A History of American Architecture - Buidings in Their Cultural and Technological Context (Paperback, New edition)

Why did the colonial Americans give over a significant part of their homes to a grand staircase? Why did the Victorians drape their buildings ornate decoration? And why did American buildings grow so tall in the last decades of the 19th century. This book explores the history of American architecture from prehistoric times to the present, explaining why characteristic architectural forms arose at particular times and in particular places. The author shows how buildings express powerful cultural forces. Buildings embody attitudes such as human's relations to nature, social relations with others, our view of the individual, the value we place on science and technology, and our perception of our political role in the world. He also explains how designers sometimes expressed these ideas with available building technologies, while other times they invented new technologies in order to realize new ideas. Each chronologically arranged chapter begins with a broad survey of the dominant cultural fores and technology, and then discusses how the designers of the day responded with particular architectural forms. This survey includes the contemporary European cultural and architectural ideas, since Europe significantly influenced much of America's history.