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Book Review
| Architecture and Town Planning in Colonial North America. By James D. Kornwolf. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Vol. 1: xxx, 504 pp. Vol. 2: xii, 740 pp. Vol. 3: x, 526 pp. $375.00/set, ISBN 0-8018-5986-7/ set.)
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| James D. Kornwolf's three-volume study is a monumental survey of architecture and planning in colonial North America. With hundreds of photographs, drawings, and detailed descriptions of important buildings and plans, it represents more than two decades of patient study by Kornwolf and his wife, Georgiana, who compiled the information they gathered into more than 1,770 pages of text. Although its size and price will undoubtedly limit its market appeal to serious scholars and research libraries, historians and art historians will find much that is valuable. It is the first detailed survey to include Canada, selected areas of New Spain, and the United States; it situates buildings and landscapes in their historical contexts; and it manages to cover a wide range of buildings despite the author's candid admission that "the aesthetic intentions of builder and patron, not aspects of material culture, are examined" (p. xii). The book is about art as expressed in buildings and landscapes; it is not revisionist history. |
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Kornwolf is determined to restore the significance of Filippo Brunelleschi, Leon Battista Alberti, and Andrea Palladio to the subject of architectural history and planning, redirecting our attention from the types of vernacular architecture studies that have absorbed the efforts of material culture scholars over the past thirty years. He focuses on the aesthetics of classicism, reason, and humanism (p. 1). "Colonial North American architecture and town planning occurred in the era of the Renaissance, which first matured in Italy early in the fifteenth century" (p. 1). Yet he is not fixated on the Renaissance or on buildings that exemplified elite style and pretensions. The book includes the contributions of vernacular architecture scholars who have studied the earthfast houses of the Tidewater, the Flürkuchen houses of Pennsylvania Germans, the dwellings of New France, and the buildings of African Americans. Readers who measure a book's worth by the consistency of its arguments will find this work frustrating. Those who seek to mine the wealth of data here will draw their own conclusions and come away awed at the audacious scale of the book. |
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