Review: The Buildings of Pennsylvania: Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania, by Lu Donnelly H., David Brumble IV, and Franklin Toker

Abstract

Lu Donnelly H., David Brumble IV , and Franklin Toker . The Buildings of Pennsylvania: Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania . Buildings of the United States series. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press for the Society of Architectural Historians, 2010, 656 pp. 342 b/w illus., 91 maps. $75, ISBN 9780813928234 The Buildings of Pennsylvania: Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania builds on an 80-year tradition of documenting Western Pennsylvania architecture. Lu Donnelly, principal author and volume editor, served as survey director of the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation's County Historic Sites Survey of 1979––84, which recorded some 8,500 sites. Other published surveys include Pittsburgh's Landmark Architecture: The Historic Buildings of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County (1997), by Walter C. Kidney, Landmark Architecture of Allegheny County Pennsylvania (1967), by James D. Van Trump and Arthur Ziegler, and The Early Architecture of Western Pennsylvania (1936), by Charles Morse Stotz. The new BUS Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania volume is a guidebook to selected extant buildings from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century in thirty-one counties——in effect, the western half of Pennsylvania. As Donnelly observes in her excellent introduction: [buildings] were designed by famous architects, others by architects whose work is locally known, and some by unknown architects or carpenters. Some buildings perform their functions with grace and beauty or clever utility, while others respond so well to their setting and evoke such vivid images of the lives of their builders that they demanded inclusion …