This latest volume in the Society of Architectural Historians'
Buildings of the United States series follows the Pennsylvania
migration narrative in broad swathes: Philadelphia and its
surrounding counties of the original Quaker settlement zone, the
Piedmont and the German agricultural zone, the Scots-Irish frontier
beyond the Blue Mountain, the coal country with its trade
connections to New York City and its East European coal miners, and
the Northern Tier claimed and settled by New Englanders.
"Buildings of Pennsylvania: Philadelphia and Eastern
Pennsylvania" uses the physical evidence of community plans,
building typologies and structural systems, and landscape to gain
an understanding of the five great migrations that settled William
Penn's Commonwealth. The first settlers were Swedes and Dutch who
left traces and buildings near Philadelphia. They were followed by
two groups seeking religious freedom--first the English, Welsh, and
Scots-Irish members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers)
and in the early eighteenth century German-speaking Protestants who
brought their characteristic planning and building types to
southeastern Pennsylvania. A fourth migration of New Englanders in
the 1750s claimed the northern third of the state and brought
characteristic New England town plans and buildings. The fifth
migration of Eastern European Catholics and Jews at the end of the
nineteenth century added their highly identifiable domed churches
to the coal country. The hybrid vigor created by the interaction of
these groups makes Pennsylvania unique among the American colonies
and set the stage for the great industrial explosion that made the
commonwealth a center of the American Industrial Revolution of the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The rising industrial
culture found its aesthetic counterpart in the architecture of
Frank Furness who turned the dross of industry into the gold of
design; his values continued through his students William L. Price
and George Howe and on into the late twentieth century in the
careers of Louis Kahn and Robert Venturi.
In addition to Philadelphia, the book surveys the rival
German-influenced small cities of the Piedmont, the brief but
explosive flourishing of wealth in the twin coal country cities,
and a host of secondary county towns and villages that carry on
vernacular building traditions overlaid with metropolitan
architecture serving regional and national clients. This volume,
which includes a glossary, bibliography, and over 400 illustrations
(photographs, maps, and drawings), is the counterpart to Buildings
of Pennsylvania: Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania, which covers
the western portion of the state.
A volume in the Buildings of the United States series of the
Society of Architectural Historians
General
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