A necessary insight into the contribution of artisanal work in early modern architecture.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries represent a high point in design and workmanship intersectionality. Skilled artisans worked across a spectrum of practices in design, supervision, and execution, and architects relied on this experience when building sites. However, this relationship has been under-studied in the architectural achievement of the early modern era.
 
Combining analysis of buildings, archival material, and eighteenth-century writings, editors Andrew Tierney and Melanie Hayes re-evaluate the social and professional fabric binding design to the act of making and reflect on the asymmetry between architecture and craft. They argue for a process-oriented understanding of architectural production that explores the scribbled and annotated beginnings of design; the debates and revisions in forging details; and the grappling with building materials that pushed projects from conception to completion.

2024 Spiro Kostof Book Award, Society of Architectural Historians
2022 PROSE Award in Architecture and Urban Planning
2022 Summerlee Book Prize in Nonfiction, Center for History and Culture of Southeast Texas and the Upper Gulf Coast
2022 Best Book Prize, Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians
2022 On the Brinck Book Award, University of New Mexico School of Architecture + Planning

A significant and deeply researched examination of the free nineteenth-century Black developers who transformed the cultural and architectural legacy of New Orleans.

The Creole architecture of New Orleans is one of the city’s most-recognized features, but studies of it largely have focused on architectural typology. In Building Antebellum New Orleans, Tara A. Dudley examines the architectural activities and influence of gens de couleur libres—free people of color—in a city where the mixed-race descendants of whites and other free Blacks could own property.

Between 1820 and 1850 New Orleans became an urban metropolis and industrialized shipping center with a growing population. Amidst dramatic economic and cultural change in the mid-antebellum period, the gens de couleur libres thrived as property owners, developers, building artisans, and patrons. Dudley writes an intimate microhistory of two prominent families of Black developers, the Dollioles and Souliés, to explore how gens de couleur libres used ownership, engagement, and entrepreneurship to construct individual and group identity and stability. With deep archival research, Dudley re-creates in fine detail the material culture, business and social history, and politics of the built environment for free people of color and adds new, revelatory information to the canon on New Orleans architecture.