| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

From Craft to Profession: The Practice of Architecture in Nineteenth-Century America. By Mary N. Woods. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. xvi, 265 pp. $50.00, ISBN 0-520-21494-3.)

Architectural history is dominated by scholarship devoted to "star architects," although recent advocates of vernacular architecture have argued that ordinary buildings can equally powerfully illuminate issues of cultural meaning. Both, however, tend to neglect architecture as a discipline in its own right, that is, as a body of knowledge that incorporates the art of design but also engineering technologies, construction, economics, the study of cities and landscapes, history, and the liberal arts. It is this larger view of the discipline that Mary N. Woods shows us, even though her book has been conceived and presented as a history of the architectural profession. 1

Woods's book brings together strands from earlier historical studies of the profession, among them Spiro Kostof's edited collection The Architect (1977) and Andrew Saint's The Image of the Architect (1983), but it also radically augments these in scope through the charting of wholly new intellectual terrain. The terrain is in large part chronological—Woods fills in major gaps existing in the earlier studies. But her greatest contribution lies in the depth of her new research, much of it archival, along with her incisive and hardheaded analysis of the existing literature on major figures such as Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Stanford White, Louis Sullivan, and Henry Hobson Richardson. As a consequence, Woods sharpens and extends our understanding of the profession. . . .

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