Architecture in the United States (Oxford History of Art Series) Book

In his book ARCHITECTURE IN THE UNITED STATES, Dell Upton takes on the ambitious aim of chronicling major themes in the 3,000 years of architecture built and inhabited on the North American continent. Although, as the title reveals, Upton focuses on most of his analysis on the architecture of the United States, which privileges the past 200 years or so, he does include a fair number of examples of architecture and landscapes designed and built by various Native American tribes. Unlike other academic books on American architecture, Upton opens his "with an eighteenth-century folk house and closes with a giant artichoke." In other words, the author makes deliberate decisions to emphasize the vernacular, non-professional, and complicated aspects of the built environment rather than holding up the all too familiar myth of a very few master designers who sculpt the land and single-handedly alter the way buildings are built. That being said, Upton does not throw out the baby with the bathwater as it were. In addition to his inclusion of a wide variety of vernacular examples of architecture, he does mention the more famous, traditionally canonized structures such as Jefferson's Monticello and Meier's Smith House, which occupies the cover of the book. In acknowledging the buildings popularly included in American architectural survey courses, Upton offers a greater lens to see how the vernacular buildings often communicate sometimes similar and sometimes contrasting messages that are continually in dialogue with one another in the diverse American landscape.

Upton organizes his book into five themes for examination: community, nature, technology, money, and art. Before he addresses his themes however, he begins with a chapter on the dwelling places that constitute, as the chapter title suggests, "An American Icon." Here, as is characteristic of Upton's writing, he makes an insightful argument that balances ambition with modesty to demonstrate how both the facades and floor plans of American homes can be read to understand "the ordinances of daily life, …social rituals and economic patterns, …identity in a consumer society; …memory of past social spaces and past architectural form; [and] the role of cultural authority." With this claim established by a combination of illustrative visuals and good writing, Upton moves on to his five themes.

Compared with other historical monographs on American architecture that tend to stress the historical progress or reversion of architectural style and practice, the author takes a more complicated view on how history functions in the construction of the built environment. While Upton does take care to demonstrate a chronological narrative that notes innovations in most chapters, he does not overemphasize "change over time" but rather tries to emphasize how culture operates to shape the environment in similar ways across time. Upton argues that architecture styles "were just as capricious in the past as they are in the present, but the accidental conjunction of particular visual vocabularies with particular places or times invested historic styles with meaning in the eyes of later generations." In other words, although history is not a static, agreed upon narrative that is easily defined, communities often agree upon appropriate historic associations that become appropriate signifiers in American culture: the Gothic style, for example, has come to symbolize piety due to its association in the minds of many Protestant Americans with medieval cathedrals'ironically Catholic'and is thus appropriate for churches and Christian homes. Although associationism was more explicit in the nineteenth century as mentioned in the former example, it can continue to be seen into the twentieth century in both post-modern work as well as various revival movements. Dell Upton crafts his arguments in such a way that they are easily understood yet profoundly enlightening. He even passes the test of including a discussion about the contribution of women and African-American architects that often get neglected from American architectural surveys.