Book Review

Comparative/World

Pamela H. Simpson has written a fine book to interest architectural, urban, and cultural historians as well as heritage restoration experts. Ada Louise Huxtable's dismissal of concrete construction as expressing the bad taste of a new middle-class society roused Simpson to study the concrete block, pressed metal, linoleum, embossed wall coverings, and other faux materials. For each imitative material, Simpson relates the industrial processes, design properties, and marketing developments. These profiles, accompanied by pertinent illustrations, are accomplishments in themselves, but Simpson goes on to champion the materials and those who used them, maintaining that their buyers should not be dismissed as lacking taste. Neither should the articles be discounted as shams, because imitative materials provided improvements over the objects they displaced and expressed aspirations for democracy, modernity, and progress. Simpson does not see these urges as expressly American but rather as goals found also in the consumption of imitative articles in Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Europe. As students of the built environment will understand, an international perspective is as unavoidable as it is commendable. Simpson located some fine archival sources outside the United States. From inside and outside the United States notable architects, designers, and critics—including William Morris, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Joseph Hoffman—debated the meaning and legitimacy of imitative materials. Hoffman and a number of other European designers even provided patterns for linoleum flooring.

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