1 comments about Cast-Iron Architecture in America: The Significance of James Bogardus (Norton Books for Architects & Designers).

1. My first encounter with skeleton structures was a plastic building set consisting of interlocking beams, columns, and very thin infill patterns. The concept of modular construction is one that many of us have been raised with, whereas at one time the idea of building with interchangeable lightweight metal units, sized to fit together in a variety of patterns, was a wholly new revelation. Understanding where this link occurs, manifested in the built environment by practical necessity, connects the modernity of International Style into the historic preservation movement.

   Several years ago I found myself involved in the business of repainting cast-iron facades in the Soho Cast Iron District in New York City and became intrigued to know more of the history of cast-iron architecture. Until I received this book, which I ordered from Amazon.com, I had to remain satisfied with a crude photocopy of an article by James Marston Fitch describing the mystery of the Laing Stores. The façade of the Laing Stores (erected in 1849 and the second of Bogardus's façade commissions) was dismantled in 1971, carefully stored with the intent of future restoration, and in 1974 were carted off by someone not-in-the-know like so many old steam radiators to be sold for scrap iron. This has engendered a small degree of paranoia with experienced preservationists and it has always been of value to me, as a preservation contractor, to know whereof the sentiment is derived. For whatever reason I have also been wondering for several years what goods were sold in the Laing Stores. This book provides the answer.

   James Bogardus (1800-1874) was a nineteenth-century American inventor, machinist, architect, engineer, manufacturer, and builder in a time, unlike our own, where an individual could do almost anything industrious and put a good name to it afterward. His inventions included the eccentric mill, the self-supporting cast iron façade, and, with construction of the McCullough Shot & Lead Company shot tower of nonstructural brick wall panels entirely supported by an iron frame to a height of 217 feet in 1855, he anticipated the skeletal steel-framework of our urban environment. At the time this structure was the tallest in Manhattan.

   I find it curious that the modern skyscraper was born of the necessity of the armaments industry. There is something else I had been wondering about -- the function of a shot tower is that lead is passed through a sieve at the top, falls a distance where it becomes spherical, and then plunges into a bath of cold water where it hardens. The necessity of the structure of a shot tower is to be tall, economical to build, and to not allow lead to not be blown around by gusting winds.

   Bogardus, in an age where mechanical invention was the new wave, was a practical and ambitious entrepreneurial builder seeking profitable income. It is ironic to consider that if he were alive today he might not have any particular interest to looking into the past or especial concern for preservation of the historic fabric that he was building for us then.

   "As for his customers, they probably were not concerned with architectural revolution or looking into the future. They wanted structures that accomplished the task at hand. Bogardus's buildings did so. And that was that."

   The above is about as speculative as this book gets -- there is a lot of factual information, dated and attributed thoroughly, that represents a great amount of admirable research. Unlike many books full of facts derived from historical records, this book is readable, the authors have a smooth and patient prose style, and I recommend the reading to anyone with a serious curiosity about cast-iron architecture, particularly if they are the owners of one of these beautiful facades. For those readers not familiar with the streets and buildings of New York City I advise keeping a street map and an AIA guide nearby (duly noted in the bibliography). I read the book on the subway, the dead time between business meetings, and was pleased to recognize a few of the buildings when emerging above ground. The author sticks to the task at hand and does not wander very far into concurrent events, therefore a timeline of American history or a short history of New York City would assist the casual reader in imagining a familiar context. The year 1855 in which Bogardus's first shot tower was built marks the publication of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and the building of the first oil refinery in Pittsburgh.

   Though the majority of Bogardus's work was in New York City he built cast-iron structures in several other locations including Chicago, Philadelphia, Albany, Charleston, Washington DC, Baltimore, San Francisco, Santo Domingo (a lighthouse), and Havana. From 1848 to 1862 Bogardus built 43 structures, with five of them now remaining standing where you can go see them for yourself, four in New York City and one, the Iron Clad Building, in Cooperstown, NY.

   Margot Gayle, a founder of the Friends of Cast Iron Architecture, is an authority on cast-iron architecture and has been a major inspiration behind the historic preservation movement in New York City. She recently celebrated her 90th birthday, and deserves as thoroughly researched a biography as she has provided us for Bogardus.

   First printed in APT Communique 1998.

2 comments about Energy-Efficient Houses (Great Houses).

1. While the book was published in 1993, it is a compliation of articles that appeared in the magazine Fine Homebuilding,leading up to that point. Thus, you'll find articles from the mid to late 80s. While many of the designs are dated and at times impractical, because of technological improvements since then (and really now, how many people can live in an earth berm house?) The take home message shouldn't be lost in, at times, bizarre approaches: heating the floor via an embedded series of air ducts.
   
   Rather, the take home message should be (and is readily apparent with the cross sectional construction drawings) in insulating the home and making it as tight as possible. Because of the excellent photography and the diagrams, I would start here, but certainly not end here. Moreover, for $5, it's not a bad starting point.



2. This book may have been good for it's time, but technology advances have dated it. It also leaves out numerous efficiency improving technologies and construction technics for existing homes. IMHO, it is better used as a coffee table book than a planning guide for your home- especially if you don't have $500,000 to spend constructing a house. Still, it gives some good food for thought.

No comments about The Seattle Bungalow: People And Houses, 1900-1940 (A Samuel and Althea Stroum Book).

1 comments about The Mighty Fallen: Our Nation's Greatest War Memorials.

1. A wonderful book, although by no means definitive. It includes wonderful photography of many of the U.S. military's most important monuments (as well as some Canadian ones). The only fault I see with the book is that almost all of the monuments are on the East Coast, whereas there are many significant monuments at military posts in the west which should have been included.

1 comments about The Environmental Imagination.

1. College-level readers of architecture or environmental design will find this a fine history which uses themes and a chronological arrangement from the 18th century to modern times to survey the history of environmental design. While The Environmental Imagination: Technics and Poetics of the Architectural Environment could have also been featured in our Arts section, it's reviewed here for its wider applications to any college-level holding strong on poetics and environment: essays consider qualitative dimensions of the environment and both old and new technologies of mechanical services, building design choices, and diversity.

5 comments about The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States (Architecture, Landscape and Amer Culture).

1. I tend to agree with you sigdragon. Most authors outside of the field who write on this topic do not do the proper research on mental illness/psychology/psychiatry. The reader must be very cautious and hesitant to accept knowledge from a writer who may be writing in their field but incorporating vast data from outside of their field. It is difficult to find well researched and accurate books on history/treatment of mental illness but there are some out there. Two come to mind: "The Art of Asylum Keeping: Thomas Story Kirkbride and the Origins of American Psychiatry" by Nancy Tomes. Also "Asylum: A Mid-Century Madhouse and Its Lessons about Our Mentally Ill Today" by Enoch Callaway, who is very well versed in the field. I am still waiting for my copy of the latter to arrive, so hopefully I can post a review on it by the end of the month. Cheers



2. Once again, Prof. Yanni has contributed a significant work to the literature on architecture and society with "The Architecture of Madness." Following her well-received study of Victorain museum architecture, "Nature's Museums," her new work vividly depicts the relationship among social views on mental illness, prevailing trends in the treatment of mental illness, and the institutions into which those sufferers were admitted. A reader can only agree with Cotterill and Solomon that Yanni's work is, on Solomon's words, a "masterful job of blending meticulous research and superb analysis with well crafted writing."



3. 
   The Architecture of Madness is a thoughtful, important, and visually stunning book, which, for the first time, studies the relations between architecture and theories of treating the insane in public institutions in nineteenth-century America. The author is an architecture historian who is interested in relations among architecture, science, and social and cultural history and whose wide-ranging intellect is drawn to topics that open up the importance of architecture within the intellectual culture of early modernity. Like her previous book, Nature's Museums: Victorian Science and the Architecture of Display, this new volume is beautifully produced with text and accompanying drawings, graphics, and photography arranged on spacious, larger-than-usual pages which are inviting to the eye and also inviting to be read. Moreover, what characterizes this book, as it characterized Nature's Museums, is the author's clear, exact, highly readable prose. Yanni is a first-rate scholar and writes precisely, but she wears her learning lightly, eschews scholarly jargon. The extensive bibliography and notes are there, at the back, but this is a book designed to interest general reader and scholar alike--anyone who wants to know more about the movement for moral treatment of the mentally ill and the effect on institutional care of early ideas of environmental determinism. Her care and humility as a scholar are evident in what she perceives as the "respectful distance" her subject required: "if I have not performed feats of scholarly acrobatics, that is intentional, and, I believe, appropriate, for this is a book about places that witnessed a great deal of suffering." Finally, one of the most poignant observations Yanni makes in the Introduction concerns a critical disjunction between science and architecture that effected the buildings of her study as the nineteenth century ended. Ideas about care had begun to change: "In many ways, these buildings gave physical form, however, imperfect, to the ideals of their makers. But psychiatry moved on, and by the middle of the twentieth century, Victorian buildings had no medical credibility....This desperate obsolescence is one of the central issues in architecture and science." Her perception captures the delicate balance, in retrospect, of the moment Yanni has chosen to explore, when architecture and science were drawn to each other so fruitfully.



4. 
   Carla Yanni's book will be the classic text on
   19th century insane asylums. She has done
   a masterful job of blending meticulous research
   and superb analysis with well crafted writing.
   Yanni, who is well versed in the history of architecture
   and the history of science, tells a compelling,
   accessible story.



5. I bought 2 copies of this book - one for myself and one for a friend in the Mental Health field as it sounded as if it would be a nice addition to both of our Mental Health libraries.
   The book, however, has some fundamental flaws in areas I have in depth knowledge of which causes me to question the accuracy of the areas with which I am less familiar.
   The author clearly has a very limited knowledge of Psychiatry and Mental Illness from both an historical and modern day perspective. The book attributes the decline in populations in State mental hospitals from the 1950's on to among other things - the refusal by them to directly admit voluntary patients. This is strange as, at least in New York State - the institutions mentioned in her book were still admitting patients referring themselves directly from the streets well into the 1980's.
   
   There are many other examples too numerous to list which betray her very limited knowledge of the field. The book would have been much better if it had confined itself to architecture and left out the author's almost "grade school need to write a report" attempts to explain mental illness and its treatments.
   
   The author has, by trying to go beyond her knowledge base, turned what could have been a very good book into one which starts out with a great premise and ends with some pitiful speeches on why the author thinks these large facilities declined- decades before they actually did and her belief that psychiatric hospitals are not needed but ones for physical illness are.
   
   Would recommend you borrow this book from the library to read as it is too expensive to own with its flaws.

3 comments about Gunnar Asplund.

1. College-level art library holdings will find much to recommend with GUNNAR ASPLUND, the only detailed monograph in print on the Swedish architect. Given that Asplund is hardly an unknown name in the world of architecture, it's amazing to note that this is the only such reference in print, providing a scholarly survey of all of his works both popular and lesser-known, and packing in new color photos along with sketches and drawings. Perhaps it's because Asplund's buildings don't neatly fit into architectural categories, and thus have missed extensive survey in genre-specific considerations - but they certainly deserve the depth GUNNAR ASPLUND provides, here.
   
   Diane C. Donovan
   California Bookwatch



2. The influence of Scandinavian design in the United States, if not in the whole world has been immense. The clean simple lines of functional design pioneered over there have influenced more designs than have been built in Scandinavia. Gunnar Asplund is one of the lessor known (in the United States) architects of Scandinavian design.
   
   Born in 1885, he began his career in 1907 with a small villa. A few years later he won his first competition for a school which launched his professional career. From then until his death in 1940 he designed a range of structures that reach from small homes through large commercial/government/public buildings. They remain classics of their type.
   
   This profusely illustrated book is unusual in that it includes not only photographs of the buildings as they exist now, but also many line drawings that illustrate the original concepts. As such this is both a tribute to his designs and an idea book for designs being made today.



3. This is a beautifully illustrated, comprehensive monograph on the underrated Swedish architect Gunnar Asplund. Although Asplund's work is contemporary with Mies, Le Corbusier, and Aalto, it is of an entirely different current -- Asplund weaves together vernacular, classical and modernist influences in a way that stands solidly outside standard, official history of Modern Architecture. Like the Slovenian architect Plecnick, Asplund's work has always been tricky for historians to place in the march from Wright to Gropius to Mies that is the standard trajectory of early 20th c architectural history.
   
   While that fact may contribute somewhat to the neglect of his reputation, this is undeserved. Aplund's best projects, like the Snellman House, the Enskede Cemetery, or the Stockholm City Library are phenomenal masterpieces of 20th century architecture. The photographs of the work in this book are excellent, and fortunately plenty of line drawings are included too. Jones' summary of Asplund's career is lucid and solidly researched. I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in early modernist architecture or Scandinavian design.

1 comments about Northwest Victorians (Beautiful America).

1. What a great find. We were visiting a friends B&B and she had this book sitting on the coffee table so I started flipping through the pages looking at all the houses, and then I turned the page and there was our house! The William G White house in Olympia, WA It is now the Swantown Inn Bed & Breakfast. The book is a great resource of local Victorian homes, and has come in handy while we look at paint schemes for when we repaint, knowing that the house was yellow at one point and what it looked like is just a plus!

1 comments about Victorian Gothic House Style: An Architectural and Interior Design Source Book for Home Owners.

1. I just bought my first house, an 1920's victorian style house. This book is being a good send to help me decorate and restore it to it's former glory.
   
   Great additions besides this book:
   * Junk Chic
   * Irish Country Style
   * French Country Junk Chic

1 comments about Sophia-Maria: A Holistic Vision of Creation.

1. If you have ever sensed that there is a gap in Christianity - and that Our Lady somehow fills that gap in an indefinable way - you will find all the answers which are already there in your heart in this book. Beautifully illustrated, unbeatable scholarship - it is all here for you. Open your heart to Sophia Mary by reading this book, and She will remain with you for a lifetime.