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Architecture and Town Planning in Colonial North America. By James D. Kornwolf. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Vol. 1: xxx, 504 pp. Vol. 2: xii, 740 pp. Vol. 3: x, 526 pp. $375.00/set, ISBN 0-8018-5986-7/set.)
James D. Kornwolf's three-volume study is a monumental survey of architecture and planning in colonial North America. With hundreds of photographs, drawings, and detailed descriptions of important buildings and plans, it represents more than two decades of patient study by Kornwolf and his wife, Georgiana, who compiled the information they gathered into more than 1,770 pages of text. Although its size and price will undoubtedly limit its market appeal to serious scholars and research libraries, historians and art historians will find much that is valuable. It is the first detailed survey to include Canada, selected areas of New Spain, and the United States; it situates buildings and landscapes in their historical contexts; and it manages to cover a wide range of buildings despite the author's candid admission that "the aesthetic intentions of builder and patron, not aspects of material culture, are examined" (p. xii). The book is about art as expressed in buildings and landscapes; it is not revisionist history.
Kornwolf is determined to restore the significance of Filippo Brunelleschi, Leon Battista Alberti, and Andrea Palladio to the subject of architectural history and planning, redirecting our attention from the types of vernacular architecture studies that have absorbed the efforts of material culture scholars over the past...