The classical architecture of Washington, D.C., has received much historical attention, but little attention has been paid to the mechanical systems that made these buildings habitable in the capital city's notoriously hot and humid summer climate. In Air-Conditioning Comes to the Nation's Capital, 1928–60 , Joseph M. Siry describes how comfort air-conditioning first appeared in the U.S. Capitol building, in the chambers of the House of Representatives and the Senate, in 1928–29. From the 1930s on, air-conditioning systems were extended to the whole of the Capitol, the Senate and House office buildings, the Federal Triangle, and beyond. All of these projects involved the integration of equipment for heating, ventilating, and cooling into the spatial and structural forms of these mostly classical buildings. Air-conditioning had major implications for the annual operations of Congress and the efficiency of federal workplaces. This account advances the historiography of mechanical systems in modern architecture.

From 1965 to 1973, Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo created the Center for the Arts at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. The center appears to be an essay in mid-twentieth-century modernism, directly expressing its varied interior programs in cubic volumes of limestone walls and reinforced concrete spans for floors and roofs. As Joseph M. Siry demonstrates in Roche and Dinkeloo's Center for the Arts at Wesleyan University: Classical, Vernacular, and Modernist Architecture in the 1960s , the Wesleyan Center for the Arts is a condensation of ideas from its context, including the seventeenth-century regional vernacular and the local Greek revival and contemporaneous modern architecture, including works of Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Louis Kahn. This article broadens both our understanding of the creative process as an integration of multiple sources and our view of modernism's potential to innovate while fittingly engaging with earlier periods without duplicating their historical vocabularies.

Gunite, or concrete shot through a hose, helped to shape twentieth-century modernist architecture, yet its history is largely unwritten. In 1927–29 Richard Neutra pioneered the architectural use of Gunite in the Lovell House in Los Angeles. Frank Lloyd Wright praised Neutra's house, and he later used Gunite with a light steel frame in his Community Church in Kansas City, Missouri (1939–42). In Wright's next public commission, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1943–59) in New York City, he proposed that the great spiral gallery be wholly of Gunite set on a pre-stressed steel frame, in order to achieve his ideal of plasticity and continuity; the material was used to form the Guggenheim's exterior walls as built. In Seamless Continuity versus the Nature of Materials: Gunite and Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum, Joseph M. Siry narrates the manner in which the design of the Guggenheim's wood formwork, its joints, and the choice of its exterior coating challenged Wright and his collaborators to achieve a form for the spiral that was consistent with his aesthetic ideal.

Frank Lloyd Wright's Annie Pfeiffer Chapel for Florida Southern College, Lakeland (1938-41) was built for a client, Ludd M. Spivey, who had studied with modernist theologians at the University of Chicago and as president of Florida Southern had directed it toward an educational program that balanced the natural sciences and study of Christianity in the context of world religions. Spivey asked Wright to design a campus and chapel that would express these ideals. Wright's Pfeiffer Chapel is an essay in modern cantilevered construction of steel-reinforced concrete. Analysis of this daring structural system suggests that it was partly his realization of the principles of Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, whose writings Wright admired. For Spivey the chapel was a symbol of religion as a source of democratic values that would resist totalitarian powers. Wright wrote of modern cantilevered construction as a symbol of American democracy. The chapel embodied his aim of regional character rather than uniformity in modern architecture.

Adler and Sullivan's Auditorium Building in Chicago (1886-1890) is here analyzed in the context of Chicago's social history of the 1880s. Specifically, the building is seen as a capitalistic response to socialist and anarchist movements of the period. The Auditorium's principal patron, Ferdinand W. Peck, created a theater that was to give access to cultural and civic events for the city's workers, to draw them away from both politicized and nonpoliticized "low" urban entertainments. Adler and Sullivan's theater was to serve a mass audience, unlike opera houses of the period, which held multiple tiers of boxes for privileged patrons. This tradition was represented by the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City (1881-1883). Turning away from works like the Paris Opéra, Peck and his architects perhaps sought to emulate ideas of other European theaters of the period, such as Bayreuth's Festspielhaus (1872-1876). Sullivan's interior had an ornamental and iconographic program that was innovative relative to traditional opera houses. His design of the building's exterior was in a Romanesque style that recalled ancient Roman monuments. It is here compared with other Chicago buildings of its era that represented high capital's reaction to workers' culture, such as Burnham and Root's First Regiment Armory (1889-1891), Peck's own house (1887), and the Chicago Athenaeum (1890-1891). The Auditorium's story invites a view of the Chicago School that emphasizes the role of patrons' ideological agenda rather than modern structural expression.