O’Neil Ford, Architect by Southern Architectural Biography Comes Of Age: A Survey of Monographs, with Brief Reviews of Mary Carolyn Hollers George, and: Fay Jones by Robert Adams Ivy, Jr. (review)

t· ,' "' I, "· 58 ARRIS Volume 4 1993 Figure 2. Fay Jones, Stoneflower (Shaheen-Goodfellow House), Eden Isle, Arkansas, 1965. Detail ofinterior cross-bracing (Esto Photographers). Southern Architectural Biography Comes Of Age: A Survey of Monographs, with Brief Reviews of Mary Carolyn Hollers George, O'Neil Ford, Architect, Texas A&M Press, 1992, xiii + 273 pp. (160 illus.) and Robert Adams Ivy, Jr., Fay Jones, The AlA Press, 1992, 224 pp. (230 illus. and plans). In a 1941 lecture series on Southern architecture, Lewis Mumford cited the importance of "that sense of self-awareness and critical understanding which goes into themakingandkeeping ofa great [regionalbuilding] tradition." Soundscholarshipanditsdisseminationwere, he urged, essential to the establishment of such a tradition . Scholarly understanding of the South's architecturalpastwasbeginningtoemergehereand therethroughout theregion-in the documentaryeffortsoftheHistoric American Buildings Survey, in the investigations accompanying the restoration of colonial Williamsburg, and in nascentstudiesofthearchitectureofCharlestonand New Orleans, the Carolina Low Country, and Tidewater Virginia . But much more was needed, including scrutiny of the period between 1865 and 1900, which Mumford himselfhad labeled the "Brown Decades," and further exploration ofregional permutationsin technique and process. And, of course, there was the largely uninvestigated subject of the builders and architects themselves. Mumford's challenge to scholars in the region remained largely unheeded during the next 30 years. Architectural scholarship appeared as a trickle of publications based on the groundbreaking research of the 1930s, which was mostly state-focused and usually treated only colonial and antebellum themes. The stream remained narrow amid a general tide ofirreverence toward regional architectural research, which could easily be construed as parochial or atavistic. With rare exceptions such as Clay Lancaster's 1956 biography of 19th-century Kentucky architect John McMurtry and, two years later, Rosamond Beirne and John Henry Scarff's study of the colonial builder William Buckland, monographs devoted to those who had fashioned the South's built landscape were conspicuously absent from this small corpus of scholarship. Even the potential for further inquiry into the rich building life of ThomasJefferson, suggested by the work ofFiske Kimball as far back as 1916 and again by I. T. Frary's 1931 Thomas Jefferson, Architect and Builder, went largely unrealized except for Frederick Doveton Nichols's expanded and correctedchecklist(1961) ofJefferson'sarchitecturaldrawings . As to practitioners in particular locales, Beatrice St. Julien Ravenel's Architects ofCharleston (1945) stood alone as a conscientious introduction and compendium of fact, but even it offered little more. Over the last20 years, however, a marked change has taken place. As unalloyed modernism has lost some of its sheen, architectural history has come into its own as a discipline. And wit-h this shift has emerged, in the South as elsewhere, an unprecedented degree of interest in the individuals who have shaped our architectural environment . Gra9.uate research is quietly generating new material on builders and building practices, while publicly funded state historic preservation offices- an outgrowth of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966- have amassed a wealth ofprimarysurveydata that holds promise for further critical analysis. Articles are frequent-to cite only those that have appeared in Arris: Ellen Weiss on turn-of-the-century African-American architect Robert R. Taylor, Marian Moffett on TVA architect Roland Wank, and LawrenceWodehouse onearlyTennessee modernists Alfred and Jane Clauss. Yet most significant of all is an encouraging flow offull-blown monographs on practitioners identified with the South. Not surprisingly, one of the earliest books to mark this surge took up where earlier Jeffersonian scholarship had left off. Desmond Guinness and Julius Trousdale Sadler,Jr.'sMr. Jefferson,Architect (1973) was an essentially pictorial work that styled itself "the first complete study" ofallJefferson'sarchitecturalwork Sincethen,Jeffersonian architectural scholarship has broadened and deepened, reexamining old topics in the light of new scholarship, as in Jack McLaughlin's meticulously researched and insightful Jefferson and Monticello: The Biography ofa Builder (1988). More portentous than the Guinness and Sadlerbook, for the ground it broke, was another 1973 monograph, ArthurScully,Jr.'s James Dakin,Architect: His Career in New York and the South. This was the first full portrait of any major Southern architect of the Greek Revival era, unless one counts James Gallier's self-serving, century-old autobiography , republished in 1973, or Agnes Addison Gilchrist's 1950 biography...