North Carolina Architecture by Catherine W. Bishir (review)

50 ARRIS 3. 1992 discover. The book may also be of aid to experienced researchers who have found documentation but never put it together in a well organized chronology. Any mistakes that the writers may have made are minor, such as the slightly awkward joining of the chapters, and the fact that some chapters have concluding sections while others do not. One small disappointment is the Postscript to the book in which the authors had a chance to pull together important observations, but it was treated as a brief general summary that was covered in the introduction. As an example, the authors documented the importance of urbanization upon architectural development. The greatest observation to be made is that urbanization, which attracts industry and mechanization, is tied directly to the level of building practice - the greater the urbanization of a city, state or region, the higher the level of professionalism and construction processes. However, the authors never emphasized the connection with self-awareness, and the Postscript would have been the perfect place to make the point that was demonstrated by history. North Carolina Architecture is a traditional architectural history, but the history of the state's buildings was executed with a balance of building types, rural and urban, that is unprecedented. All buildings in North Carolina were treated with equal historical merit, whether log or reinforced concrete. Great praise needs to also go to the publisher who allowed a well rounded history to be produced, when many publishers encourage a writer to remove most of the "humble buildings" due to the costs of publication. In North Carolina Architecture Bishir exhibited great scholarship and raised the level of analyzing a state's architectural history to a new plateau, a model for architectural historians to follow. PHll.lPPE OSZUSCIK University of South Alabama Catherine W. Bishir. North Carolina Architecture. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. xiv + 514 pp. 490 duotone photographs, 18 color plates, 65 line drawings. North Carolina is as architecturally rich as it is topographically varied, although its built heritage is among the least known of the original American colonies. North Carolina Architecture, a fifty-year commemorative project of the Historic Preservation Foundation of North Carolina, should help dispel the notion that Virginia, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania have a monopoly on great buildings. As an historian with the state preservation office, Catherine Bishir knows the architecture of the Old North State intimately, although she clearly prefers the country plantations of the eighteenth century to the office blocks and housing projects of recent years. While her evenhanded chronological study of North Carolina's architectural history includes tobacco barns, factories, bungalows, and even a filling station, the domestic emphasis is appropriate for such a longtime rural state. Nevertheless, most purchasers ofNorth Carolina Architecture will buy the book mainly for Tim Buchman's stunning photographs. In the documentary tradition of Walker Evans, Paul Strand, and Frances Benjamin Johnston (whose Early Architecture ofNorth Carolina was published by Chapel Hill in 1947), Buchman's "straight" images are crisply detailed and classically composed - works of art in their own right. But for all their poetry, Buchman's photographs are detached, lifeless. Except in the few older pictures, there are almost no people in the book. There are few signs, and no unseemly intrusions that are as rriuch a part of the Carolina landscape as anywhere else in America. Even when the photographer ventured into cities, he blocked out offending neighbors and apparently did his picture taking only on Sundays and holidays. Without people, cars, or urban bustle, the streets of Greensboro or Asheville or Winston-Salem become ghostly surreal landscapes, h~aunting but unrevealing. Given the book's hefty price, awkward size, and daunting bulk (eight pounds!), North Carolina Architecture seems primarily destined for coffee table display. The scholarship is obscured by the beauty, so that the book becomes an extension of the type of Williamsburg-theme park sanitized history that we ought to have abandoned years ago. While the book is of undeniable interest to historians and librarians, for me North Carolina Architecture doesn't begin to express this state's remarkably rich, individual built environment. Instead of empty porches and other details...