Architecture, Landscape, and American Culture Series

Series Editors:
Katherine Solomonson, University of Minnesota, email: solom003@umn.edu
Abigail A. Van Slyck, Connecticut College, email: aavan@conncoll.edu

The goal of this series is to highlight and promote historical scholarship that addresses the complex interplay among architecture, landscape, and American culture.  We define architecture and landscape broadly, to include both professionally designed buildings and landscapes and ordinary, vernacular environments. Collectively, the books in the series examine the social, political, economic, and cultural processes that inform the conception, production, and reception of American cultural landscapes.

The scope of the series is intentionally broad, ranging from deeply contextualized studies of single buildings or sites within a focused timeframe, to investigations of sites and building types as they change over time; from studies that consider how furniture, fittings, and other forms of material culture contribute to the function and meaning of the built environment, to projects that focus on issues or processes that may not have resulted in tangible environments. We also welcome studies that address the intersection between local practices and national and global networks of culture and capital, as well as environments constructed by American interests abroad.

Through single-authored books and tightly focused collaborative studies, the series seeks to illuminate the built environment’s active engagement with changing social relations and cultural values. To this end, it features scholarship that treats buildings and landscapes as social spaces shaped and experienced by many different human actors--from those who commissioned, designed, and built them to those who inhabited and reshaped them over time.  It also features studies that focus on rhetorical strategies instrumental in the ways people perceive and interact with the built environment.

Rather than drawing distinctions between “high” and “ordinary” buildings and landscapes, the series welcomes books on both, as well as works using innovative methodologies that erase the conceptual distinctions between the two. Theoretically informed and empirically grounded, books in the series draw upon theories, methods, and data from related disciplines in innovative ways while recognizing that architecture, landscape, and material culture provide forms of evidence that cannot be accessed through texts alone. Linking the books together is the use of visual evidence to expand scholarly awareness of how people have understood and experienced their physical surroundings.