Architecture Book List ·

The AIA Guide to Columbus

Columbus, the largest city in Ohio, has, since its founding in 1812, been home to many impressive architectural landmarks. The AIA Guide to Columbus, produced by the Columbus Architecture Foundation, highlights the significant buildings and neighborhoods in the Columbus metropolitan area.…

American Pantheon

Sculptural and Artistic Decoration of the United States Capitol

Like the ancient Roman Pantheon, the U.S. Capitol was designed by its political and aesthetic arbiters to memorialize the virtues, events, and persons most representative of the nation's ideals—an attempt to raise a particular version of the nation's founding to the level of myth.…

Architecture in Cincinnati

An Illustrated History of Designing and Building an American City

Cincinnati was the first “great” city founded after American independence, and its prodigious growth reflected the rise of the new nation. Its architecture is a testament to that growth and to the importance of the city itself.…

Art and Empire

The Politics of Ethnicity in the United States Capitol, 1815–1860

The subject matter and iconography of much of the art in the U.S. Capitol forms a remarkably coherent program of the early course of North American empire, from discovery and settlement to the national development and westward expansion that necessitated the subjugation of the indigenous peoples.…

Asylum on the Hill

History of a Healing Landscape

Foreword by Samuel T. GladdingAsylum on the Hill is the story of a great American experiment in psychiatry, a revolution in care for those with mental illness, as seen through the example of the Athens Lunatic Asylum.…

Build with Adobe

This practical guide to building adobe homes was written from the author's many years of experience with adobe, and it is refreshingly no-nonsense: “What can you spend?” “Where will you put it?” “Who is going to build it?” This new updated and enlarged edition includes hundreds of photographs, drawings and house plans as well as new information about passive solar heating and cooling, and specific details on construction.…

The Centennial Atlas of Athens County, Ohio

Illustrations, History, Statistics

The original The Centennial Atlas of Athens County, Ohio was compiled and edited in 1905 by Fred W. Bush, then editor of The Athens Messenger and Herald. It was a history sponsored primarily by the people who were part of it: citizens and businesses paid to have their family stories, photographs of themselves, their homes or farms, and their businesses included in this volume.…

Guide to Chicago’s Historic Suburbs on Wheels and on Foot

Although the Chicago area is famous the world over for its splendid architecture, the architectural treasures of the suburban area have remained largely unknown. Ira Bach, assisting by Susan Wolfson, has now provided a comprehensive readable guide to more than 850 nineteenth century dwellings, commercial buildings, public buildings, and churches which are memorable and well worth visiting for their fine architecture and their historic significance.…

A Historical Guidebook to Old Columbus

Finding the Past in the Present in Ohio’s Capital City

Ever look at a modern skyscraper or a vacant lot and wonder what was there before? Or maybe you have passed an old house and been curious about who lived there long ago. This richly illustrated new book celebrates Columbus, Ohio’s, two-hundred-year history and supplies intriguing stories about the city’s buildings and celebrated citizens, stopping at individual addresses, street corners, parks, and riverbanks where history was made.…

Available October 2012 (est.)

The History and Conservation of Zanzibar Stone Town

Zanzibar Stone Town presents the problems of conservation in its most acute forms. Should it be fossilized for the tourists? Or should it grow for the benefit of the inhabitants? Can ways be found to accommodate conflicting social and economic pressures? For its size, Zanzibar, like Venice, occupies a remarkably large romantic space in world imagination.…

Log Construction in the Ohio Country, 1750–1850

Log construction entered the Ohio territory with the seventeenth-century fur traders and mid-eighteenth-century squatters and then spread throughout most of the area after the opening of the territory in the 1780s.…

Mariemont

A Pictorial History of a Model Town

Today’s visitor to Mariemont, Ohio, encounters what appears to be a community from another place and time, perhaps a country village in England’s Cotswold region. Tree-lined streets pass through neighborhoods lined with Tudor- and Georgian-style buildings.…

Montgomery C. Meigs and the Building of the Nation’s Capital

At the age of thirty-six, in 1852, Lt. Montgomery Cunningham Meigs of the Army Corps of Engineers reported to Washington, D.C., for duty as a special assistant to the chief army engineer, Gen. Joseph G.…

The United States Capitol

Designing and Decorating a National Icon

The United States Capitol is a national cultural icon, and among the most visually recognized seats of government in the world. The past quarter century has witnessed an explosion of scholarly interest in the art and architectural history of the Capitol.…

The Virgin and the Dynamo

Public Murals in American Architecture, 1893-1917

The beaux-arts mural movement in America was fueled by energetic young artists and architects returning from training abroad. They were determined to transform American art and architecture to make them more thematically cosmopolitan and technically fluid and accomplished.…