African American Architectural Heritage in the Capital
By: Vyta Pivo
Washington, D.C., is well known for its European heritage, going all the way back to Pierre...
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Thematic Essays
Essays in SAH Archipedia are broadly grouped as either place-based or thematic. Place-based essays include overviews of architecture in specific U.S. states and cities. Thematic essays examine architectural and urban issues within and across state and regional boundaries. Like individual building entries, essays are accompanied by rich subject metadata, so you can browse them by style, type, and period. SAH Archipedia essays are comprised of peer-reviewed scholarship (born-digital and print-based) contributed by architectural historians nationwide.
BEER AND BREWERIES IN WISCONSIN
By: Marsha Weisiger and Contributors
Milwaukee dominated America’s beer-brewing industry in the nineteenth century. In large part this dominance was...
Black Travelers On and Off the Road
By: Jennifer Reut
Roadside architecture, which had its heyday from World War II until the late 1960s, has been celebrated for both its...
BLUE RIDGE PARKWAY
By: Anne Carter Lee
The construction of a 469-mile-long linear park, linking Shenandoah National Park and its Skyline Drive to the Great Smoky Mountains National...
Born to Build: Theodate Pope Riddle
By: Judith Paine McBrien
Gifted by a sense of spatial design, fascinated by construction, and motivated by architecture’s power to...
BRANDYWINE PARK
By: W. Barksdale Maynard
Brandywine Creek had long afforded Wilmingtonians with recreation: walks, picnics, bathing, skating. A proposal for the city to buy land on...
BRATTLEBORO'S MAIN STREET BUSINESS BLOCKS
By: Glenn M. Andres and Curtis B. Johnson
The three blocks of Brattleboro's Main Street between Whetstone Brook and High Street exhibit...
Building a National Network: Telephone Buildings in the United States
By: Kathryn Holliday
In many American cities, the most hated structure is the central, downtown telephone...
BURLINGTON'S QUEEN ANNE HOUSES
By: Glenn M. Andres and Curtis B. Johnson
The expansion of Burlington's post–Civil War lumber industry fueled a residential building boom, aided by...
California Missions
By: Heather N. McMahon
Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century and extending into the early nineteenth century, the Spanish crown strategically...
California Missions and the Genesis of the Mission Revival Style
By: Heather N. McMahon
The Spanish colonial missions in the American Southwest, built in the seventeenth...
CAMP MEETINGS
By: W. Barksdale Maynard
Lower Delmarva was a center of early Methodism—21 percent of its adults were Methodist by 1810—and western Sussex County still has many rural...
CHESAPEAKE AND DELAWARE CANAL
By: W. Barksdale Maynard
So potently does the canal divide Delaware into northern and southern cultural zones, it is sometimes hard to recall that it...
COBBLESTONE BUILDINGS
By: Marsha Weisiger and Contributors
Cobblestone buildings are rare in the United States. They mostly occur in areas near bands of glacial moraine, where...
COURTHOUSES AND SQUARES
By: Gerald Moorhead et al.
The county courthouse set in its town square is the centerpiece of Texas architecture and urbanism. The square with its courthouse is the...
DANVILLE'S TOBACCO DISTRICT
By: Anne Carter Lee
Tobacco and Danville grew together. By the mid-nineteenth century, the thin, marginally fertile sandy soil in the counties around...
DU PONT COUNTRY ESTATES
By: W. Barksdale Maynard
According to Winterthur Museum historian Margaret Lidz, Delaware's Chateau Country resembles enclaves of the ultra-rich on the...
Du Pont Highway
By: W. Barksdale Maynard
T. Coleman du Pont will always be remembered for his highway (U.S. 13 and 113) that carries traffic ninety-seven miles north...
Elizabeth Roberts, Master of the Brooklyn Brownstone
By: Camille Wilson Spencer
American architect Elizabeth Roberts has come to be known as a master of the Brooklyn brownstone....
ETHNICITY AND CULTURE AS INFLUENCES ON VERNACULAR ARCHITECTURE
By: Steve C. Martens and Ronald H. L. M. Ramsay
Buildings and landscapes molded by diverse cultural groups are...
FEDERAL FORT PLANNING IN TEXAS: HISTORY
By: Gerald Moorhead et al.
The frontier forts the U.S. Army built in Texas between 1849 and 1870 helped secure the frontier for settlement and, through...
Federal Influence in Maryland
By: Lisa Pfueller Davidson and Catherine C. Lavoie
From the moment of its founding in 1790, the District of Columbia changed its Maryland neighbors. The...
FLORA AND LANDSCAPE DESIGN
By: Don J. Hibbard
A horticulturist's delight, the flora of Hawaii is as cosmopolitan as its human population. During the past two centuries, over five...
Googie Architecture
By: Bart Bryant-Mole
In the postwar period, with industry in California booming, migrating workers flocked to the state, more than doubling the...
GROUT BUILDINGS
By: Marsha Weisiger and Contributors
Grout, a form of poured concrete, was briefly popular as a building material in the mid-nineteenth century. The town of Milton...
Gulf Coast Tribes
By: Willa Granger
Scholars often subdivide the study of Native American culture into vast, multistate regions, including the Northeast, the Plains, and the...
Hidden Power: Louise Bethune in Plain Sight
By: Annie Sloan Schentag
Over the last two decades, Louise Blanchard Bethune has increasingly gained recognition as the first...
Historic Preservation in Savannah
By: Robin B. Williams
Few cities in America enjoy so distinctive an urban identity as Savannah, with its squares and broad streets, its trees and...
HOW RAILROADS BROUGHT ARCHITECTURE TO NORTH DAKOTA
By: Steve C. Martens and Ronald H. L. M. Ramsay
It would be hard to point to a more pervasive impact on buildings and...
KENTMERE PARKWAY AND ROCKFORD PARK
By: W. Barksdale Maynard
Breaking with the city grid, the sinuous Kentmere Parkway was meant to connect the two new parks, Brandywine and Rockford...
Lustron Houses in West Virginia
By: Rhonda L. Reymond
West Virginians have one of the highest rates of home ownership in the United States. One way they have achieved this is by...
MARYLAND WOOD BOATBUILDING
By: Lisa Pfueller Davidson and Catherine C. Lavoie
Situated along the Chesapeake Bay, the world’s largest estuary, Marylanders could not help but embrace...
MILL NEIGHBORHOODS
By: Glenn M. Andres and Curtis B. Johnson
Bennington retains a coherent pattern of nineteenth-century mill neighborhoods, with owners' mansions and workers' housing in...
Mimetic and Programmatic Architecture in America
By: Cristina Carbone
America’s fascination with mimetic architecture began with an elephant. In 1881,...
MODERNISM IN DELAWARE
By: W. Barksdale Maynard
As with states farther south, architectural modernism took only shallow root in Delaware and was usually diluted with historicizing motifs...
Modernism in Vermont: The Architecture of Ruth Reynolds Freeman
By: Devin Colman
Ruth Reynolds Freeman, the first woman architect in Vermont, was known for her significant contributions...
Multifamily Private Housing Since World War II
By: Matthew Gordon Lasner
The Gilded Age and Progressive Era are often regarded as the golden age of apartment construction and...
MURALS IN ARKANSAS
By: Cyrus A. Sutherland with Gregory Herman, Claudia Shannon, Jean Sizemore, Jeannie M. Whayne and Contributors
Between 1938 and 1943, twenty-one...
NATIVE AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE IN CENTRAL AND WESTERN VIRGINIA
By: Anne Carter Lee (coordinator) , By: Klint Ericson (writer)
During the Middle Woodland 500 BCE to 900 CE and...
New Canaan Modernism
By: Patricia Seto-Weiss
In the late 1940s, Modernism arrived in New Canaan in full force. Architect and Harvard graduate Eliot Noyes (1910–1977)...
OCTAGONAL HOUSES
By: Marsha Weisiger and Contributors
Octagonal houses enjoyed widespread popularity in the mid-nineteenth century, thanks largely to their foremost proponent,...
POHAKU (STONE)
By: Don J. Hibbard
Pohaku is the Hawaiian word for stone. Deriving from lava and the coral reef, the types of stone locally available are somewhat limited. Lava rock...
Prefabricated Modernism in New London, Connecticut
By: Douglas Royalty
Among Connecticut’s earliest modern houses are the two “houses of tomorrow”...
Project 80s and the Reshaping of Anchorage
By: Ian C. Hartman
In the late 1890s and early 1900s, Alaska experienced one of North America’s greatest gold rushes. But the wealth generated...
Public Housing in California
By: Carolyn Stuart
Public housing in California and, indeed, nationwide, saw its first major surge of activity following the 1937...
Residential Architecture in Territorial Hawaii
By: Alison Chiu
Within a small collection of house renderings found in newspapers dating circa 1930, the inscription “Eller...
Roadside Motels
By: Megan Kendrick
In light of California’s cultural associations with the automobile, it is no wonder that the roadside motel emerged in the twentieth...
ROUND BARNS
By: Marsha Weisiger and Contributors
As Wisconsin’s farmers made the transition from wheat farming to dairying at the turn of the twentieth century, many of them...
Santa Fe and the Spanish City System
By: Jose Miguel Jimenez Chavez
In 1776, the Franciscan Spanish priest Fray Francisco Atanasio Domínguez visited the Villa of...
SHENANDOAH NATIONAL PARK
By: Anne Carter Lee
Nature, art, and politics came together to create Shenandoah National Park and its signature feature, the Skyline Drive. In the 1920s, as...
Slave Houses and Plantation Landscapes
By: Jobie Hill
Slavery was different for every single person who experienced it, whether free, freed, or...
Spenard: Anchorage’s Entertainment and Vice District
By: David Reamer and Ian C. Hartman
Spenard is arguably Anchorage’s most colorful neighborhood, steeped in a history of vice...
TEXAS DANCE HALLS
By: Gerald Moorhead et al.
Often beginning as small outposts surrounded by farms or ranches, towns were established throughout nineteenth-century Texas that not only...
TEXAS PARKS AND THE CCC
By: Gerald Moorhead et al.
The familiar 1930s “rustic” buildings and landscapes in national, state, and local parks emerged from the bittersweet years of the Great...
The Building Culture of the African Methodist Episcopal Church
By: Charlette Caldwell
In 1900, the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church published the Manual of the AME...
The Chesapeake House
By: Lisa Pfueller Davidson and Catherine C. Lavoie
The term “Chesapeake” has been applied to a basic house form prevalent within the Western and Eastern...
THE DU PONT FAMILY AND ARCHITECTURE
By: W. Barksdale Maynard
This genealogy is limited to the du Ponts mentioned in Buildings of Delaware, down to the sixth generation in...
THE FAUX BOIS ART OF DIONICIO RODRÍGUEZ
By: Gerald Moorhead et al.
Mexican artisan Dionicio Rodríguez (1891–1955) is known as the most “naturalistic” exponent of the technique known as...
The Five-Part Palladian House
By: Lisa Pfueller Davidson and Catherine C. Lavoie
Among Maryland’s most distinctive domestic building forms is the five-part Palladian house,...
THE HAWAIIAN ROOF
By: Don J. Hibbard
The 1920s and 1930s were a time when consideration of Hawaii's strong sense of place—its environment, local materials, and multicultural traditions—...
THE HONOLULU BOARD OF WATER SUPPLY
By: Don J. Hibbard
A public water supply system was not established for Honolulu until 1848. Prior to that time, people dwelling in the area drew water from shallow wells, surface...
THE KING RANCH
By: Gerald Moorhead et al.
Founded by Captain Richard King in 1853, the ranch originated with his purchase of the Santa Gertrudis land grant that dated to the Spanish...
The Land-Grant Campus
By: J. Philip Gruen
The land-grant campus is, perhaps, the nation’s vernacular campus. Seemingly lacking coherence, a reasonably well-ordered core...
The Making and Unmaking of the Nation’s Northernmost Black Community
By: David Reamer and Ian C. Hartman
Before the establishment of Anchorage in 1915, what is today the neighborhood of Fairview was a ...
Tobacco and Tobacco Barns in Virginia
By: Anne Carter Lee
Tobacco barns, once ubiquitous in Southside and the southern Piedmont, are fast disappearing. In the past, farmers in every...
Women and Delaware Architecture
By: W. Barksdale Maynard
Greenville socialite Mary Wilson Thompson was proud of having designed her own house at the beach,...
Women as Architecture Patrons in Gilded Age Newport, Rhode Island
By: Catherine W. Zipf
From the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, hundreds of...
“FLAME OF FAITH”: RELIGIOUS ARCHITECTURE
By: Steve C. Martens and Ronald H. L. M. Ramsay
North Dakota might be called the “Land of Luther and Leo,” with Scandinavian Lutherans in the eastern third of...