Taking the Land to Make the City: A Bicoastal History of North America Taking the Land to Make the City: A Bicoastal History of North America. By Mary P Ryan. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2019. x, 438 pp. $40.00.) Daniel Bluestone Daniel Bluestone Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 107, Issue 4, March 2021, Pages 993–994, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaaa486 Published: 01 March 2021

In the late nineteenth century, housing reformers and public health officials mapped urban mortality and quickly realized that human density, crowded building lots, and poor sanitation correlated closely with increased levels of urban mortality. To mitigate these conditions, reformers advocated for more open and natural landscape, more light, and more sunshine within neighborhoods, but more importantly, within the bounds of residential lots. They began to rethink and reimagine landscape from within the context of their own cosmopolitan urbanity and density. They focused on the importance of dwelling not only in buildings but also in landscape. This chapter will explore two significant Chicago housing and planning initiatives that grappled directly with the reform nexus that existed between dwelling and landscape. The first is the planning advocacy that developed in the City Club between 1905 and 1915. These efforts culminated in 1913 with a major competition for a residential subdivision on a 160-acre site. City Club reformers were especially inspired by English Garden City and German zoning models, with a special interest in single-family housing. This led the reformers to overlook a significant Chicago vernacular, the Chicago courtyard apartment, which had already achieved many of the results that reformers sought unsuccessfully in their advocacy of the garden city planning.

Translating Nature: Cross-Cultural Histories of Early Modern Science Translating Nature: Cross-Cultural Histories of Early Modern Science. Ed. by Jaime Marroquín Arredondo and Ralph Bauer. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. vi, 355 pp. $55.00.) Seth Archer Seth Archer Utah State University, Logan, Utah Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 107, Issue 4, March 2021, Pages 992–993, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaaa485 Published: 01 March 2021

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Chicago developers, architects, and residents defined a new residential vernacular: brick courtyard apartments, which massed units in low-rise buildings around landscaped courtyards, often open to the street. These buildings accommodated higher levels of residential density and seemingly did the opposite as well—preserved and cultivated nature. The Chicago courtyard apartment creatively negotiated the social and cultural tension between reverence for the iconic single-family house and an urban society increasingly occupying multiple-unit dwellings. The designs drew upon the interest in sunlight, air circulation, and natural landscape that influenced contemporary tenement house reform, urban hospital design, the small park and playground movement, and the rethinking of the dimensions and possibilities of residential lawns and gardens. In Framing Landscape While Building Density: Chicago Courtyard Apartments, 1891–1929, Daniel Bluestone looks closely at specific Chicago courtyard apartments, unpacking the design and cultural logic at play in their construction.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Chicago developers, architects, and residents defined a new residential vernacular: brick courtyard apartments, which massed units in low-rise buildings around landscaped courtyards, often open to the street. These buildings accommodated higher levels of residential density and seemingly did the opposite as well—preserved and cultivated nature. The Chicago courtyard apartment creatively negotiated the social and cultural tension between reverence for the iconic single-family house and an urban society increasingly occupying multiple-unit dwellings. The designs drew upon the interest in sunlight, air circulation, and natural landscape that influenced contemporary tenement house reform, urban hospital design, the small park and playground movement, and the rethinking of the dimensions and possibilities of residential lawns and gardens. In Framing Landscape While Building Density: Chicago Courtyard Apartments, 1891–1929, Daniel Bluestone looks closely at specific Chicago courtyard apartments, unpacking the design and cultural logic at play in their construction.

Preservation's tangible qualities are the source of its greatest strength and responsibility. At the same time, the essential materialism of preserved places has led preservationists to steward these objects of preservation desire as if they are ends in themselves, often sapping preservation's vitality, relevance, and civic promise. Preservationists believe in the power of buildings and yet they regulate these very buildings in ways that short circuit the essential links between historic places, heritage, politics, and the future. This essay explores the curatorial conundrum through a series of case studies and proposes an alternative approach to Design + Heritage.

In 1912, building on established Jim Crow laws, the city council in Charlottesville, Virginia, unanimously passed its segregation ordinance. The ordinance made it illegal for whites to move onto blocks that were majority black. Similarly, African Americans were not permitted to move onto blocks that were majority white. Residences facing both sides of a street between intersecting crossstreets constituted a block. Transgressions were punishable by fines; persistent violators could be jailed for thirty to ninety days. Domestic servants could share the private homes and lots with their employers regardless of racial differences. The city council did not require immediate racial separation; the majority block segregation rule applied whenever an existing residence was sold to a new owner or leased to a new tenant. Developers had to declare the race of all new residential blocks in their building permit applications. If the U.S. Supreme Court had not declared such laws unconstitutional in 1917, the segregation ordinance would have profoundly changed the neighborhood along South, Garrett, and Fifth Streets, immediately adjacent to Charlottesville’s downtown, just two blocks south of city hall. Here, single white women and African Americans had shared the neighborhood for decades. The white women were prostitutes. They lived in relatively substantial brothels surrounded by more modest houses, occupied by workingclass blacks. Despite their illegality, these brothels operated relatively unfettered for over three quarters of a century before 1950. This essay will explore the architectural, urban, and social form of Charlottesville prostitution; in the course of these decades, city police, judiciary, political leaders, and university officials all played a role in maintaining Charlottesville’s red light district. In this neighborhood race and urban space intersected, transgressing the social mores codified by the segregation ordinance and underscoring the racial and gender dynamics that have often shaped American urbanism.

Through Chicago building and writing, Louis Sullivan explored the aesthetic and urban possibilities of skyscrapers, particularly their composition on urban skylines. Sullivan envisioned the skyscraper's eclipse of the fairly uniform street-wall urbanism constituted by what he called "old single or 'shirt front' buildings." In its place he promoted the skyscraper urbanism of "full four-front or all around structures." He thus pointed the way toward a defining feature of modern architecture and modern skylines-their three-dimensional urban character. Here, Sullivan envisioned an important balancing of the rights to the city between private builders and the broader civic realm.

This essay focuses on the adaptive reuse of tobacco warehouses and factories along Tobacco Row in Richmond, Virginia, between 1980 and 2005. This work encompassed an impressive environmental strategy that ambitiously recycled existing buildings and infrastructure to new urban uses. Even while promoting salutary environmental and conservation goals, adaptive reuse, by definition, also pushes buildings away from their historic function and often away from their historic significance; buildings are adapted to new uses for which they were not built. This essay will explore the tendency of the adaptive reuse process to preserve the historic building even as it obscures the building's early history. In Richmond and throughout the United States, local, state, and federal guidelines for preservation and rehabilitation generally give primacy to building exteriors over interior plan, urban context, industrial technology, and the spaces of labor. In treating building façades as the primary locus of historical meaning, historic preservationists often efface the very history that they are charged with protecting. In considering the effectiveness of adaptive reuse, it is important to weigh more than simply what happens to building exteriors. We need to consider the extent to which these projects encourage a capacity for critical reflections on the histories associated with particular places. It is also vital to assess the relationship between those histories, our understanding of the world around us today, and our own agency as citizens.

In 1845 Philip St. George Cocke commissioned Alexander Jackson Davis to design a Gothic revival villa for Belmead. In doing so he radically departed from the tradition of Palladian and classical architecture that had characterized elite Virginia plantations since the mid-eighteenth century. In A. J. Davis’s Belmead: Picturesque Aesthetics in the Land of Slavery, Daniel Bluestone argues that a Davis design resonated differently on the banks of the James River than on the banks of the Hudson. The appeal of Davis’s design lay in its sensitivity to the reciprocity between buildings and landscape, highlighting Cocke’s advocacy of greater stewardship of the land in the place of generations of ruinous agricultural practices. Beyond his villa and his land, Cocke commissioned Davis to design Belmead’s slave quarters. This was an attempt to harmonize himself with his slaves and the nation with an agricultural system based upon chattel slavery rather than yeomen farmers. This essay encourages us to look beyond the universals that often frame architectural history discussions of picturesque aesthetics to situate picturesque designs more precisely within a place-centered context of client vision and socio-cultural meaning.

Over the past generation the focus of American architectural history has shifted from a dominant preoccupation with chronicling changes in the style and formal aesthetics of leading architects to a broader interest in the social and cultural aspects of American buildings and landscapes. American architectural history has reflected and drawn on scholarship in American history; it has, for example, adopted the conceptual frames of race, class, gender, and ethnicity to open new perspectives on the built landscape. American architectural history has become increasingly relevant to a cross-disciplinary effort to understand human history and experience. Elizabeth Collins Cromley’s The Food Axis impressively demonstrates the rich possibilities of merging social history with architectural analysis. Her innovative thematic approach to domestic space should be of interest to architectural historians, designers, and historic preservationists.This well-written account, drawing on architectural plans, advertising, personal accounts, and critical commentary and advice literature, should also engage historians of American family life and society, advocates of the burgeoning local-food movement, enthusiastic cooks, and residents who want to engage the shifting historical patterns of food preparation and consumption within and around the American home.

Book Review| June 01 2011 Review: Place, Race, and Story: Essays on the Past and Future of Historic Preservation by Ned Kaufman; Our Unprotected Heritage: Whitewashing the Destruction of Our Cultural and Natural Environment by Thomas F. King Ned KaufmanPlace, Race, and Story: Essays on the Past and Future of Historic Preservation. New York: Routledge, 2009, xi + 421pp., 50 b/w illus. $39.95, ISBN9780415965408Thomas F. KingOur Unprotected Heritage: Whitewashing the Destruction of Our Cultural and Natural Environment. Walnut Creek, Calif.: Left Coast Press, 2009, 200pp., no illus. $24.95 (paper), ISBN1598743813 Daniel Bluestone Daniel Bluestone University of Virginia Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2011) 70 (2): 257–258. https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2011.70.2.257 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Daniel Bluestone; Review: Place, Race, and Story: Essays on the Past and Future of Historic Preservation by Ned Kaufman; Our Unprotected Heritage: Whitewashing the Destruction of Our Cultural and Natural Environment by Thomas F. King. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 1 June 2011; 70 (2): 257–258. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2011.70.2.257 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentJournal of the Society of Architectural Historians Search Place, Race, and Story presents essays on historic preservation's past and future that are intellectually provocative, culturally incisive, and politically astute. At its core this book challenges the twentieth-century alliance, or confusion, between the practices of architectural history and historic preservation. That alliance often tended to define historic preservation as a curatorial pursuit, committed to preserving a three-dimensional encyclopedia of the objects of historians’ desire, aesthetically and stylistically considered. This framing of historic preservation drastically narrowed its social and cultural possibilities. Ned Kaufman points the way toward a more relevant, expansive, and vital historic preservation movement; a movement committed to social equity, steeped in ethnography and politics and guided less by the imperatives of architectural history practice and more by sensitivity to the human values manifested in everyday attachments to place. Some historic preservation practitioners have used the criteria and models of architectural history to insulate their work from social... You do not currently have access to this content.

Buildings, Landscapes, and Memory: Case Studies in Historic Preservation explores historically and critically the historic preservation movement in the United States. Analyzing ten extraordinary places, this provocative analysis of historic preservation's past and future will transform contemporary understanding of the movement, examining assumptions about why history, heritage, and place should matter. It ranges broadly from a discussion of the commemoration of place in the Marquis de Lafayette's triumphal tour of the United States in 1824-25 to speculation about the cultural and political import of interpreting history on EPA Superfund toxic waste sites. Thinking critically about preservation requires also thinking critically about its opposite: destruction. The book treats the movement to conserve the Hudson River Palisades from destruction at the hands of trap rock quarrymen as well as the effort to save Dutch-American homesteads that stood in the path of development in Brooklyn. It explores the intersection between race, culture, and preservation in the 1940s effort of African Americans to preserve the Mecca Flats in Chicago, an apartment building that was the subject of popular blues music and that was threatened by Mies van der Rohe's designs for the Illinois Institute of Technology. Focusing on the relationship among tradition, preservation, and modern design, Buildings, Landscapes, and Memory explores the making of Eero Saarinen's Jefferson National Expansion Memorial Arch on the historic Mississippi riverfront in St. Louis as well as the tension between tradition and modern design at Thomas Jefferson's University of Virginia, declared a World Heritage site in 1987. Engaging early efforts to build an economy on preservation and heritage tourism, the book also looks at the creation of Virginia's historic highway marker program in the 1920s.