Book Review

Canada and the United States

Mary N. Woods's book is the first work to comprehensively survey the history of the architectural profession in nineteenth-century America. Although specialists will find much that is familiar, the book gives a valuable perspective on the legacy of nineteenth-century architects' practices and values. Woods's interests and arguments are apparent from the first page of her introduction. She is intent on writing a more balanced examination of "architecture as work and business, not in its typical guises as art or problem solving" (p. 1). Her concern is animated by her affiliation with Cornell University, home of one of the country's most prominent schools of architecture. Underlying the book's focus, then, is the author's desire to survey the history of the profession and explicate the lessons from that history.

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Woods begins her narrative with a familiar figure in American architectural history, Benjamin Henry Latrobe, who was trained in England and emigrated to the United States in 1796. As an architect, Latrobe struggled for years to find a niche between the world of gentleman amateurs and carpenter builders who maintained control of construction and most design. Latrobe argued that his knowledge of the art, theory, and practice of building was superior to that of either the builders or their patrons, but his claims of authority and prickly sense of status grated on American sensibilities and tight-fisted economics. Woods does a fine job setting in relief Latrobe's considerable design and engineering skills and his limited sense of how to reconcile his artistic vision with his patrons' financial interests. In essence, Latrobe becomes a metaphor for the enduring challenges of the job: how to make a living at a profession that reveres aesthetic, intellectual, and design skills, but survives through attention to sound business practices and cultivation of clients.

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