In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Architecture in Cincinnati: An Illustrated History of Designing and Building an American City
  • Eric Sandweiss
Architecture in Cincinnati: An Illustrated History of Designing and Building an American City. By Sue Ann Painter. (Athens: Ohio University Press, with the Architectural Foundation of Cincinnati, 2006. xviii, 352 pp. Paper $35.00, ISBN 978-0-8214-1701-0.)

It's not easy to represent cities in writing. After all, to a large extent they already represent themselves; their street plans, their public spaces, their monuments, and buildings not only promote the functions of everyday life but also signify the ambitions and hopes that led people there in the first place.

Never content to let planners and architects take all the credit, the traditional urban historian offers his own way of representing the city. Peeling back the surface of the buildings and monuments, he reveals the people who shaped them, who lived and worked in them, who passed beneath them each day. If physical structures—elements of the representational city—serve any purpose to the urban social historian, it is in their role as containers of the individuals and social structures that merit our ultimate attention.

For the architectural historian, however, it is the structures themselves that comprise the object of a story worth telling. The story may begin in the lives of workers, families, or civic leaders, but it leads us ultimately to the built landscape. Taken to its materialist extreme, such attention leads to the familiar literary genre of the architectural guidebook, with its thumbnail pictures and its facile reduction of the significance of the city's buildings into a succession of examples of "Stick-Eastlake," "Streamlined Moderne," and "Neobrutalism" presented like paintings in a gallery or contestants in a beauty pageant.

Given the extremes to which urban historical representation can go, Sue Ann Painter deserves commendation for finding a niche within that narrow space where architectural critique and social history work together, both to highlight and to interrogate the urban landscape. Her subject is Cincinnati, at one time the nation's sixth-largest city and to this day the site of a notable number of examples of the changing technologies, aesthetics, and uses that have shaped American architecture in the last two centuries. Distancing herself from guidebook writers, Painter insists that her work is [End Page 138] "about the task of building a community" (vii) and that she plans to focus on "the historical context in which planning and building took place" (vii). In ten chronological chapters (the last four of them written by either Beth Sullebarger or Jayne Merkel, Painter's collaborators), we see the history of the city laid out in clear, if summary, fashion, with a focus on the builders, architects, and clients responsible for changing its face over time.

Despite the authors' commendable effort to keep the bigger picture in focus, readers seeking serious consideration of the history of Cincinnati will do better to turn to the works of historians such as Zane Miller, Robert Fair-banks, or the authors of the articles that have appeared in the pages of this journal or its cross-state counterpart, Ohio Valley History, or that magazine's predecessor, Queen City Heritage. Chapter subheadings hint at the sketchy and relatively uninterpretive nature of the historical survey—"Building Materials Were Plentiful" and "War of 1812 Spurs Manufactures and Commercial Building" (13, 16). The prose works overtime—"at war's end, a building boom began" (59) and "by midcentury, railroads were gradually replacing canals" (37)—to push us through several hundred years of metropolitan change with a minimum of complexity and nuance.

Where Architecture in Cincinnati delivers its closest and most compelling view of the city's history is in its selection of dozens of individual buildings, beginning with the earthworks at Fort Ancient and ending with the remarkable spate of signature buildings recently commissioned for the campus of the University of Cincinnati. These are the structures that best define the city and that will, perhaps, first come to local readers' minds: James McLaughlin's Shillito's Department Store Building with its early (1877) use of structural steel, Washington Roebling's pioneering suspension bridge across the Ohio River, Cass Gilbert's...

pdf

Share