Architecture - Recent Titles from Ohio University Press

Asylum on the Hill

Sun, 12 Feb 2012

Asylum on the Hill (2012)
History of a Healing Landscape

By Katherine Ziff

Foreword by Samuel T. Gladding

Asylum 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. Built in Southeast Ohio after the Civil War, the asylum embodied the nineteenth-century “gold standard” specifications of moral treatment. Stories of patients and their families, politicians, caregivers, and community illustrate how a village in the coalfields of the Hocking River Valley responded to a national impulse to provide compassionate care based on a curative landscape, exposure to the arts, outdoor exercise, useful occupation, and personal attention from a physician. Although ultimately doomed by overcrowding and overshadowed by the rise of new models of psychiatry, for twenty years the therapeutic community at Athens pursued moral treatment therapy with energy and optimism. Ziff’s fresh presentation of America’s nineteenth-century asylum movement shows how the Athens Lunatic Asylum accommodated political, economic, community, family, and individual needs and left an architectural legacy that has been uniquely renovated and repurposed.

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Mariemont

Thu, 29 Sep 2011

Mariemont (2011)
A Pictorial History of a Model Town

By Millard F. Rogers Jr.

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. A stone church with a roof that dates from 1300 abuts an early settlement graveyard. This remarkable village is the masterpiece of the eminent town planner John Nolen (1869–1937) and the vision of philanthropist Mary M. Emery (1844–1927).

Located near Cincinnati, Mariemont was designed as a self-sufficient town, its inspiration derived from the English Garden City and concepts developed in the early twentieth century. In 2007, Mariemont earned National Historic Landmark status from the Secretary of the United States Department of the Interior. Today, it serves as a “National Exemplar” for twenty-first-century developers, including those of the New Urbanist movement.

Mariemont: A Pictorial History of a Model Town presents both archival photographs that trace the creation, construction, and growth of the town and contemporary views by noted Cincinnati photographer Robert Flischel. Photographs from the rich collection of the Mariemont Preservation Foundation, including rare images made of the area in the 1870s–80s and by John Nolen and Nancy Ford Cones in the 1920s, mark this important experiment in architecture and urban design.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Mariemont.
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The AIA Guide to Columbus

Tue, 01 Jul 2008

The AIA Guide to Columbus (2008)

By Jeffrey T. Darbee and Nancy A. Recchie

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. Skillfully blending architectural interest with historic significance, The AIA Guide to Columbus documents approximately 160 buildings and building groups and is organized geographically. Each chapter provides an opportunity to explore a special area of Columbus' built environment.

The Columbus Architecture Foundation has been affiliated with the American Institute of Architects (AIA), Columbus Chapter, for more than thirty years. Its first book project was Architecture Columbus, published in 1976. This new companion volume updates coverage of the buildings and provides a portable, accessible guide to the city's architectural history.

The AIA Guide to Columbus identifies buildings designated as historic and those that have won awards, and includes information on architectural styles, excellent photographs, maps, a glossary, and an index. The focus is on easy touring, whether the reader is walking or driving. Students, visitors, and residents with a penchant for knowing more about their city will enjoy discovering the rich heritage of Columbus' downtown, special districts, and neighborhoods.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/The+AIA+Guide+to+Columbus.
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Architecture in Cincinnati

Wed, 01 Nov 2006

Architecture in Cincinnati (2006)
An Illustrated History of Designing and Building an American City

By Sue Ann Painter

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.

Architecture in Cincinnati: An Illustrated History of Designing and Building an American City traces the city's development from the first town plans of the 1780s to the city that it is today, renowned for its dramatic architectural achievements. It is a fascinating story of patrons, politicians, architects, engineers, and planners building a city.

Bringing the city's rich architectural history to life in luminous color photographs by noted photographer Alice Weston, Architecture in Cincinnati captures the beauty of the Queen City and the spirit of individual buildings, bridges, and urban places. Supplemented by historical images and interesting sidebars, Architecture in Cincinnati is an informative and lavishly illustrated book that will inspire renewed pride of place in residents of the city. Nonresidents and students of architectural and urban history will enjoy this authoritative introduction to a remarkable—yet typical—American city.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Architecture+in+Cincinnati.
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American Pantheon

Sun, 04 Jul 2004

American Pantheon (2004)
Sculptural and Artistic Decoration of the United States Capitol

Edited by Donald R. Kennon and Thomas P. Somma

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.

American Pantheon examines the influences upon not only those virtues and persons selected for inclusion in the American pantheon, but also those excluded. Two chapters address the exclusion of slavery and African Americans from the art in the Capitol, a silence made all the more deafening by the major contributions of slaves and free black workers to the construction of the building. Two other authors consider the subject of women emerging as artists, subjects, patrons, and proponents of art in the Capitol, a development that began to emerge only in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The Rotunda, the Capitol's principal ceremonial space, was designed in part as an art museum of American history—at least the authorized version of it. It is explored in several of the essays, including discussions of the influence of the early-nineteenth-century Italian sculptors who provided the first sculptural reliefs for the room and the contributions of the mid-nineteenth-century Italian American artist Constantino Brumidi, to the mix of allegory, mythology, and history that permeates the space and indeed the Capitol itself.

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The Virgin and the Dynamo

Fri, 15 Aug 2003

The Virgin and the Dynamo (2003)
Public Murals in American Architecture, 1893-1917

By Bailey Van Hook

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. The movement slowly coalesced around the decoration of mansions of the Gilded Age elite, mostly in New York, and of public buildings and institutions across the breadth of the country.

The Virgin and the Dynamo: Public Murals in American Architecture, 1893-1917 is the first book in almost a century to concentrate exclusively on the beaux-arts mural movement in the United States. Beginning with a short history of the movement from its inception in Boston during the American Renaissance, Bailey Van Hook focuses on the movement's public manifestations in the period between the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and the First World War.

Professor Van Hook explores different aspects of the mural movement, the concept and meaning of “decoration,” the claim that murals are inherently democratic, the shift in preference from allegory to history, the gendered concept of modernity, the ideologies behind the iconography, and, finally, the decline of the movement when it began to be seen as old fashioned and anachronistic.

The Virgin and the Dynamo raises our understanding of the beaux-arts movement to a new level. For the general reader, this illustrated history will explain many familiar representations of local and national values.

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

Fri, 01 Feb 2002

Montgomery C. Meigs and the Building of the Nation’s Capital (2002)

Edited by William C. Dickinson, Donald R. Kennon and Dean A. Herrin

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. Totten. It was a fateful assignment, both for the nation’s capital and for the bright, ambitious, and politically connected West Point graduate.

Meigs's forty-year tenure in the nation's capital was by any account spectacularly successful. He surveyed, designed, and built the Washington water supply system, oversaw the extension of the U.S. Capitol and the erection of its massive iron dome, and designed and supervised construction of the Pension Building, now the home of the National Building Museum. The skills he exhibited in supervising engineering projects were carefully noted by political leaders, including president-elect Abraham Lincoln, who named Meigs quartermaster general of the Union Army, the most important position he held during his long and active military career.

Meigs believed Washington, D.C., should be the reincarnation of Rome, the ancient capital of the Roman Empire. He endeavored to memorialize the story of the American nation in all the structures he built, expressing these ideas in murals, sculpture, and monumental design.

Historians have long known Meigs for the organizational genius with which he fulfilled his duty as quartermaster general during the Civil War and for his unwavering loyalty to Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. This volume establishes his claim as one of the major nineteenth-century contributors to the built environment of the nation's capital.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Montgomery+C.+Meigs+and+the+Building+of+the+Nation%E2%80%99s+Capital.
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Art and Empire

Thu, 15 Mar 2001

Art and Empire (2001)
The Politics of Ethnicity in the United States Capitol, 1815–1860

By Vivien Green Fryd

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.

In Art and Empire, Vivien Green Fryd's revealing cultural and political interpretation of the portraits, reliefs, allegories, and historical paintings commissioned for the U.S. Capitol, the reader is given an enhanced appreciation for the racial and ethnic implications of these works.

This latest contribution to the United States Capitol Historical Society's Perspectives on the Art and Architectural History of the United States Capitol series provides an affordable and accessible insight into one of our most visited, viewed, and revered national buildings. Professor Fryd demonstrates how the politics of our history is written in stone and painted on the walls of these hallowed halls.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Art+and+Empire.
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The United States Capitol

Wed, 30 Aug 2000

The United States Capitol (2000)
Designing and Decorating a National Icon

Edited by Donald R. Kennon

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 emergence of the historic preservation movement and the maturation of the discipline of art conservation have refocused attention on the Capitol as the American “temple of liberty.” Major restoration and conservation projects have made possible a better understanding and appreciation of the building and its decoration.

The United States Capitol: Designing and Decorating a National Icon is a product of this revival of scholarly interest. The book combines the papers from the U.S. Capitol Historical Society’s first two conferences dedicated to the visual history and appreciation of this most significant of public buildings in the United States.

The first six papers in the collection focus on the roles of the architects of the Capitol from the contentious and delay-ridden first decade of construction through the twentieth–century expansion and modernization. The six essays in the book’s second section examine a variety of topics relating to the Capitol's artistic decoration, including the origins of Statuary Hall, the mural Westward Ho! and other paintings and artistic embellishments.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/The+United+States+Capitol.
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The Centennial Atlas of Athens County, Ohio

Mon, 01 Jul 1996

The Centennial Atlas of Athens County, Ohio (1996)
Illustrations, History, Statistics

Edited by Fred W. Bush

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. Residents of the towns of Nelsonville, Glouster, Trimble, Amesvlle, Chauncey, and Albany were also included, as were tables of statistics, a war record, lists of county officers, and lodge memberships.

Athens was established from the territory known as Washington County, which was the first county in the state. The original Athens County included parts of Meigs, Vinton, Morgan, and Hocking counties. Early residents describe vast virgin forests, encounters with Native Americans, raising log cabins, early grist mills, the first homes erected on the site of the present–day city of Athens, and various routines of pioneer life. Separate, illustrated articles discuss the mounds of Athens County, the history of Ohio University, the Hocking Canal, and the county’s coal industry.

Nostalgia buffs and antique collectors will be intrigued by the photographs of furniture store interiors. Hardward and plumbing stores display wood stoves, lawnmowers, bicycles, and bathtubs. Also pictured are local places of interest: the Devil’s Tea Table, the Shadow Rocks, Elm Rock in York township, the Stewart Mill, and old South Bridge, among others.

The 1905 Atlas was reprinted in 1975 as part of America’s Bicentennial celebration. This first paperback edition will assure that this unique and invaluable portrait of a bustling turn–of–the–century community will be available for a new generation of readers.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/The+Centennial+Atlas+of+Athens+County%2C+Ohio.
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