| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

USA: Modern Architectures in History. By Gwendolyn Wright. (London: Reaktion, 2008. 320 pp. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-86189-344-4.)
The new Reaktion Books series Modern Architectures in History aims to create historical surveys for the architecture of many nations, exploring "modernist visions and revisions ... against a backdrop of aesthetic currents, economic developments, political trends and social movements" (p. 2). The historian Gwendolyn Wright's survey USA is one of the first in the series and is perhaps the finest American survey text available.	1
Wright addresses herself first to architects, among the many readerships of the series, but USA seamlessly turns the freshest scholarship into a clear (but not monolithic) guide for historians. Teachers who want to include architectural history in a history course without immersing students in art-historical paradigms will especially welcome this book. Readers will find incisive introductions to major architects and buildings, and recenterings of ones that helped shape progressive architecture (such as the work of O'Neil Ford) but that tend to be skipped by art historians in favor of "major" monuments. Wright shows other, more populist forces at work, such as the developers and contractors that shaped the landscapes of the 1900s and 1910s. The agencies and clients responsible for the modern American environment are clearly described, both in their impact on architecture and as cultural forces.	. . .

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