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BOOK REVIEWS Cary Carson and Carl Lounsbury, eds. The Chesapeake House: Architectural Investigation by Colonial Williamsburg Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina in association with the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 2013, 544 pp. color photographs and illustrations, hardcover, $60.00, ISBN:978-0-8078-3577-7. In the introduction to The Chesapeake House, Cary Carson writes: "In effect, the cover of this book works like the front door of the hundreds of houses described herein. Open it and discover not empty rooms, but furnished, functioning, living interiors" (p. 4). Reading this handsome volume is like visiting one ofthese rooms; the wide range of essays, all beautifully illustrated with photographs and excellent drawings, offer the reader a multilayered and rewarding journey into the history of a fascinating group of buildings - seventeenth- and eighteenth-century houses and agricultural buildings ARRIS 74 § Volume 24 ~ 2013 constructed and inhabited in the "Chesapeake." As the title suggests, the book showcases the work of the Architectural Research Department at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation over the past eighty years, a collaboration of many scholars and researchers who worked to create a deep and comprehensive survey, which is an excellent addition to the bookshelf of scholars, teachers, and architecture buffs. The "Chesapeake" under discussion in this book is composed ofthe tablelands across the colonies (laterstates) ofVirginia and Maryland that form the drainage basin of the Chesapeake Bay. European settlers began populating this area in the seventeenth century, developing a rural society based on the production oftobacco for export. A central premise of the book is that the social intricacies resulting from this agricultural economy (especially its reliance on European indentured servants and African slaves), were manifested in the architectural design decisions of the owners and users of the buildings. Thus, the buildings in the Chesapeake were not merely copies of British precedents but rather a thriving, changing, regional tradition, which began in small one- or two-room homes and eventually produced complex houses such as Tuckahoe, Monticello, and Montpelier. In studying these buildings, the authors approach architecture as social history, as Carson explains: Instead of style (how buildings look), we now study function (how buildings work). In place of landmarks (enduring monuments), we see landscapes (animated social settings). The moral center of our scholarship rests squarely on the conviction that architecture, intentionally or not, gives physical form to the way people treat other people who share their spaces (p. 12). This emphasis is evident throughout the book and is beautifully summarized in "Portfolio 1 Furnished Lives" (pp. 115-19), a set of illustrations of houses in different eras, includingall the interior furnishings and explanations ofhow the houses were inhabited. Unsurprisingly, the white planters, the inhabitants with the most control over the design and construction of the houses, are most conspicuous in the history of buildings in this region; but the authors of The Chesapeake House widen the scope of the story so that all residents, including dependents, servants, and slaves, are given due attention. Writing about "Housing Slavery," for example, Edward A. Chappell posits that the white slave-owners' goal was to balance investment in the slaves through housing, clothing, and food and the maximum profit that could be made from their work. Using the layout and construction of housing for slaves, Chappell reveals much about the white inhabitants' changing conceptions ofslavery and slave labor. Chappell also describes a bid for a small measure ofcontrol. Slaves would dig pits in the earthen floors oftheir communal housing to store their meager belongings and possibly rations as well. Readers familiar with Rhys Isaac's seminal The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-17901 and Dell Upton's equally important Holy Things and Profane: Anglican Parish Churches in Colonial Virginia,2 will recognize The Chesapeake House not only as a book on the Chesapeake building traditions but also as a pivotal contribution to what Upton has identified as the historical strand in vernacular architecture studies: "which seeks to understand architectural change by relating it to patterns of social structure, economic differentiation and craft tradition."3 As a product of fruitful collaboration, long gestation (the original impetus for the book was in 1980s), and decades of meticulous research, The Chesapeake House will no doubt...

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