Description:
Providing access to over 6,500 house designs published between 1850 and 1915, this work is indexed by architects' or designers' names as well as by the geographic location of each house when given in the periodical. It also includes a geographic index of architects, an annotated bibliography of the periodicals indexed, and an illustrated section with samples of the designs included in the index.
Brief description:
MARGARET CULBERTSON is head of the William R. Jenkins Architecture and Art Library at the University of Houston. She has published several articles on mail-order house and plan catalogues, as well as on other architectural and design topics. She is an active member of the Art Libraries Society/North America, which awarded her its first research grant in 1991.
Review Quotes: ..."an important bibliography for students of American domestic or vernacular architecture....The importance of this work is that it makes readily available access to popular turn of the century house designs by pattern book architects, low profile architects and local architects in remote locations who have seldom been acknowledged by the professional architectural journals. The history of domestic architecture as written in the journals which Culbertson indexes is the story of architecture as a consumer commodity rather than as a fine art and helps explain the townscape of virtually every small town in the United States. Scholars of vernacular architecture and regional historians will find this bibliography valuable in their work."-H-NET