Buildings of Pennsylvania: Philadelphia and Eastern Pennsylvania ed. by George E. Thomas (review)

The rich and varied architectural history of Philadelphia and eastern Pennsylvania has been given an exhaustive and sophisticated representation in Buildings of Pennsylvania: Philadelphia and Eastern Pennsylvania. The book’s editor and author, architectural historian George E. Thomas, and his colleagues, Patricia Likos Ricci, Richard J. Webster, Lawrence M. Newman, Robert Janosov, and Bruce Thomas, have provided a treasure trove of delights. The book explicates the spectacular as well as the typical, mining the region’s past as well as exploring the pressing questions of its future. This provides appeal for a varied audience, from academics and educators in varied disciplines to design professionals and interested laypeople, all united by a common interest in the history of Pennsylvania and the Mid-Atlantic region. This book is one of two volumes on Pennsylvania—the other addresses Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania—in The Buildings of the United States series, comprised of more than sixty volumes, founded and commissioned by the Society of Architectural Historians. The book series itself has a rich history: it was inspired by German-born British architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner’s series Buildings of England and its founding editor-in-chief was distinguished architectural historian William H. Pierson Jr.

Buildings of Pennsylvania: Philadelphia and Eastern Pennsylvania begins with a broad historical overview of the region. Philadelphia and Eastern Pennsylvania’s history is explicated from its origins as William Penn’s utopian “Holy Experiment” to the new architecture of the 1990s to what the authors aptly describe as its uncertain architectural future in the twenty-first century. This insightful introduction discusses many important aspects of the region’s development from historical and cultural geography to transportation development and industrial innovation. The rest of the book is organized by the following six regions: Philadelphia, the Inner Counties (including Bucks, Montgomery, Delaware, and Chester counties), the Piedmont, Beyond Blue Mountain to the Northern Tier, the Anthracite Region, and the Northern Tier and the Poconos. A short history of each region describes the overall architectural character and explains the evolution of the design and planning of that particular area. The book’s attentiveness to practical detail, such as suggesting routes of travel and including scenarios of everyday life in buildings, signals a concern with real life rather than abstractions. This aligns with the editors’ assertion that this volume is as concerned with vernacular architecture as it is with landmark architecture, an appropriate viewpoint given that lived experience and inhabitation are at the root of architectural history.

Thomas’s introduction contains much fascinating information. For instance, he points out that the long-held belief that Philadelphia’s distinctive architectural character descends from the original plain style of the Quakers is inaccurate. In fact, Thomas argues, Quaker values played only an indirect role in shaping the architecture of characteristic Philadelphia architects like Frank Furness, William L. Price, George Howe, Louis Kahn, and Robert Venturi. Instead, Thomas contends that the culture responded in its own peculiar way to the challenges and opportunities of the modern industrial age.

A particularly insightful section within the introduction is “Consumer Culture,” which concentrates on the ways that the region’s industrial and economic history had distinctive architectural consequences, including the rowhome. Nineteenth-century industry contributed to a burgeoning consumer culture that developed from a special financial institution: the savings and loan society. Such institutions were not unique to Philadelphia, but Philadelphia was one of the first American cities to employ them successfully. In fact, Philadelphia workers initiated mass consumer culture before it reached the rest of the country. This was realized in the form of the rowhome building form, typically a two-story brick rowhouse, purchased by many Philadelphia industrial workers, who by the 1890s had enough income to purchase a home in the city as well as a vacation home at the New Jersey shore. This history of Philadelphia rowhomes touches a wide demographic, one that still inhabits this kind of...