Perhaps most interesting is the range of buildings and machines that Mills designed - from monuments and local courthouses, to prisons and churches, bridges and canals, to rotary piston engines and fireproof masonry vaults - all during a revolutionary era of building technology in America.".

Although individually and collectively Americans have many histories, the dominant view of our national past focuses on the colonial era. The reasons for this are many and complex, touching on stories of the country's origins and of the founding fathers, the privileged position in history granted the thirteen original colonies, and the ways in which the nation has adjusted to change and modernity. But no matter the cause, the result is obvious: images and forms derived from and related to America's colonial past are the single most popular form of cultural expression. Often conceived solely in architectural terms, from the red-brick and white-trimmed buildings that recall eighteenth-century James River estates to the clapboarded saltboxes that recall early New England, Colonial Revival is in fact better understood as a process of remembering. In Re-creating the American Past, architectural historian Richard Guy Wilson and a host of other scholars examine how and why Colonial Revival has persisted in modern times. The volume contains essays that explore Colonial Revival expressions in architecture, landscape architecture, historic preservation, decorative arts, and painting and sculpture, as well as the social, intellectual, and cultural background of the phenomena. Based on the University of Virginia's landmark 2000 conference "The Colonial Revival in America," Re-creating the American Past is a comprehensive and handsome volume that recovers the origins, characteristics, diversity, and significance of the Colonial Revival, situating it within the broader history of American design, culture, and society.

The Washington Monument is one of the most easily recognized structures in America, if not the world, yet the long and tortuous history of its construction is much less well known. Beginning with its sponsorship by the Washington National Monument Society and the grudging support of a largely indifferent Congress, the Monument's 1848 groundbreaking led only to a truncated obelisk, beset by attacks by the Know Nothing Party and lack of secured funding and, from the mid-1850s, to a twenty-year interregnum. It was only 1n 1876 that a Joint Commission of Congress revived the Monument and entrusted its completion to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.In "To the Immortal Name and Memory of George Washington": The United States Corps of Engineers and the Construction of the Washington Monument, historian Louis Torres tells the fascinating story of the Monument, with a particular focus on the efforts of Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Lincoln Casey, Captain George W. Davis, and civilian Corps employee Bernard Richardson Green and the details of how they completed the construction of this great American landmark. The book also includes a discussion and images of the various designs, some of them incredibly elaborate compared to the austere simplicity of the original, and an account of Corps stewardship of the Monument up to its takeover by the National Park Service in 1933. First published in 1985. 148 pages, ill.

If engineering is the art and science of technical problem solving, systems architecting happens when you don't yet know what the problem is. The third edition of a highly respected bestseller, The Art of Systems Architecting provides in-depth coverage of the least understood part of systems design: moving from a vague concept and limited resources

Yes, they make rather an odd couple-but, truly, Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) and Fiske Kimball (1888-1955) are the Johnson and Boswell of the story of American architecture. If not for Dr. Fiske Kimball, we might never have known that Thomas Jefferson was an architect. Though he was hailed as a brilliant statesman, Jefferson was all but unknown as an artist and an architect for nearly a century. But Kimball, an industrious scholar with a keen eye, made a series of critical discoveries that changed not just the image of Jefferson, but also rewrote the story of American architecture, introducing its first real practitioner. Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Charles Bulfinch, William Thornton, Robert Mills-Kimball identified the key figures who together with Jefferson transformed the craft of building into the art of architecture, at the same time setting the aesthetic tone for a young country still struggling to define itself. Part detective story, part narrative history, Dr. Kimball and Mr. Jefferson recreates the stories of these visionary men through the lens of the amazing Fiske Kimball, who, in resurrecting their legacy, helped found the twin disciplines of historic preservation and architectural history. Hugh Howard's books include the definitive Thomas Jefferson, Architect; his memoir House-Dreams; the essay collection The Preservationist's Progress; and an introduction to the architecture of Williamsburg, Colonial Houses. He lives in upstate New York with his wife and their two teenage daughters.