Everyday Architecture of the Mid-Atlantic: Looking at Buildings and Landscapes

Everyday Architecture of the Mid-Atlantic: Looking at Buildings and Landscapes. By GABRIELLE M. LANIER and BERNARD L. HERMAN. Creating the North American Landscape. GREGORY CONNIFF, BONNIE LLOYD, EDWARD K. MULLER, and DAVID SCHUYLER, Consulting Editors. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press in cooperation with the Center for American Places, 1997. xi, 407 pp. $55.00 cloth; $29.95 paper.

THERE was a time when most architectural historians thought of buildings primarily as a series of stylistic categories. Georgian, Federal, Greek, and gothic revivals followed each other in an easily traceable chronological sequence. Books such as Nikolaus Pevsner's famous county surveys of English buildings were essentially devoted to naming the style and describing the decorative features of local landmarks. Numerous American field guides followed the same format. Unfortunately, this approach placed such high value on description and stylistic categorization that the buildings became merely a sort of three-dimensional sculpture, independent of the lives of the people who made and used them. For twenty years now, younger historians such as Gabrielle M....