Review: Electric Light: An Architectural History, by Sandy Isenstadt and Palazzos of Power: Central Stations of the Philadelphia Electric Company 1900–1930, by Aaron V. Wunsch and Joseph E. B. Elliott

Abstract

Sandy Isenstadt Electric Light: An Architectural History Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2018, 304 pp., 27 color and 109 b/w illus. $44.95 (cloth), ISBN 9780262038171 Aaron V. Wunsch and Joseph E. B. Elliott Palazzos of Power: Central Stations of the Philadelphia Electric Company 1900–1930 New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2016, 160 pp., 124 b/w illus. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 9781616895006 “A bicycle shed is a building. Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture,” Nikolaus Pevsner famously wrote at the beginning of his Outline of European Architecture .1 The two books under review, both of which deal in various ways with electricity and architecture, offer compelling evidence of how far the study of architectural history has moved away from Pevsner's formulation. Beyond this, the books diverge. Sandy Isenstadt's Electric Light is a series of meditations on the way electrical lighting has altered both the built environment and our perception of it. In contrast, Palazzos of Power , with text by Aaron V. Wunsch and images by Joseph E. B. Elliott, is a case study of a single building type erected by a single company in a single urban area over a narrow time span. It is probably best to think of Palazzos of Power as a portfolio of photographs. It includes a short but eloquent foreword by David Nye, the peerless chronicler of the history of technology, who puts the subject into a broad historical perspective. Wunsch contributes an informative essay that discusses in more detail the history of the Philadelphia Electric Company (PECO), the technology it employed, the buildings it erected, and the two men most responsible for the buildings pictured in the book, namely, company engineer William C. L. Eglin and the Philadelphia architect John T. Windrim. According to Wunsch, PECO was the result of a series of mergers that took place during a period of tumultuous technological change in the electrical industry. The result was a unified power company for the Philadelphia region, one of the country's most heavily industrialized urban areas. As the company grew, it became clear that the power stations located in the city center and using direct current for transmission were insufficient to …