to the... More

From Dallas–Fort Worth to El Paso, Goodnight to Marfa to Langtry, and scores of places in between, the second of two towering volumes assembled by Gerald Moorhead and a team of dedicated authors offers readers a definitive guide to the architecture of the Lone Star State. Canvassing Spanish and... More

As it churns toward its terminus in southeastern Louisiana, the Mississippi River becomes a wide, muddy superhighway of activity, matched in might only by the megastructures of heavy industry that line its banks. The section of the river from Baton Rouge to New Orleans doubles as one of the most... More

Human beings in the 21st century hunger, often unconsciously, for places to live that are more than efficient, economical machines. Inhabiting the Sacred offers sound and innovative guidance to both citizens and planning professionals who seek to transform public spaces into sites that answer not... More

For roughly a century, the log cabin occupied a central and indispensable role in the rapidly growing United States. Although it largely disappeared as a living space, it lived on as a symbol of the settling of the nation. In her thought-provoking and generously illustrated new book, Alison... More

Cars, single-family houses, fallout shelters, air-conditioned malls—these are only some of the many interiors making up the landscape of American suburbia. Indoor America explores the history of suburbanization through the emergence of such spaces in the postwar years, examining their design, use,... More

Mount Vernon, despite its importance as the estate of George Washington, is subject to the same threats of time as any property and has required considerable resources and organization to endure as a historic site and house. This book provides a window into the broad scope of preservation work... More

Contemporary art, interdisciplinary research, traditional Appalachian culture, and advanced technology converge in The Mountain Lake Symposium and Workshop: Artists in Locale. Published to coincide with the exhibition of the same name, the book showcases the collaborative creative works that... More

Fish Town is an inspired documentary project focused on preserving, through photography and oral history recordings, the cultural and environmental remains of southeastern Louisiana’s fishing communities. Owing to a dying wild-caught seafood industry and a rapidly vanishing coastline, the places... More

Much of twentieth-century design was animated by the creative tension of its essential duality: is design an art or a science? In the postwar era, American architects sought to calibrate architectural practice to evolving scientific knowledge about humans and environments, thus elevating the... More

St. Mary’s County is where colonial Maryland began, with the establishment of St. Mary’s City on the site of an ancient Yaocomico village as Maryland’s first capital in 1634. Southern Maryland has been home to human occupation for at least 12,000 years, and since 1634 the area has seen myriad... More

This collection of essays by leading scholars and practitioners addresses a timely and essential question: How can we design, plan, and sustain built environments that will foster health and healing? With a salutogenic (health-promoting) focus, Healthy Environments, Healing Spaces addresses a range... More

"New Orleans isn’t like other cities," Stella tells her sister Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. Cradled in the crescent of the Mississippi River and surrounded by water, the city has faced numerous challenges since its founding as a French colonial outpost in 1718.... More

The Chesapeake region of eastern Virginia and Maryland offers a wealth of evidence for readers and researchers who want to discover what life was like in early America. In this eagerly anticipated volume, Camille Wells, one of the foremost experts on eighteenth-century Virginia architecture,... More

From Fayetteville, Little Rock, and Hot Springs to Jonesboro, El Dorado, Arkadelphia, Texarkana, and scores of places in between, the latest volume in the Buildings of the United States series provides the most comprehensive, authoritative, and up-to-date guide to the architecture of Arkansas. The... More

"By weaving in a single narrative the city's siting, geography, spatial qualities, culture, economy, society, and tragedy, it affords us an exceptional insight into the city as it is today, and remains a passionate journey through one of our nation's most fascinating places."--from Karen Kingsley's... More

Countering the widespread misconception that slavery existed only on plantations, and that urban areas were immune from its impacts, Slavery in the City is the first volume to deal exclusively with the impact of North American slavery on urban design and city life during the antebellum period. This... More

Of all building types, the skyscraper strikes observers as the most modern, in terms not only of height but also of boldness, scale, ingenuity, and daring. As a phenomenon born in late nineteenth-century America, it quickly became emblematic of New York, Chicago, and other major cities. Previous... More

As a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a masterwork of Thomas Jefferson, the "Academical Village" at the heart of the University of Virginia has long attracted the attention of visitors and scholars alike. Yet today Jefferson’s original structures make up only a small fraction of a campus comprising... More

"I trace my ancestry back to the Mayflower," writes Andrew S. Dolkart. "Not to the legendary ship that brought the Pilgrims to Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620, but to the more prosaic tenement on the southeast corner of East Broadway and Clinton Street named the Mayflower, where my father was born... More

From Milwaukee to Madison, Racine to Eau Claire, La Crosse to Sheboygan, and scores of places in between, tradition and progressivism have shaped Wisconsin's architectural landscape. This latest volume in the Society of Architectural Historians' Buildings of the United States series showcases... More

New Perspectives on Boston Furniture gathers together nineteen essays first delivered at the Winterthur Museum’s 2013 Furniture Forum. It amply illustrates how research concerning one of America’s most productive centers of furniture-making has diversified in the forty years since the Colonial... More

While many of its traditional elements, such as roads and utilities, do not change, urban infrastructure is undergoing a fascinating and necessary transformation in the wake of new information and communication technologies. This volume brings together many of the most important new voices in the... More

Over the past two hundred years, Americans have reproduced George Washington’s Mount Vernon plantation house more often, and in a greater variety of media, than any of their country’s other historic buildings. In this highly original new book, Lydia Mattice Brandt chronicles America’s obsession... More

Renowned for his extensive work in architectural history and historic preservation as an educator, scholar, activist, and public lecturer, Richard Longstreth is one of the most important architectural preservationists of the recent past. Looking beyond the Icons offers a generous and diverse... More