Beyond the Architect's Eye.

Beyond The Architect's Eye

Mary N. Woods

University of Pennsylvania Press

3905 Spruce St., Philadelphia, PA 19104

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

9780812241082, $49.95, www.amazon.com

Architecture is what both shapes and is shaped by human-created environments. The way architecture is typically recorded for academic studies is professionally produced images via photography or blue-print sketches. What makes "Beyond The Architect's Eye: Photographs And The American Built Environment" by Mary N. Woods (Professor of the History of Architecture and Urbanism at Cornell University) is an informed and informative exploration of how amateur as well as professional photographers utilized the camera to record architectural structures that populated a disparate American landscape priort to World War II reflective of the differences between rural and urban man-made landscapes and the culture shifts they connote. Professor Woods includes the work of Alfred Stieglitz, Frances Benjamin Johnston, Marion Post Wolcott, Alice Austen, Gertrude Kasebier, Berenice Abbot, Eudor Welty, and many others to provide the reader with an intensely informed and elegant work of seminal scholarship that is an enthusiastically recommended addition to personal, professional, and academic library American Architectural Studies reference collections and supplemental reading lists.