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.".

This study of one of the most innovative practitioners of the Beaux-Arts movement in America covers Flagg's early training and Beaux-Arts works, his town and country houses, his commercial and utilitarian buildings, the Singer Tower, urban housing reform, and his small houses of modular design.

Louise Blanchard Bethune, the subject of this biography, was America's first female professional architect. She belonged to the influential group of pioneer architects--Daniel Burnham, John Root and Louis Sullivan--who supported her in becoming a fellow of the American Institute of Architects. In the booming industrial city of Buffalo, she preceded Frank Lloyd Wright and Alfred Kahn in factory design and was the key designer of the modern urban public school building, developing standards still used today. During her career (1881-1905) Bethune was consistently one of the most successful architects practicing in Buffalo and the driving force behind New York State's professional organizations for architects. Beyond setting standards for public schools, she was the go-to architect for factories, warehouses, police stations, a Nikola Tesla power transfer station, and the largest luxury hotel of the early 1900s. Bethune moved from a small town on the Erie Canal--the economic and technological marvel of the antebellum period--to a rapidly industrializing major American city, following the urban migration of many Americans. Unlike many women of her day she seized the promise of the growing nation to pursue life, liberty, and happiness in an occupation of her choice and succeeded.

Over the past two decades, scholarship in architectural history has transformed, moving away from design studio pedagogy and postmodern historicism to draw instead from trends in critical theory focusing on gender, race, the environment, and more recently global history, connecting to revisionist trends in other fields. With examples across space and time—from medieval European coin trials and eighteenth-century Haitian revolutionary buildings to Weimar German construction firms and present-day African refugee camps—Writing Architectural History considers the impact of these shifting institutional landscapes and disciplinary positionings for architectural history. Contributors reveal how new methodological approaches have developed interdisciplinary research beyond the traditional boundaries of art history departments and architecture schools, and explore the challenges and opportunities presented by conventional and unorthodox forms of evidence and narrative, the tools used to write history.

The Architect traces the role of the profession across the centuries and in different cultures, showing the architect both as designer and as mediator between the client and the builder.