The folly, as a structure lacking a use, offers an opportunity to reflect on the role of design in social life. It casts off the burden of utility that separates architecture from the fine arts. Follies are not houses, or churches, or even bicycle sheds—they are ornaments at the scale of buildings. Despite their interpretive potential, the subject falls between scholarly cracks: too precious for scholars of the vernacular, and perhaps too frivolous for architectural historians. Kerry Dean Carso’s Follies in America is a literate, appreciative account of this little-considered aspect of nineteenth-century American architecture. Written by an art historian, it integrates visual and textual sources to outline the interpretive possibilities raised by ornamental garden buildings in public and private settings.
Follies in America focuses on the northeastern United States, principally New York and Pennsylvania, in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. This concentration is driven by Carso’s aim...
University of California Press