The Many Flavors of US Architecture

Each of the chosen 500 (at least that's 100 more than Mrs. Astor's ballroom or Forbes magazine allows) is accompanied by a useful photo. Princeton's editors have also added a pithy, colorful introduction by Michael Lewis, which constitutes a useful, condensed course in American architecture. If you're out to tour the US, try leaving your Fodor or AAA book in the motel room some days and set out with Kidder Smith in hand. It provides a fascinating tour of a different aspect of the American melting pot. How's that for a mixed metaphor: from frozen music to melting pot in one art form.

If you become addicted to this less flittering substitute for birdwatching, Princeton Architectural Press will happily feed your hobby. Three of the press's current books zoom in on subsections of the territory Kidder Smith travels. One requires you to rubberneck in New York; one in L.A.; another in parks, parkways, esplanades, and sculpture gardens.

Closest to birdwatching is Terra-Cotta Skyline, by Susan Tunick. If you go forth to find the beautiful ceramic design elements on some of the 200 New York buildings still dressed in these Gilded Age and Art Deco designs you may find yourself craning your neck like a peregrine falcon spotter as you discover pediments, gargoyles, friezes, and roofs far above the city hubbub. But there are also spectacular, ornate doorways, and staircases, arrayed in subtle blues and greens, regal silver, gold, and blue, or hot oranges. Salamanders, crowns, classical columns, shell motifs, a tailor stitching, buffalos, griffins, and even, yes, falcons, appear as bas reliefs or full sculpted figures that seem to grow out of the buildings they decorate.

Tunick conducts this tour, but also fills us in on the history of the terra-cotta factories that produced and the designers who created these swaths of finery for a city whose miles of masonry and paving needed the relief of both this decoration and the greenery of Central Park.

The American Landscape, by Christian Zapatka, surveys the American park and parkway scene that grew as the continent was conquered and its grandeur inspired both artists and landscape architects. Zapatka begins in the 1830s, pays appropriately large attention to Frederick Law Olmsted's march across America from Central Park to national parks, then moves on through planned suburbs, FDR's New Deal, to today's parkway green strips.

Finally, in balmy California, you can search out a fanciful adaptation of the Spanish-Moorish ethos: Courtyard Housing in Los Angeles. The book's three authors are passionately devoted to preserving this romantic, Hollywoodian version of Andalusian Spain before on-marching glass boxes and ticky tacky wipe it out. Wonderful photos, floor plans, and decorative tile details show why. The buildings were mostly erected in the 1920s, not ancient Spain or Morocco. But, in a cityscape as ever-new as L.A.'s, their oasis calm - with Romanesque colonnades, bougainvilla vines, and elaborate fountains - provides a timeless feel worth preserving, and seeking out.

* Earl Foell is chief editorial writer of the Monitor.

Source book of American Architecture: 500 Notable Buildings from the 10th Century to the Present

By G.E. Kidder Smith

Princeton Architectural Press

679 pp., $34.95

TerrA-cotta skyline

By Susan Tunick

Photos by Peter Mauss

Princeton Architectural Press

160 pp., $45

The American Landscape

By Christian Zapatka

Prinecton Architectural Press

215 pp., $35

Courtyard Housing in Los Angeles

By Stefanos Polyzoides, Roger Sherwood, James Tice

Photos by Julius Shulman

Princeton Architectural Press

216 pp., $24.95

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