Dell Upton’s groundbreaking 1984 essay “Black and White Landscapes in Eighteenth-Century Virginia” opens with a simply stated observation: “For me, one of the most engaging problems in architectural history is to understand the social experience of architecture.”1 This mind-expanding approach to the study of the built environment prompted a new chapter in architectural history that continues to include not only industrial buildings but also spaces and grounds, interior and exterior, and marks on the landscape such as monuments.
Nearly three decades later Kirk Savage’s most recent book, Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape, carries on this inclusive consideration of American space with another watershed publication that deals also with a Virginian-Maryland landscape of Washington, D.C., and specifically the National Mall. In his synthetic history of Washington’s memorial landscape, Savage identifies basic issues of monumentalization from Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s efforts in...
University of California Press