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Thematic Essays

Essays in SAH Archipedia are broadly grouped as either place-based or thematic. Place-based essays include overviews of architecture in specific U.S. states and cities. Thematic essays examine architectural and urban issues within and across state and regional boundaries. Like individual building entries, essays are accompanied by rich subject metadata, so you can browse them by style, type, and period. SAH Archipedia essays are comprised of peer-reviewed scholarship (born-digital and print-based) contributed by architectural historians nationwide.

Beginning

By: Gabrielle Esperdy

Oklahoma

“I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves.”[1] In her 2016 speech at the...

BLUE RIDGE PARKWAY

By: Anne Carter Lee

Virginia

The construction of a 469-mile-long linear park, linking Shenandoah National Park and its Skyline Drive to the Great Smoky Mountains National...

BRANDYWINE PARK

By: W. Barksdale Maynard

Delaware

Brandywine Creek had long afforded Wilmingtonians with recreation: walks, picnics, bathing, skating. A proposal for the city to buy land on...

Brutalism

By: Daniel Williamson

New York

The term Brutalism has served as a rallying cry, a stylistic label, and an epithet. The term originated in the early 1950s in England, where the...

BURLINGTON'S QUEEN ANNE HOUSES

By: Glenn M. Andres and Curtis B. Johnson

Vermont

The expansion of Burlington's post–Civil War lumber industry fueled a residential building boom, aided by...

California Missions

By: Heather N. McMahon

California

Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century and extending into the early nineteenth century, the Spanish crown strategically...

CAMP MEETINGS

By: W. Barksdale Maynard

Delaware

Lower Delmarva was a center of early Methodism—21 percent of its adults were Methodist by 1810—and western Sussex County still has many rural...

CHESAPEAKE AND DELAWARE CANAL

By: W. Barksdale Maynard

Delaware

So potently does the canal divide Delaware into northern and southern cultural zones, it is sometimes hard to recall that it...

COBBLESTONE BUILDINGS

By: Marsha Weisiger and Contributors

Wisconsin

Cobblestone buildings are rare in the United States. They mostly occur in areas near bands of glacial moraine, where...

COURTHOUSES AND SQUARES

By: Gerald Moorhead et al.

Texas

The county courthouse set in its town square is the centerpiece of Texas architecture and urbanism. The square with its courthouse is the...

DANVILLE'S TOBACCO DISTRICT

By: Anne Carter Lee

Virginia

Tobacco and Danville grew together. By the mid-nineteenth century, the thin, marginally fertile sandy soil in the counties around...

DU PONT COUNTRY ESTATES

By: W. Barksdale Maynard

Pennsylvania

According to Winterthur Museum historian Margaret Lidz, Delaware's Chateau Country resembles enclaves of the ultra-rich on the...

Du Pont Highway

By: W. Barksdale Maynard

Delaware

T. Coleman du Pont will always be remembered for his highway (U.S. 13 and 113) that carries traffic ninety-seven miles north...

Federal Influence in Maryland

By: Lisa Pfueller Davidson and Catherine C. Lavoie

Maryland

From the moment of its founding in 1790, the District of Columbia changed its Maryland neighbors. The...

FLORA AND LANDSCAPE DESIGN

By: Don J. Hibbard

Hawaii

A horticulturist's delight, the flora of Hawaii is as cosmopolitan as its human population. During the past two centuries, over five...

Googie Architecture

By: Bart Bryant-Mole

California

In the postwar period, with industry in California booming, migrating workers flocked to the state, more than doubling the...

GROUT BUILDINGS

By: Marsha Weisiger and Contributors

Wisconsin

Grout, a form of poured concrete, was briefly popular as a building material in the mid-nineteenth century. The town of Milton...

Gulf Coast Tribes

By: Willa Granger

Florida

Scholars often subdivide the study of Native American culture into vast, multistate regions, including the Northeast, the Plains, and the...

MARYLAND WOOD BOATBUILDING

By: Lisa Pfueller Davidson and Catherine C. Lavoie

Maryland

Situated along the Chesapeake Bay, the world’s largest estuary, Marylanders could not help but embrace...

MILL NEIGHBORHOODS

By: Glenn M. Andres and Curtis B. Johnson

Vermont

Bennington retains a coherent pattern of nineteenth-century mill neighborhoods, with owners' mansions and workers' housing in...

MODERNISM IN DELAWARE

By: W. Barksdale Maynard

Delaware

As with states farther south, architectural modernism took only shallow root in Delaware and was usually diluted with historicizing motifs...

MURALS IN ARKANSAS

By: Cyrus A. Sutherland with Gregory Herman, Claudia Shannon, Jean Sizemore, Jeannie M. Whayne and Contributors

Arkansas

Between 1938 and 1943, twenty-one...

New Canaan Modernism

By: Patricia Seto-Weiss

Connecticut

In the late 1940s, Modernism arrived in New Canaan in full force. Architect and Harvard graduate Eliot Noyes (1910–1977)...

OCTAGONAL HOUSES

By: Marsha Weisiger and Contributors

Wisconsin

Octagonal houses enjoyed widespread popularity in the mid-nineteenth century, thanks largely to their foremost proponent,...

POHAKU (STONE)

By: Don J. Hibbard

Hawaii

Pohaku is the Hawaiian word for stone. Deriving from lava and the coral reef, the types of stone locally available are somewhat limited. Lava rock...

Roadside Motels

By: Megan Kendrick

California

In light of California’s cultural associations with the automobile, it is no wonder that the roadside motel emerged in the twentieth...

ROUND BARNS

By: Marsha Weisiger and Contributors

Wisconsin

As Wisconsin’s farmers made the transition from wheat farming to dairying at the turn of the twentieth century, many of them...

SHENANDOAH NATIONAL PARK

By: Anne Carter Lee

Virginia

Nature, art, and politics came together to create Shenandoah National Park and its signature feature, the Skyline Drive. In the 1920s, as...

TEXAS DANCE HALLS

By: Gerald Moorhead et al.

Texas

Often beginning as small outposts surrounded by farms or ranches, towns were established throughout nineteenth-century Texas that not only...

TEXAS PARKS AND THE CCC

By: Gerald Moorhead et al.

Texas

The familiar 1930s “rustic” buildings and landscapes in national, state, and local parks emerged from the bittersweet years of the Great...

The Chesapeake House

By: Lisa Pfueller Davidson and Catherine C. Lavoie

Maryland

The term “Chesapeake” has been applied to a basic house form prevalent within the Western and Eastern...

THE GREEN

By: W. Barksdale Maynard

Delaware

William Penn called for a market square in Dover, but one was not laid out until c. 1720, on either side of S. State Street. Revolutionary...

THE HAWAIIAN ROOF

By: Don J. Hibbard

Hawaii

The 1920s and 1930s were a time when consideration of Hawaii's strong sense of place—its environment, local materials, and multicultural traditions—...

THE HONOLULU BOARD OF WATER SUPPLY

By: Don J. Hibbard

Hawaii

A public water supply system was not established for Honolulu until 1848. Prior to that time, people dwelling in the area drew water from shallow wells, surface...

THE KING RANCH

By: Gerald Moorhead et al.

Texas

Founded by Captain Richard King in 1853, the ranch originated with his purchase of the Santa Gertrudis land grant that dated to the Spanish...

THE LANAI

By: Don J. Hibbard

Hawaii

Hawaii's contribution to architectural vocabulary, “lanai” initially referred to traditional Hawaiian structures with open sides. Usually covered, open-air work...

The Land-Grant Campus

By: J. Philip Gruen

New York

The land-grant campus is, perhaps, the nation’s vernacular campus. Seemingly lacking coherence, a reasonably well-ordered core...

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