A Field Guide to American Houses by Virginia Savage McAlester
Subtitled "The Definitive Guide to Identifying and Understanding America's Domestic Architecture," this 2013 update to the 1984 original is an exhaustive but engrossing 884 pages (including 18 pages of endnotes, 24 pages of references, six pages of acknowledgements, three pages of illustration and four pages of photo credits, and a 20-page index).
I serve on my city's historic preservation commission, and I thought I should learn something about house styles to better do my (volunteer) job. The book begins with a pictorial key designed to help a user narrow down possible house styles based on the pictured feature, and this is followed by a pictorial glossary illustrating those features. This will be immediately useful to those who already have a background in architecture.
I thought the introductory chapters on the style (fashions), form (shapes), structure (anatomy), and neighborhoods (groupings) of American houses provided an outstanding framework for the rest of the book.
The chapter on neighborhoods was very useful in understanding how the development of a community has changed over the years, based on types (rural, urban, suburban - railroad, streetcar, and automobile, post-suburban), ground plans (rectilinear or curvilinear), overlay patterns (green space, streets and circulation, blocks and lots), and development influences (the developer/builder, home financing, growth rates, and governance such as zoning, deed restrictions, and subdivision regulations). This chapter ends with a section on how to "read" a streetscape (houses on the block, street trees and enclosures, the house on the lot, and the surveys) to learn a neighborhood's history.
The surveys section was particularly interesting. I'd always wondered why some of the older cities in Texas (such as Houston and Dallas) had parts of their downtown laid out as grids at an angle. Turns out (page 101):
In California, New Mexico, and Texas - all under Spanish rule prior to being annexed by the United States - another grid orientation was required under Spanish law. The Laws of the Indies prescribed a 45° southwest-by-northeast angle for laying out streets. It was believe that this was the most desirable orientation for maximum light and ventilation....This orientation is seen today in the downtown area of older cities of these states....[In] Dallas, Texas,...John Grigsby's circa 1837 land grant for fighting in the Texas Revolution [has] boundaries and resulting streets [that] run in the northeast-southwest grid prescribed by the Laws of the Indies, a practice continued by the Republic of Texas.
The rest of the book then goes, mostly chronologically, through the different home styles in America. Here is an outline of what is covered:
Folk houses -- Native American, Pre-Railroad, National, Manufactured
Colonial houses (1600-1820) -- Postmedieval English, Dutch Colonial, French Colonial, Spanish Colonial, Georgian, Federal, Early Classical Revival
Romantic houses (1820-1880) -- Greek Revival, Gothic Revival, Italianate, Exotic Revivals, Octagon
Victorian houses (1860-1900) -- Second Empire, Stick, Queen Anne, Shingle, Richardson Romanesque, Folk Victorian
Eclectic houses (1880-1940) --
-- English and Anglo-American period houses (Colonial Revival, Neoclassical, Tudor)
-- French period houses (Chateauesque, Beaux Arts, French Eclectic)
-- Mediterranean and Spanish period houses (Italian Renaissance, Mission, Spanish Revival, Monterey, Pueblo Revival)
Modern houses (1900-present) --
-- Early modern (Prairie, Craftsman, Art/Streamline Moderne and Art Deco)
-- Bankers modern (Minimal Traditional, Ranch, Split-Level)
-- Mainstream modern (International, Contemporary, Shed, and other 20th-century and 21st-century modern styles, like Brutalism)
And finally, a new chapter for this edition, on styled houses since 1935 (Mansard, Styled Ranch, Millennium Mansion (aka McMansion), New Traditional, and American Vernacular), and an appendix on approaches to construction in the 20th and 21st centuries.
I'd heard of (and seen) many of these styles before, but probably knew a few identifying characteristics for only a few of them, such as Greek Revival, Second Empire, Queen Anne, Tudor, and the Mediterranean/Spanish styles. That was only because I'd encountered some of them in research I've done, both related to local history and to the work an architect in the family (Ewald Theodore Pape).
Most of the chapters started out with an illustration identifying key features of the style and its principal subtypes, which was also summarized in text in the first two chapter sections. This was followed by illustrations and descriptions of variants and details of that style, in things such as roofs, windows, doors, etc.). Next came a section on the occurrence of that style (when and where it appeared and was most popular), followed by comments in the ending chapter text. Next came numerous black-and--white photographs of examples of the different subtypes of the style, along with captions giving their locations and build dates, and sometimes additional comments.
I can't say after reading the book that I can distinguish house styles any better (there are SO many, and many later styles are variations on earlier ones), but I can say I now understand different roof types (gables, hipped, mansard, gambrel, etc.) and many architectural terms (such as pilaster, balustrade, entablature, pediment, cornice, etc.) that I didn't understand before seeing so many drawings and photographs illustrating them.
I wondered why there were SO many photographs and examples from Dallas. Turns out author Virginia Savage McAlester (1943-2020) was known as the "Queen of Dallas Preservation." I was impressed that she did this revised edition without her former husband, and finished it while being treated for myelofibrosis, the disease that ultimately took her life.
For a variety of reasons, I won't be on the Historic Preservation Commission after my term ends in January 2022, but I think I'm going to buy this as an e-book. It will be much lighter!
Little Leonardo's Fascinating World of Paleontology by Jeff Bond, illustrated by Greg Paprocki
This nonfiction science book has engaging, almost cartoon-like illustrations by Greg Paprocki that are reminiscent of Little Golden Books. They accompany a vocabulary-rich text by paleontologist Jeff Bond, who is the education director for the George Eccles Dinosaur Park in Utah. These vocabulary words are in all caps in the text, and are further defined in a two-page glossary at the end of the book. The book also includes instructions for six activities, as well as a page with one-paragraph biographies on six paleontologists.
The stated age range for the book is 4-8. But this isn't a dinosaur book, it's about paleontology! I feel 4-to-5-year-olds, especially in a school or other group setting, are too young for this book. The vocabulary, in my opinion, is a little too much for that age, and the activity involving putting plastic toy bugs in gummy "amber" is not appropriate for that age group (i.e., the book says it's ok to eat the juice-gelatin-honey "amber" the plastic bugs are embedded in, but not the bugs themselves). I'd use the book for ages 6-10 (or about first through fourth grades) instead.
The Life and Times of Jo Mora: Iconic Artist of the American West by Peter Hiller
Jo (Joseph Jacinto) Mora, 1876-1947, was a versatile American artist, born in Uruguay to a Spanish sculptor father and French mother. He worked in a variety of forms and media: paintings in gouache and watercolor; pencil, pen-and-ink, and Conté crayon drawings; cartoons and comics; photographs (including cyanotypes); murals; sculpture (including bronze and wood); architectural adornments and embellishments; dioramas; calligraphy; etchings; and posters and maps. He was also an author and historian.
This biography is by Peter Hiller, curator of the Jo Mora Trust, which includes an extensive archive of letters and diaries written by Mora that almost make this book an autobiography, as Hiller quotes extensively from them.
Mora came to the United States as a child and spent his youth in New York City, New Jersey, and Boston. In 1903, he went to California, lived and worked on a ranch as a cowboy, and visited the old Spanish missions on horseback, photographing, drawing, painting, and writing all the way. He traveled to Arizona to live and work among the Hopi and Navajo tribe for over two years from 1904 to 1906, creating a series of paintings of tribe members in kachina and other ceremonial costumes.
Mora moved permanently to California in 1907, ultimately settling in Monterey County. He is probably best known for his creative maps, which he called cartes, and other posters with Western themes. I particularly like the cartes he created of Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, and Yosemite National Parks.
I requested this book to read and review because of its beautiful dust jacket. The top depicts a portion of Mora's famous Evolution of the Cowboy carte/poster (also known as Sweetheart of the Rodeo), while the bottom shows a photograph of Mora working on his equally famous (and for a long time, lost) Fable murals.
I really enjoyed reading this book and learning about this (unknown to me) artist, primarily in his own words. The book has an appendix listing Mora's works that are publicly available to view, five pages of end notes, a selected bibliography, and a six-page index.
The only thing I didn't like about this book was that the illustrations were too small. I often had to pull out a magnifying glass to see the details. It might be because this book was originally published as a limited run in a larger format (with reproduction copies of two cartes in the deluxe edition) by the Book Club of California, with a starting price of over $371. At $21-$24 for the e-book or hardcover, this edition is a bargain.
© Amanda Pape - 2021
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