"The Architecture of Baltimore provides a comprehensive, narrative account of the city's rich architectural heritage, both lost and extant. The volume's editors and contributors - a distinguished group of scholars, writers, and critics - provide fresh insights into the city's architectural history, from its founding to the present. The volume opens with a look at the eighteenth century Georgian buildings that reflect the grandeur of the style, goes on to the prosperous port city's Federal-period achievements, including many country houses with their delicate details, then proceeds to its monumental examples of early-nineteenth-century American neoclassical design. Romantic stylings follow excursions into the Greek and Gothic Revivals, the rise of the popular Italianate-mode for town and country houses : fine examples of soaring church spires; public spaces like the Peabody Library, and masterpieces of ornamented dignity." "Later in the nineteenth century, a picturesque eclecticism produced such monuments as the Johns Hopkins Hospital and the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad's Mount Royal station as well as illustrative changes to the city's versatile row houses. Contributors discuss the evolution of industrial buildings and the growth of the city's architectural profession. The architecture of Baltimore also addresses the arrival of modernism and postmodernism, examines the origins and challenges of historic preservation, and assesses the Baltimore renaissance of the period 1955-2000, which saw and construction of Charles Center, Harborplace, and the sports complex at Camden Yards." "Illustrated with nearly 600 photographs, architectural plans, maps, and details, this impressive work of scholarship also offers a narrative of the history of Baltimore itself - its men and women of all stations, its taste and traditional preferences, its good choices and lamentable ones, and its built environment as a social and cultural chronicle."--BOOK JACKET.

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