Building the nation: Americans write about their architecture, their cities, and their landscape

Ch. 1. Introduction: American Architecture?

1. Excerpt from On the Architecture of America / Anonymous

2. Excerpt from On the Arts / Anonymous

3. Architecture: Its Alleged Degeneracy / R. C. Long

4. Excerpt from American Architecture / Horatio Greenough

5. Excerpt from A Public Building / Anonymous

6. Architecture Through Oppression / Frederick Jackson Turner

7. Point of View / Montgomery Schuyler

8. Excerpt from The Big Money / John Dos Passos

9. "Melting Pot of Architecture" / Mary Hornaday

10. Excerpt from The Architecture of the Future / Talbot F. Hamlin

11. Excerpt from The Tragedy of American Architecture / G. E. Kidder Smith

12. Excerpt from What Is 'American' in Architecture and Design? Notes Toward an Aesthetic of Process / John A. Kouwenhoven

13. Towers of Mammon / Douglas Davis

14. Tomorrow's Ruins Today / Vincent Scully

Ch. 2. "They Do Things Better in Europe": American View the World

15. Letters from Paris / Thomas Jefferson

16. Excerpt from "Description of the City of Morocco" / Anonymous

17. Excerpt from Sketch of Amsterdam / Anonymous

18. Excerpt from Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home / Catherine Maria Sedgwick

19. Excerpt from Mentone, Cairo, and Corfu / Contance Fenimore Woolson

20. Excerpts from The Innocents Abroad / Mark Twain

21. Excerpt from Italian Villas and Their Gardens / Edith Wharton

22. Excerpt from "The German Way of Making Better Cities" / Sylvester Baxter

23. Excerpt from Exile's Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s / Malcolm Cowley

24. Excerpt from Architecture and Life in the U.S.S.R. / Frank Lloyd Wright

25. Excerpt from Recent Architecture Abroad / Douglas Haskell

26. Excerpt from Israel: Young Blood and Old / George Biddle

27. Excerpt from The International Style After Half a Century / Paul Goldberger

28. Manifest Destiny / Suzanne Stephens

Ch. 3. So Glorious a Landscape: Shaping Nature the American Way

29. Antiquities of Ohio / C. W. Short

30. Pine Lands of New Jersey / Anonymous

31. Excerpt from The Pine Barrens / John McPhee

32. Excerpt from A Tour on the Prairies / Washington Irving

33. Review of Andrew Jackson Downing, "Landscape Gardening and Rural Architecture in America" / Anonymous

34. Excerpt from The Pennsylvania Coal Region / H. M. Alden

35. Our National Shabbiness / Frederick Lewis Allen

36. Architecture of the TVA / Douglas Haskell

37. Last Chance to Save the Everglades / John D. MacDonald

38. Excerpt from Preliminary Glance at an American Landscape / John A. Kouwenhoven

39. Excerpt from The Politics of Beauty / William F. Buckley

40. Excerpt from God's Own Junkyard / Peter Blake

41. Abolish the White House Lawn / Michael Pollan

42. Trouble with Wilderness / William Cronon

Ch. 4. One Nation, of Many Parts: Regionalism and the Built Environment

43. Excerpt from Topographical Sketches of the County of Essex / Anonymous

44. Excerpt from An Account of Moravian Settlements / Anonymous

45. Excerpt from Domestic Architecture / Z

46. Excerpt from The Souls of Black Folk / W. E. B. Du Bois

47. Excerpt from Highways and Byways of the South / Clifton Johnson

48. Excerpt from The Abomination of Cities / Corra Harris

49. J. W. Hoover, excerpt from "House and Village Types of the Southwest as Conditioned by Aridity," 1935; and Talbot Hamlin, excerpt from "What Makes It American? Architecture in the Southwest and West," 1939

50. Excerpt from Grandfather's Store / Phyllis Fenner

51. Excerpt from Look What's Happened to California / Carey McWilliams

52. Why Is This an American Style House? / Charlotte Conway

53. Show Me the Way to Go Home / Thomas Griffith

54. Excerpt from A Vision of New Fields / John Brinckerhoff Jackson

55. Bulldozing Our Sense of Place / Steven Conn

Ch. 5. Urbanism, Real and Imagined

56. Description of Philadelphia / Jacob Duche

57. Description of the City of Washington / Anonymous

58. Excerpt from The Plan of San Francisco / M. G. Upton

59. Excerpt from The Problem of the Twentieth Century City / Josiah Strong

60. Excerpt from Colorado and Its Capital / Julian Ralph

61. Excerpt from What a Great City Might Be - A Lesson from the White City / John Coleman Adams

62. Excerpt from Art and Railway Stations / Anonymous

63. Excerpt from Improvement in City Life: Aesthetic Progress / Charles Mulford Robinson

64. Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study / W. E. B. Du Bois

65. Louis Sullivan, excerpt from "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered," 1896; and Henry James, excerpt from The American Scene, 1907

66. Terrible Super-City / Commonweal Editors

67. Excerpt from Magic Motorways / Norman Bel Geddes

68. Excerpt from Here Is New York / E. B. White

69. America Day by Day (L'Amerique au jour le jour) / Simone de Beauvoir

70. Downtown Is for People / Jane Jacobs

71. Fear of the City, 1783-1983 / Alfred Kazin

72. Excerpt from The New American Ghetto / Camillo Jose Vergara

73. Excerpt from A City on a Hill / Kurt Andersen

74. Excerpt from Las Vegas, Tis of Thee / Richard Todd

75. On Edge, Again / Max Page

Ch. 6. Taming the Crabgrass Frontier: The Triumph of the Suburbs

76. Anonymous, "Landscape-Gardening: Llewellen Park," 1857; and Anonymous, "Llewellyn Park," 1871

77. Excerpt from Letter to the Riverside Improvement Company / Olmsted, Vaux and Co

78. Excerpt from Suburban Homes on the West Jersey Railroad / Anonymous

79. Excerpt from Suburban Homes: A Plea for Privacy in Home Life / R. Clipston Sturgis

80. Christine Frederick, excerpt from "Is Suburban Living a Delusion"? 1928; and Ethel Longworth Swift, excerpt from "In Defense of Suburbia," 1928

81. Excerpt from Does Your City Suffer from Suburbanitis? / Thomas H. Reed, Doris Reed and Murrah Teigh Bloom

82. Excerpt from The Big Change in Suburbia / Frederick Lewis Allen

83. Excerpt from Are Cities Un-American? / William H. Whyte, Jr.

84. Excerpt from The Feminine Mystique / Betty Friedan

85. Excerpt from No Place Like Home / David Guterson

86. Excerpt from Home from Nowhere / James Howard Kunstler

Ch. 7. Better Buildings, Better People: Architecture and Social Reform

87. Excerpt from American Notes / Charles Dickens

88. Excerpt from The Shakers at Lebanon / Anonymous

89. Excerpt from College Edifices and Their Relation to Education / Anonymous

90. Excerpt from The American Woman's Home / Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe

91. Excerpt from Pullman: A Social Study / Richard T. Ely

92. Excerpt from Mill Architecture / C. John Hexamer

93. Excerpt from Beautifying the Ugly Things / Mary Bronson Hartt

94. Excerpt from Giving Carnegie Libraries / Isaac F. Marcosson

95. Excerpt from City Planning in Justice to the Working Population

96. Excerpt from That 'One Third of a Nation' / Edith Elmer Wood

97. Case History of a Failure / James Bailey

98. Threat and Promise of Urban Redevelopment in New Haven / Vincent Scully

99. John Edgar Wideman, "Doing Time, Marking Race," 1995; and Peter Annin, "Inside the New Alcatraz," 1998

Ch. 8. Monuments and Memory: Building and Protecting the American Past

100. Description of an Indian Mound / Joseph Sansom

101. Excerpt from Church Architecture in New-York / S.

102. Washington's Examples / Anonymous

103. Excerpt from The Lack of Old Homes in America / Charles Eliot Norton

104. Excerpt from A Great Battle Park / Anonymous

105. Excerpt from Preserving the Landmarks / Park Pressey

106. Excerpt from Colonial Williamsburg / Helen Burns

107. Disappearance of Pennsylvania Station / Lewis Mumford

108. Destroying the Past by 'Development' / Russell Kirk

109. Herbert J. Gans, excerpt from "Preserving Everyone's Noo Yawk," 1975; and Ada Louise Huxtable, excerpt from "Preserving Noo Yawk Landmarks," 1975

110. Vietnam Memorial / Paul Goldberger

111. Excerpt from The House That Ruth's Father Built / Phil Patton

112. How a Brand-New Development Came by its Rich History / Ann Carrns

113. Excerpt from Old Baltimore Row Houses Fall Before the Wrecking Ball / Tracie Rozhon

114. New War Memorial Is Shrine to Sentiment / Herbert Muschamp.