Rewriting American Architecture

A critical reassessment of nineteenth‑century American architecture that uncovers how race, settler colonialism, and contested national identities shaped the built environment and its historiography.

Rewriting American Architecture offers a revisionist riposte to the canonical story of nineteenth-century American architecture. Drawing on new archival research and revisionist historiography, the essays in this volume reveal how American architecture was shaped not by inevitable progress toward a unified national culture but by the turbulent realities of race, labor, settler colonialism, and territorial expansion. Rather than treating architecture as an apolitical aesthetic expression, the contributors expose it as an active arena in which the meanings of nationhood were constructed, contested, and often violently enforced. From Indigenous spatial practices and Black institutional building to transnational exchanges and the racial politics embedded in professionalization, this collection reframes the built environment as central to the competing cultural, political, and geographic claims that defined the United States during this period.

Charles L. Davis II is an associate professor and Director of the Architectural History program at the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture.

Kathryn E. Holliday is the Randall J. Biallas Professor of Historic Preservation and American Architectural History and professor of landscape architecture at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Joanna Merwood-Salisbury is professor of architecture and Associate Dean of Postgraduate Research at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.