Writers on Architecture in America: From Jefferson to Giedion

Mallgrave's intention in Writers on Architecture in America is much simpler. He brings together an episodic collection of voices—male and female, professional and lay—which compose not a chronicle of building events but tell a story in their own right. It is one related through a series of thematic essays that pose the question of how individuals of a freshly minted country—children and later adolescents in teenage defiance of their Anglo-Saxon past—press the search for a truly national building culture. Is it possible to do so within the span of a century, or two? Is it even desirable? In any case, the goal of a national architectural culture proved to be ever more elusive as efforts intensified.