Fine Art, Mere Building, and Pretty Much Everything Else

James D. Kornwolf with Georgiana W. Kornwolf. Architecture and Town Planning in Colonial North America, 3 vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. li + 1770 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, appendices, bibliography, and indices. $375.00.

A study of this magnitude invites a reviewer to suspend the rules. Since historians ought to know what is in this mind-boggling compilation, one is tempted to forego evaluation for notification because reporting what is at hand and how it is presented could be a substantial essay itself. To describe now and assess later, perhaps in the next Reviews, would be ideal, but since that is unlikely, suffice it to say by way of preliminary appraisal—unusually long summary of content to follow—that nothing on this scale for North American design (for most things North American, really) has ever before been attempted.

Its closest competitors—two fine books—are distant runners-up. Hugh Morrison's Early American Architecture: From the First Colonial Settlements to the National Period (1952) is the more encyclopedic and William H. Pierson, Jr.'s The Colonial and Neoclassical Styles (1970) the more imaginative, but they both omit town planning, African-Americans, and anything Canadian, treat Spain only in the United States Southwest, and overlook the French, Pierson completely, Morrison but for sixteen pages on the Mississippi Valley. Morrison has five pages on Indian construction, Pierson two.

Kornwolfian understatement—or was it to avoid a longer title?—masks another Morrison/Pierson omission. In addition to examining architecture and town planning thoroughly, the Kornwolfs also devote ample space to garden and other outdoor design—lumped together nowadays as "landscape architecture"—analyzing Canada and the United States in all constructional respects, not in obeisance to twenty-first-century political divisions but according to sixteenth- through nineteenth-century differences in settler intentions and cultural characteristics. Colonial design is therefore understood as an holistic potpourri of European or European-inspired deposits, not as early components of what would later be separate national patrimonies.

Spanning three centuries, from Jean Ribault's 1562 attempt to establish pe rmanent settlement on Parris Island, South Carolina, to the 1867 formation of the Dominion of Canada, these volumes constitute the most detailed yet comprehensive account of what North Americans (including Indians and African-Americans) built—firmly anchored in design history, social and political context, and environmental influences—that we are ever likely to have, if for no other reason (merit aside) than that the task is so daunting. Five full pages of acknowledgments indicate just how daunting. When one appreciates that the pages measure eight and one-half by eleven inches with one-inch margins around double columns, one begins to grasp the monumental effort it took—lasting twenty years, logging thousands of miles—to produce these 1770 pages with some three thousand illustrations (weighing in at twelve pounds). But this is not the entirety of the Kornwolfs' grande project, for they are now at work on a companion study of European, native, and African constructions from Mexico through Central America and in the Caribbean. God bless!

Spanning five hundred and four pages, the first volume, Continental Powers and Peoples in North America, 1562-1867, opens with a fourteen-page preface outlining what its authors are about and why, one of its strongest sections being endnotes fifteen to twenty-two (as often as not the notes throughout are informative mini-essays), a no-nonsense, theoretically and experientially based "textbook" explanation of what architectural historians do, how they do it, and some of the conceptual and empirical tools they do it with. I mention this because over the years I have had little success convincing plain vanilla historians that architectural historians do not waste their time fooling around with what a history professor once told me was "superstructure," as opposed to the "base," meaning the real history over which he labored. These eight footnotes ought to be required reading for anyone still under the illusion...