In 1879, Carpentry and Building magazine launched its first house design competitionfor a cheap house. Forty-two competitions, eighty-six winning designs, and a slew ofnear winners and losers resulted in a body of work that offers an entire history of anarchitectural culture. The competitions represented a vital period of transition in delineating roles and responsibilities of architectural services and building trades. The contests helped to define the training, education, and values of "practical architects" and to solidify house-planning ideals. The lives and work of ordinary architects who competed in Carpentry and Building contests offer a reinterpretation of architectural professionalization in this time period.Cheap and Tasteful Dwellings thoroughly explores the results of these competitions, conducted over a thirty-year period from 1879 to 1909. The book outlines the philosophybehind and procedures developed for running the competitions; looks at characteristicsof the eighty-six winners of the competitions; examines the nature of architecturalpractices during the period; analyzes the winning competition designs; and providesbiographical details of competition winners and losers.A landmark book in architectural history, Cheap and Tasteful Dwellings makes a compelling case for the theory of convenient arrangement--its history, its role, its principles, its relationship to contemporary interior design education, and its meaning to American architecture. More importantly, the book explains the impact of Carpentry and Building's contests in furthering the tenets of convenient arrangement for house design. By using extensive material from the magazine, Jennings leaves little doubt as to how important this overlooked story is to the history of American architecture as a whole.

The first full length study of women's utopian spatial imagination in the seventeenth and eigtheenth centuries, this book explores the sophisticated correlation between identity and social space. The investigation is mainly driven by conceptual questions and thus seeks to link theoretical debates about space, gender and utopianism to historiographic debates about the (gendered) social production of space. As Pohl's primary aim is to demonstrate how women writers explore the complex (gender) politics of space, specific attention is given to spaces that feature widely in contemporary utopian imagination: Arcadia, the palace, the convent, the harem and the country house. The early modern writers Lady Mary Wroth and Margaret Cavendish seek to recreate Paradise in their versions of Eden and Jerusalem; the one yearns for Arcadia, the other for Solomon's Temple. Margaret Cavendish and Mary Astell redefine the convent as an emancipatory space, dismissing its symbolic meaning as a confining and surveilled architecture. The utopia of the country house in the work of Delarivier Manley, Sarah Scott and Mary Hamilton will reveal how women writers resignify the traditional metonym of the country estate. The study will finish with an investigation of Oriental tales and travel writing by Ellis Cornelia Knight, Lady Mary Montagu, Elizabeth Craven and Lady Hester Stanhope who unveil the seraglio as a location for a Western, specifically masculine discourse on Orientalism, despotism and female sexuality and offers their own utopian judgment.