American architecture at 250: a reading list

Fifty years ago yesterday, on New Year’s Day, 1976, the polymath designers Charles and Ray Eames (along with their colleagues Bill Tondreau and Alex Funke) released a small-scale photo book called “Images of Early America.” The publication, featuring pictures of a Quaker meeting house and other examples of modest, broad-shouldered, and clean-lined religious and vernacular architecture, accompanied an exhibition installed in the Eames-designed Herman Miller showroom, in West Hollywood.

The book and the show, as you will have guessed, were timed to mark the bicentennial of the United States (as a companion to the Eames Office’s better known and far more substantial “The World of Franklin and Jefferson” exhibition). They opened at a moment of extreme tumult and uncertainty in American history. Gerald Ford had pardoned his disgraced predecessor in the White House, Richard Nixon, eighteen months earlier. Ford himself had survived a pair of assassination attempts—both in California, and both at the hands of women, first Squeaky Fromme and then Sara Jane Moore—in September of 1975. The Vietnam War had ended in chaos with the Fall of Saigon just five months before that. Inflation and unemployment were both running, as 1976 began, at around nine percent.

Fast forward five decades, and the U.S. is now approaching its semiquincentennial—or hitting the quarter-millennium mark, if you prefer—in a similar state of anxiety, with a president who has not only survived his own pair of assassination attempts but is busy taking a wrecking ball to the White House grounds. (Oh, and planning a 250^th celebration, on those grounds, featuring, naturally, the stars of the Ultimate Fighting Championship.) We’ll happily leave it to others to diagnose the condition of the larger body politic. Our job here, over the coming year, will be to offer some assessments of the state of American architecture, an effort that will find Punch List bringing on, for the first time, additional writers and photographers.

As a precursor to those essays and images, today we offer a reading list on American architecture. This is of course an incomplete and subjective effort, with some thoughts on standalone essays, as opposed to this list of books, to follow in the coming weeks. I welcome—encourage! beseech!—your suggestions (for both books and essays) at [email protected].

I hope at the very least this post will prompt you to start organizing your own thoughts about where the field finds itself as we approach the 250^th. What follows is sorted into a handful of categories:

Overviews & anthologies:

1. Anderson, Sean, and Mabel O. Wilson, eds. Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America. The Museum of Modern Art, 2021

2. Eggener, Keith, ed. American Architectural History: A Contemporary Reader. Routledge, 2004

3. Gelernter, Mark. A History of American Architecture: Buildings in Their Technological and Cultural Context. Manchester University Press, 1999

4. Huxtable, Ada Louise. The Unreal America: Architecture and Illusion. The New Press, 1997

5. Mumford, Lewis. Sticks and Stones: A Study of American Architecture and Civilization. W.W. Norton, 1924

6. Nabokov, Peter, and Robert Easton. Native American Architecture. Oxford University Press, 1989

7. Roth, Leland, and Amanda C. Roth-Clark. American Architecture: A History. 2nd ed. Routledge, 2016

8. Scully, Vincent. American Architecture and Urbanism. Frederick A. Praeger, 1969; reprinted by Trinity University Press, 2013

9. Upton, Dell. Architecture in the United States. Oxford University Press, 1998

10. Wright, Gwendolyn. USA: Modern Architectures in History. Reaktion Books, 2008

Early America:

1. DeWitt, Lloyd, and Corey Piper, eds. Thomas Jefferson, Architect: Palladian Models, Democratic Principles, and the Conflict of Ideals. Yale University Press, 2019

2. Eames Office. The World of Franklin and Jefferson. Museum of Modern Art, 1976

3. Eberlein, Harold Donaldson. The Architecture of Colonial America. Little, Brown and Company, 1915

4. Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia. Annotated edition, Robert Pierce Forbes, ed. Yale University Press, 2022

5. Upton, Dell. Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces of the New American Republic. Yale University Press, 2008

Urbanism, landscape, & planning:

1. Banham, Reyner. Scenes in America Deserta. Gibbs M. Smith, 1982

2. Baudrillard, Jean. America. Translated by Chris Turner. Verso, 1998

3. Blake, Peter. God’s Own Junkyard: The Planned Deterioration of America’s Landscape. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964. “It is not written in anger. It is written in fury.”

4. Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Random House, 1961

5. Sorkin, Michael, ed. Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space. Hill & Wang, 1992

6. Venturi and Rauch & Stephen Shore. Signs of Life: Symbols in the American City. Aperture, 1976

Houses and housing:

1. Hayden, Dolores. The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities. MIT Press, 1981

2. Krumwiede, Keith. Atlas of Another America: An Architectural Fiction. Park Books, 2017. Keith walked so McMansion Hell could run

3. McAlester, Virginia Savage, and A. Lee McAlester. A Field Guide to American Houses: The Definitive Guide to Identifying and Understanding America's Domestic Architecture. Alfred A. Knopf, updated 2013

4. Smith, Elizabeth A. T., ed. Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses. MIT Press, 1989

5. Woodbridge, Sally B., ed. Bay Area Houses. 2^nd ed. Gibbs Smith, 1988

Specific cities & regions:

1. Banham, Reyner. Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. University of California Press, 1971

2. Cronon, William. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. W.W. Norton & Company, 1991

3. Koolhaas, Rem. Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. Oxford University Press, 1978

4. Lewis, Peirce F. New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape. University Press of Virginia, 1976

5. McCoy, Esther. Five California Architects. Reinhold Publishing Corp., 1960

6. Stern, Robert A.M., David Fishman, and Jacob Tilove. New York 2020: Architecture and Urbanism at the Beginning of a New Century. Monacelli Press, 2025

7. Vinegar, Aron. I Am a Monument: On Learning from Las Vegas. MIT Press, 2008

Building types:

1. Chase, John. Glitter Stucco & Dumpster Diving: Reflections on Building Production in the Vernacular City. Verso, 2000. Especially for the essay “The Stucco Box,” on the L.A. dingbat, written with John Beach

2. Lange, Alexandra. Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall.  Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022

3. Willis, Carol. Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago. Princeton Architectural Press, 1995

 Biographies & monographs:

1. Baker, Paul R. Stanny: The Gilded Life of Stanford White. The Free Press, 1989

2. Bergdoll, Barry, and Jennifer Gray, editors. Frank Lloyd Wright: Unpacking the Archive. The Museum of Modern Art, 2017

3. Boutelle, Sara Holmes. Julia Morgan, Architect. Abbeville Press, 1988

4. Goldberger, Paul. Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry. Alfred A. Knopf, 2015

5. Lamster, Mark. The Man in the Glass House: Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century. Little, Brown & Company, 2018

6. Lewis, Michael J. Frank Furness: Architecture and the Violent Mind. W. W. Norton, 2001

7. McCoy, Esther. Craig Ellwood: Architecture. Walker & Company, 1968; reprint, Hennessey & Ingalls, 1997

Happy New Year!

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