Baltimore, Maryland, is one of America's oldest and most beautiful big cities. Twelve generations of Baltimoreans have built and destroyed some of America's best constructions. Then and Now: Baltimore Architecture shows the dramatic building and rebuilding of architecture around the city's harbor, in its downtown, and throughout its great historic neighborhoods.

From eighteenth-century mansions to urban high-rise buildings, the book chronicles two hundred years of architectural history through an exploration of the city's most beautiful and significant structures. Grouped by neighborhood in walking and driving tours, each building is pictured and described with a commentary on its history and style.

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."

Biography of a major Baltimore architect and an illustrated catalog of his buildings, including railroad stations, churches, and commercial structures, primarily in the mid-Atlantic region.

Baltimore was an innovator in the development of cast-iron architecture, but the city's heritage of buildings in this genre, once numbering more than a hundred, has dwindled to only a handful today. The Baltimore region also had a long tradition in iron production, beginning with the colonial era and continuing through the 1950s as Sparrows Point became the single largest steel complex in the world. Baltimore's Cast-Iron Buildings is a celebration of a unique aspect of Baltimore's architectural and industrial history. The authors examine cast-iron buildings in an integrated way to show how the material was fabricated and the buildings erected. They also explore the cast and wrought ironwork used for gates, fences, railings, and ornaments. The heavily illustrated work includes ironwork catalogs from the mid-1800s.

Alexander Cochran of Baltimore (1913–1990) was described as an "architectural missionary." Besides being devoted to modernism, Cochran was a highly romantic, deeply religious humanist who desired to keep the best of the past while adapting to modern needs. He transformed his city, pointing the way to its later renaissance in the 1960s. The book opens with a short biography of Cochran—peopled with the likes of Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, George Howe, Richard Neutra, and Eero Saarinen. The second half is a portfolio of Cochran’s work.