Inventing the New American House: Howard Van Doren Shaw, Architect
Inventing the New American House: Howard Van Doren Shaw, Architect
$65.00
Cohen, Stuart. Inventing the New American House: Howard Van Doren Shaw, Architect
Monacelli Press
2015
Book ID: 98753
Howard Van Doren Shaw designed stately country houses in and around ChicagoÑfrom affluent Lake Forest, Illinois, and Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, to Iowa, Minnesota, Ohio, and IndianaÑfrom 1894 to 1926, a period in American architecture that spanned the Gilded Age, the adoption of Beaux-Arts classicism as the ideal for civic architecture, the invention of the skyscraper, and the beginning of modernism. Born in 1869, he worked for the leading industrialists of that period, including Reuben H. Donnelley of printing fame, newspaper giant Joseph Medill Patterson, Edward Forster Swift, the meatpacking king, and Edward L. Ryerson of Ryerson Steel. A contemporary of Frank Lloyd Wright, Shaw explored many of the same ideas as the Prairie School Architects within the forms of traditional architecture. Though he was recognized as one of the leading country house architects of the early twentieth century, his name was largely forgotten after his death. Like many traditional architects practicing today, Shaw was skilled at adapting historic precedents to suit contemporary living, in particular the easy flow of interior space that became a design hallmark of the period for traditionalists and modernists alike. For the new and fashionable suburb of Lake Forest, Shaw created Market Square, the town center, which was lauded for its design as both a unique town green and the first American shopping center designed to accommodate automobiles.
256 pp. English Cl.
