Robert J. Kapsch's detailed account of the difficult process of building Washington, D.C., focuses on the shift in American architecture from dependence on gentleman builders to the emergence of professional architect-engineers. Building Washington begins with a description of the political and financial problems that accompanied the creation of a capital city for a new, relatively poor, and not well-coordinated federation of states with diverse populations and interests. The vision was George Washington's, the implementation Thomas Jefferson's. Kapsch explains the evolution from Washington's eighteenth-century amateur vision to nineteenth-century professionalization under Jefferson (16). In his introduction he ably lays out the tangle of difficulties these men faced when executing their ambitious plan in a virgin area, with little funding, political will, or professional expertise. He reviews the technical, political, financial, and planning problems they encountered along the tortuous path to the birth of the new city. Together, Washington and Jefferson achieved many...
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September 2020
Book Review|
September 01 2020
Review: Building Washington: Engineering and Construction of the New Federal City, 1790–1840, by Robert J. Kapsch
Robert J. Kapsch
Building Washington: Engineering and Construction of the New Federal City, 1790–1840
Baltimore
: Johns Hopkins University Press
, 2018
, 384 pp., 38 color and 83 b/w illus. $69.95 (cloth), ISBN 9781421424873
Tom F. Peters
Tom F. Peters
Lehigh University
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Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2020) 79 (3): 337–338.
Citation
Tom F. Peters; Review: Building Washington: Engineering and Construction of the New Federal City, 1790–1840, by Robert J. Kapsch. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 1 September 2020; 79 (3): 337–338. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2020.79.3.337
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