American Architecture

Description

America has always presented a unique challenge to architects: should they emulate the Old World or respond to the demands of the New? David Handlin tells the complex story with lucidity and insight. Almost from its seventeenth-century beginnings, American architecture was subject to two apparently contradictory processesthe practical and the grandiose. The first comes through in the vernacular buildings of rural America, the innovations of Jefferson, Bulfinch's fine civic buildings, the offices and factories of the Industrial Age, and the comfortable domestic tradition that lies behind the houses of the Greene Brothers and Frank Lloyd Wright. The second is seen in the unprecedented daring of the Chicago Schoolgreat engineers like Adler united with great designers like Sullivan; in the majestic state capitols, exhibition halls, and public buildings by firms such as McKim, Mead & White; in the luxury of Fifth Avenue mansions; and in the exuberance of commercial Manhattan.The revised edition ends with a lively account of recent developmentsvirtual architecture, the revival of historical styles (including modernism), the thirst for striking originality, and a new interest in the local, with figures including Stern, Meier, Gehry, and Mockbee. 264 illustrations.

David P. Handlin was born in Boston and educated at Harvard College and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He has a PhD from the University of Cambridge, England, where from 1973 to 1978 he lectured in the Department of Architecture. From 1979 to 1985 he was Associate Professor of Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He is now president and founding partner of Handlin, Garrahan, Zachos and Associates, Inc., an architecture firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is the author of The American Home, Architecture and Society, 1815-1915 (1979).