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whole communities, like New Castle, Delaware, or parts of communities, like the Vieux Carre in New Orleans or Georgetown, D.C., or important or beautiful building groups such as were or still are to be found on or about our Texas or California missions, New England greens, our Pennsylvania Dutch towns, or the Virginia court-house compounds. It is my thesis that we have neglected with resulting tragic loss, the historic and architecturally supporting surroundings of our most historic and beautiful buildings, places and squares. Important volumes have been written in the field of architectural aesthetics and theory, from Camille Sitte to Christopher Tunnard, on the value of building groups and of a supporting cast for major structures, but city by city, village by village, the national lack of sensitivity to scale and group design has done irreparable damage not only to our heritage but to the beauty of our communities. We have tended to concentrate our attention on a doorway, a cornice, or a cupola, as though a building existed in its own highly specialized vacuum. Only in a very few selected areas have we allowed our eyes to roam the full 360 degrees. Such 360-degree areas as are still remaining in New Orleans, La., Charleston, S. C., San Juan, Porto Rico, San Antonio, Texas, Georgetown, D. C., Provincetown, Mass., Herman, Mo., Natchez, Miss., or in Central Pennsylvania or New England or New York or Ohio villages, therefore, become especially precious to us. It is not easy to take stock of activities in the 3600 historic area today. They are not only varied in type and geographic distribution but they also demonstrate wide range of technical competency, historic accuracy, histrionics, and what might be called "degrees of applied emotion." From the driest of archeological "digs" to the most saccharin of our sentimental reconstructions are to be found the infinite choices which beset the historian and those of us concerned with the process of historic preservation. Somewhere in the infi ite choices to be made there is a broad b nd of good taste, discernment, and human understanding which can be adjus ed to both the scientific and romantic interests of all of us.

ONE TREND in American architecture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnesses to a desire to keep abreast of the latest European innovations. In several cities appeared an elite group-financial, social and often political leaders-cultivating a cosmopolitan point of view and willing to accept both continental and English ideas as long as they were modern. This attitude helped to bring developments in America into the general history of nineteenth-century architecture. While earlier scholars changed the study of American architecture from antiquarianism to architectural history, Henry-Russell Hitchcock has firmly placed it in this international context. Only in this relation, the satisfying of the expansive cultural yearnings of the merchant class dominant in Baltimore, can we understand the building designed by Robert Cary Long, Sr. (1770-1833) for the Union Bank (fig. 1).1 The institution, founded in 1804, occupied temporary quarters for about three years before taking possession of its new and much admired building. No precedents

Robert Bork Late Gothic Architecture: Its Evolution, Extinction, and Reception Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2018, 552 pp., 32 color and 337 b/w illus. $119, ISBN 9782503568942 Robert Bork has written a remarkable book that in its scope has no competition. He offers a detailed analysis of late Gothic architecture, tracing its long history and examining the ultimately successful challenge to the style made by classicizing architecture from Italy. Bork reminds us that the years just prior to this challenge witnessed some of the most dazzling and wondrous inventions of Gothic architecture. Nave vaults were equipped with looping ribs resembling the petals of flowers. Smaller chapels displayed hanging ribs, miraculously suspended several feet below the webbing of the vaults. Tracery fields became ever larger and more complex, veiling broad segments of facades. Artful filigree towers of intricate design rose far above the pavement. Gothic elements became increasingly mimetic, imitating vegetal forms and other objects, such as the enormous buckle dressing the buttress at the Portuguese monastery of Tomar. Yet by the middle of the sixteenth century, the Gothic was in decline. For much of the previous century the Gothic's innovative building techniques had led architects such as Filarete to call it the modo moderno ; by 1550 this was no longer the case. Giorgio Vasari changed the nomenclature, referring to classicizing approaches as modern and the northern tradition as barbarous, German, Gothic. This extensive volume has numerous strengths. Bork deals with both northern and Italian buildings, Gothic and antique, and discusses the complex interplay between practices on both sides of the Alps. He charts the Gothic's origins and trajectory, including the High Gothic of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, noted for its supposed rationality, an aesthetic opposed to later manifestations. He offers the most detailed account to date of how the late Gothic evolved from …

THE French architect Guillaume Abel Blouet (1795-I853) toured the United States with the jurist Frederic Auguste Demetz in 1836 to study American prison architecture and administration for the French government. Upon their return to Paris they issued a lengthy and laudatory report (1837). In the Harvard Law School Library is a copy of this report which Blouet had sent to John Haviland and which still has Blouet's accompanying letter attached. The importance of American architecture to Europe has been most variously described; in Pevsner's Outline of European Architecture as compared to Hitchcock's Architecture: Nineteenth andTwentieth Centuries, for instance. Baudelaire hated America. This letter indicates another opinion current in Paris.

EUGENE VIOLLET LE Duc, whom John Summerson1 aptly described as the "last great theorist in the world of architecture," is known mainly for his observations on structional rationalism. This he thought was best illustrated by Gothic Cathedral architecture, and in his zeal, he proclaimed that every [Gothic] member was the result of constructional necessity.2 Thence began a controversy which has been joined by a host of architectural critics in order to expound a wide variety of viewpoints, even into our own time.

The characteristic structural forms of large Renaissance churches-domes, drums, pendentives, and barrel vaults-were the products of innovation in theory and practice during the later fifteenth century in Italy that culminated in Bramante's projects for the new Saint Peter's. Significant ideas were contributed by Leon Battista Alberti, Francesco di Giorgio, and Leonardo da Vinci. Francesco di Giorgio's geometrical methods of design for churches as described in his second treatise incorporate a procedure for calculating the thickness of walls bearing vaults. Francesco di Giorgio tested the procedure in his own churches, and it was later used by Bramante.

Joseph Hoffer, a Hungarian-born architect trained at the Polytechnikum of Vienna, worked in the newly independent Kingdom of Greece between 1833 and 1838. In Athens he surveyed with extraordinary accuracy the buildings of the Acropolis, which led to the discovery of one of the "refinements" of ancient architecture, the curvature of the horizontal parts of Greek temples. He published his findings in the Vienna Allgemeine Bauzeitung in 1838, but for some time his achievement was ignored. John Pennethorne, an English architect, claimed to have observed this same fact first, but he published it only later. After his return from Greece, Hoffer, already a master-builder in his native Arad, was admitted to the builders' guild of Pest, but with only limited rights; in Hungary, his scholarly achievement was not appreciated.

HISTORICALLY, military architecture has been noted for its beauty and logic. Characterized by handsome geometrical configurations, fortifications were unified by functions which organically determined their forms and their relationships. Among the numerous works for defense wherein purpose beautifully and clearly generated form was the Martello tower, a military work which is little known today, but which was once an important adjunct to the defenses of several North American cities. The Martello tower was named after a tall cylindrical structure situated in the Bay of Martella in Corsica.' In 1794 this tower, mounting only one heavy cannon, became famous among military authorities when two British menof-war were defeated from behind its parapet. During the encounter, little damage was inflicted on the French work by the ships, well demonstrating the strength of the structure.2 As with all architecture for defense, once the effectiveness of the basic configuration was proven, the defense was formulated; only minor changes were thereafter made, either to improve efficiency or to adapt to a particular site. Circular or elliptical in plan, most Martello towers had diameters of thirty or more feet-in addition to being very strong, curved forms enclosed a large amount of area per length of perimeter. On an open platform at the top were mounted one or more smoothbore cannons, en barbette, usually on traversing carriages. The facilities necessary to support both the garrison and the battery were contained within, on several floors. Simple in form, towers were designed effectively to resist assault. Built either of stone or brick, the walls were usually between six and fourteen feet thick, to provide a bombproof enclosure, and over twenty feet high, to resist escalade. Then, access to the interior was furnished only by a single door, located ten or more feet above the ground. Communication to this entrance was up a ladder or small wooden stair.