American Architects and Their Books to 1848

by Hafertepe, Kenneth; O'Gorman, James F.

• ISBN13: 9781558492820
• ISBN10: 1558492828
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-09-01
• Publisher: Univ of Massachusetts Pr

Summary

Since the Renaissance, books and drawings have been a primary means of communication among architects and their colleagues and clients. In this volume, twelve historians explore the use of books by architects in America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a period when the profession of architecture was first emerging in the United States.

As architects separated themselves from amateur and gentlemen designers on the one hand and masons and carpenters on the other, members of the profession were distinguished by their ability to draw and their possession of a common body of learning gleaned from printed sources. Clients and patrons expected architects to derive their designs from precedents communicated in books. These publications reproduced the work of European masters and, eventually, Anglo-American examples as well.

The essays in this volume range from studies of architectural publications available in the colonies, to the appearance of American architectural incunabula, to the revolution in architectural publishing that occurred in t

Table of Contents

Illustrations	ix
Introduction: Architects and Books	xiii
Kenneth Hafertepe
James F. O'Gorman
The Availability of Architectural Books in Eighteenth-Century New England	1	(16)
Abbott Lowell Cummings
The Ownership of Architectural Books in Colonial Virginia	17	(18)
Bennie Brown
George Washington, Mount Vernon, and the Pattern Books	35	(24)
Robert F. Dalzell Jr.
Thomas Jefferson's ``Bibliomanie'' and Architecture	59	(14)
Richard Guy Wilson
Defining the Profession: Books, Libraries, and Architects	73	(18)
Martha J. Mcnamara
Bulfinch, Buildings, and Books	91	(18)
James F. O'Gorman
The Architectural Libraries of Benjamin Henry Latrobe	109	(20)
Jeffrey A. Cohen
The Country Builder's Assistant: Text and Context	129	(20)
Kenneth Hafertepe
Owen Biddle and The Young Carpenter's Assistant	149	(14)
Michael J. Lewis
Architectural Books in New York: From McComb to Lafever	163	(18)
Damie Stillman
Asher Benjamin, Andrew Jackson Downing: Two Divergent Forms of Bookmaking	181	(18)
Charles B. Wood III
Louisa Tuthill, Ithiel Town, and the Beginnings of Architectural History Writing in America	199	(18)
Sarah Allaback
Contributors	217	(2)
Index	219