In judging a photograph, one distinguishes between the quality of the image and that of the object shown, and so it is with a literary anthology. American Architectural History, edited by Keith Eggener, is a compilation of essays published between 1981 and 2002 that presents a vivid and faithful image of the discipline today. What it reveals about that discipline is, of course, a different question altogether.

American Architectural History was designed to free the instructor from the burdensome task of making a reading packet to supplement a survey text. One can do this with a set of well-chosen primary sources, such as Leland Roth’s long out-of-print America Builds: Source Documents in American Architecture and Planning (New York: Harper and Row, 1983). Or one can use secondary sources, showing students the methods and concerns of modern scholarship. This is the approach of Eggener, whose twenty-four “concise, lively, accessible, and engaging” texts were selected to illustrate the wide “diversity of subject matter, method, and authorial voice” that characterizes the discipline today (16). They are grouped in six chronological sections that proceed from pre-Columbian and colonial America to the present, each prefaced with brief introductory remarks and an up-to-date bibliography. In every respect, the book is intelligently and attractively assembled (although readers curious about the authors and their affiliations will look in vain for a contributors’ list).

In a thoughtful introduction, Eggener sketches the history of the discipline from its “romantic, anecdotal, and unsystematic” origins in the nineteenth century to the deliberately revisionist “discourse analysis” of the present (3, 14–15). As a convenient milepost, he cites John Maass’s landmark 1969 article in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (“Where Architectural Historians Fear to Tread,” The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 28, no. 1 [March 1969]: 3–8), which famously tabulated every article ever published in that journal in order to show how embarrassingly narrow was the range of topics and approaches (12). But even as Maass wrote, Eggener explains, architectural history was widening its scope in favor of “an intensified interdisciplinarity; this is apparent in both the topics authors choose to work on and the methods that they use to study them” (13). These methods range widely from sociology and economics to linguistics and literary criticism, as well as to gender analysis, almost all of which are on display here.

If Maass lamented the “bourgeois standard [that] prevented architectural historians from studying the buildings of the lower class” (12), this is no longer the case. Some of the most useful readings come from the field of vernacular architecture. John Michael Vlach’s provocative essay, “The Plantation Landscape,” stresses how the paths of clandestine movement and places of furtive gathering used by slaves constituted invisible “acts of appropriation” that made the landscape of slavery a much richer and more complex artifact than the hierarchical geometry of plantations would suggest (109). He also demonstrates how the popular American image of the southern plantation—of a colonnaded prodigy like Tara, resplendent in myrtle, jasmine, and japonica—is a polite fiction, plantation life having usually been a hardscrabble affair, “a Spartan pioneer experiment on the edge of a constantly advancing frontier” (103). Similarly rewarding is Dell Upton’s text, “Churches, Courthouses, and Dwellings in Colonial Virginia,” not only for its thorough weighing of the physical and documentary evidence but for its highly original conclusions. Among these is his insight that “the decline of the Anglican parish and the diminution of court day’s importance during the Revolution” led to a decrease in the prestige and authority of these public buildings in favor of the plantation (87). One does not need to agree with all of Upton’s assertions (is it really true that “the activity of churchgoing was predominantly secular”?), for an essay rich in evidence and assertions invariably makes better fodder for classroom debate (78).

The best of the essays here, like those of Vlach and Upton, help us to view familiar objects in unfamiliar and rewarding ways. By this criterion, the most remarkable essay is Alice Friedman’s “Edith Farnsworth, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Philip Johnson.” The Farnsworth House and Johnson’s own Glass House are two of the most familiar objects in the landscape of modernism, and by this point one might think that these glass boxes have nothing more to hide. But Friedman creatively deals with the personalities of the owners, and their sexuality, in a way that makes their houses more eloquent than traditional formal analysis possibly could. She is especially subtle in her reading of the Glass House as a homosexual object in a heterosexual world, which performed a delicate pas de deux with Johnson’s bunker-like Guest House—the “closet” without which the ostentatious theatricality of the Glass House would not have been possible (334). This is sensitive material, but handled here with extraordinary imagination and sensitivity, and without special pleading or polemical agenda.

It is not only the revisionist essays that are worthy of note. Mary McLeod’s study of the Vietnam Veterans memorial, and the contentious competition that produced it, is a model monograph. The story is familiar enough in its broad outlines, but McLeod fleshes it out in surprising detail, such as the odd fact that veterans were deliberately excluded from the competition jury (383–84), or that the entries that proposed figural sculpture were almost exclusively the work of amateurs (385). Neil Levine’s “Robert Venturi and the ‘Return of Historicism’” is quite different in character, but just as commendable. Its focus is the return of representation to modern architecture, not as ironic markers of a Pop sensibility but as part of a renewal of the “public discourse, signaling a revitalization of cultural memory and a desire for urban reform” (378). His analysis of the complex relationship between Venturi and Louis Kahn, whose “idealism and hermeticism” kept him from fully accepting historical representation (374), is particularly gratifying.

To excerpt a text from a longer book, which was the case with many of these, does not always produce a satisfyingly self-contained essay. Those by Friedman and Upton work well, but some of the others read more like fragments of a larger whole. Also somewhat out of place is the excerpt from James O’Gorman’s Three American Architects: Richardson, Sullivan, and Wright, 1865–1915 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), which is a muscular and urgent account of the genesis of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie House. Since O’Gorman intended his book for a general audience and dispensed with footnotes entirely, it does not seem to offer the same case study in scholarship that the other essays do (although it offers a lesson in lucid writing, which is probably more important).

No anthology, alas, pleases everybody. Most readers will quickly come up with a list of substitutions, if only as a thought experiment. I found myself wishing that John Archer’s splendid 1975 essay on “Puritan Town Planning in New England” (The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 34, no. 2 [May 1975]: 140–49) had been included, rather than John Stilgoe’s handsome but less revolutionary essay on the colonial grid. Likewise with the excerpt from Daniel Bluestone’s Constructing Chicago (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). This was the first comprehensive study of Chicago skyscrapers from a point of view other than the technical and stylistic framework of Siegfried Giedion and Carl Condit, who policed the pedigree of International Style Modernism as exactingly as any D.A.R. membership committee. But while it admirably traces the complex cultural context for the rise of the skyscraper, this anthology is already heavy on cultural interpretation; might more have been accomplished with an excerpt from Carol Willis’s Form Follows Finance (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995), with its innovative look at the economics of skyscraper building? Other readers will have their own pet quibbles.

In the end, this scrupulous and conscientiously selected anthology depicts the state of the field with splendid fidelity. But what of the state of the field? Anyone who has followed recent discussions of art-historical methodology cannot fail to note the distinct tone of self-congratulation that creeps in when scholars contrast their work with their counterparts of the past generation, a tone far removed from the humility that caused Maass to lament the narrowness of the field in 1969. Yet it is possible to put on new shackles even as old ones are being hammered away. And a spacious look at the field shows not only a widening of scholarly interests but in some areas a shrinking.

Three developments seem troubling. First, it is by no means clear that interdisciplinarity has lived up to the claims made on its behalf. The two academic disciplines with the most important ramifications for architecture—economics and sociology—are hardly ever (if at all) applied with like rigor. Regression analysis, the elemental tool of economics, is not only not found here but virtually nowhere in architectural history, which is woefully weak on numerical analysis. To mention money and capitalism does not make one an economist. Likewise, sociology is invoked, but the actually analytical tools of sociology are hardly ever used. Invariably, the interdisciplinarity one finds is of the soft variety, not the exacting disciplines that require the gathering and interpretation of hard data.

Such hard data might reveal much. In fact, economic analysis might go far in analyzing what is among the most important and least-studied shifts in the architecture of the last century—the radical reversal of the relative costs of labor and materials. The drop in the price of materials as labor costs rose comprehensively changed the process of making buildings, financing them, and shaping them—with ramifications for the visual character of our world as important as modernism itself. Here is a promising avenue for interdisciplinary research begging for scholarly interest.

A second conspicuous development is a profound shift away from historical realia to modes of interpretation. A generation ago, architectural history was deeply concerned with buildings in their corporeal reality—their materials, structural systems, engineering technology, and their specific visual form. During the zenith of modernism, questions of technology and style tended to dominate the field, and so unremittingly were they explored that a later generation felt liberated when it was permitted to look at the larger cultural continuum in which buildings stood.

This is not to say that important work is not being done on architectural technology; it is, and often with spectacular results. One thinks of William Rose’s “Moisture Control in the Modern Building Envelope: History of the Vapor Barrier in the U.S., 1923–52,” published in the APT Bulletin in 1997 (28, no. 4: 13–19), which takes a lowly material and shows it to be at the center of important developments in technology, regulation, and even public health (it also explains why one sees so many Tyvek signs when driving). The inclusion of such an essay would have corrected the anthology’s somewhat lopsided stress on interpretative frameworks. It is revealing that the essays here generally show a fairly low level of engagement with the visual material, and tend to use their images as garnish rather than integral parts of the argument (only nine of the essays, for example, show plans).

Third, one notices a tendency to treat architecture in terms of mass culture rather than as a discrete intellectual and aesthetic culture in its own right. Only a few of the essays give the sense of buildings being intellectual artifacts, the physical manifestation of a complex thought. The ideas that seized and possessed architects, and that gave their works their underlying meaning—the whole corpus of thought behind the Gothic Revival and Beaux-Arts classicism—are scarcely mentioned here. Ruskin is mentioned only once in passing, Pugin not at all. That this is the case is not Eggener’s fault; it seems to be an honest reflection of the changing preoccupations of the discipline.

A last question: why was not a single article culled from the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians? One likes to think that new ideas briskly make their way into article form before they take on more stately and resolved form in a book. Can it be that the journal no longer publishes the field’s groundbreaking essays, or, if it does, then not in American architecture? Members of the society might want to ponder this.