“There is a new architectural history to be written, and there is an old architectural history to be rewritten.” John Coolridge, 1942.

As if in renewed response to Coolridge’s words, a new history of American architecture has emerged during the past four decades. American Architectural History is a collection of twenty-four previously published writings, on subjects ranging from colonial to contemporary times and representing a diverse group of individuals, sites, objects, issues, events and scholarly teachers of American architecture and cultural history.

Native American Architecture

While European settlers did not always recognise or appreciate their efforts, Native American groups had long preceded them in shaping the land for human habitation.

It is impossible to single out why a native dwelling looked and worked the way it did. The indigenous natives responded to the climate around them and made the most of natural building materials at hand. The evolution of a particular habitation was also affected by social organisation, patterns of gathering food, religious life and cultural history.

Staking a claim and shaping space

In contrast, the first European settlers, in what is now the United States, saw the American landscape as virgin territory, raw and undeveloped. As environmental historian John R.Stilgoe demonstrates, the grid provided the Europeans with one of their first and most successful tools for ordering space. The grid design of a mercantile city like Philadelphia became the template for shaping other cities, towns and territories across the American continent. Everybody recognises checkerboard America. Like a great geometrical carpet, like a Mondrian painting, the United States west of the Appalachians is ordered in a vast grid. William Penn introduced the grid to the English colonies in 1681, when he directed his agents and surveyors to lay out a city in Pennsylvania. Philadelphia was city by intention not accident. William Penn did not invent the grid - the towns of New Spain were ordered about a plaza and streets intersecting at right angles.

Building the American Dream

The first essays deal with church design and construction in Spanish New Mexico; space in parish churches, courtyards and dwellings in colonial Virginia. Building the American republic is discussed through the plantation landscape, the first architectural professionals and the master buildings of the Greek Revival.

To the majority of citizens in the early Republic the ideal American house was an independent homestead. This rural home, like the family for whom it was designed was considered the basis for America’s strength and progress. The regular homestead plan, the grid and the skyscraper resulted in the archetypical American city, Chicago. Daniel Bluestone’s essay “A city under one roof: Chicago skyscrapers 1880-1895” is an especially fascinating account of the history of the skyscraper.

Even before skyscrapers took possession of the down town cityscape, Chicagoans had worried about the scale of commercial buildings. Sigfried Gideon and Carl W. Conduit pioneered serious architectural history of the Chicago skyscraper in the 1940’s and 1950’s.

Any reader on American architectural history would be incomplete without Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie House, first unveiled in 1901. This “city man’s country house on the prairie” was recognised as the first realisation of his suburban domestic ideal. Wright and his works are icons of modern architecture. The Guggenheim Museum and Falling Water are very well known. Wright was also influential in Germany and LeCorbusier was certainly aware of him, without acknowledging it. Far more significant than these early influences was the dissemination of Wright’s ideas through Dutch architecture in the 1900’s.

Deconstruction of the American City

In the 1990’s there has been widespread concern about the shifting character and quality of American urban life particularly around public space. Michael Sorkin, in “The New American City” identifies a number of themes occupying centre stage in 1990’s urban studies. He writes about the rise of rapid transportation and electronic communication and their effect in breaking down the connective tissues and stable geographical relations of the city as traditionally conceived. Sorkin expresses alarm over the new obsession with security and surveillance, the subsequent rise in new models of segregation and the blandly simulated, themed nature of so much contemporary architecture and urban design.

In a polemical essay, the Marxist social historian Mike Davies provides a critique of downtown Los Angeles as it was developing in the 1980’s. Davies describes this environment as a battlefield of class struggle. He finds that real public space in Los Angeles is nearly gone; genuine democracy is in a state of shambles, security and privatisation are on the rise and the poor and underclass are on the run through sadistically designed street environments.

The final collection, by journalist Marc Spiegler, discusses the increasingly troubled relationship between major international airports (eg Chicago’s O’Hare) and the city they purportedly serve. Typical major airports, like O’Hare, have become virtually independent self-contained communities. Like scores of shopping malls, office parks and highway strips across the United States, O’Hare provides the focal point of an edge city. Sprawling and placeless; drawing life and business away from downtown, they are based on convenience rather than culture or community.

In conclusion, we see the view of the ongoing reconceptualisation and reconfiguration of the American city, in the emergence of a new generic landscape. This contemporary reader usefully collects together a number of interesting essays on modernism, postmodernism, the battle for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Los Angeles and O’Hare International Airports. In all, they provide a thoughtful and scholarly body of work, which should be of interest to American cultural and architectural historians.