TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 305 transportation systems that tie the communities together. Rather than focus on the technology of railroads, road building, or automobiles, Ebner discusses repeated efforts by residents to resist technological change. There was considerable opposition to the construction of a second commuter rail line, to the construction of Sheridan Road along the lakeshore, and to the arrival of the automobile. The onslaught of technology became a threat to the beauty, quietness, privacy, and established values of the exclusive communities. The reader should also not expect to gain insight into such areas as street layout, public works, utility development, park design, archi tecture, and planning philosophy in the towns studied. The book is a history of people and their image of the society in which they lived more than of the physical man-made environment. It is a beautifully written, well designed, and handsomely illustrated social history, an important contribution to the literature of urban and suburban development. Frances H. Si i im r 1)r Steiner is associate professor of art and architectural history at Rosary College. She is the author of several architectural books ancl is currently writing a volume on Chicago architecture. Native American Architecture. By Peter Nabokov and Robert Easton. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Pp. 431; illustrations, glossary, bibliography, index. $50.00. Many books about the Native American attempt to recover the character of Indian life at some point before contact with Europeans and then show how it changed over the intervening centuries. Ellis is legitimate, but it is difficult with Native American architecture be cause this changed dramatically before contact, and the surviving records date mainly from the 19th and 20th centuries. Hence, Peter Nabokov and Robert Easton have chosen to emphasize the persistence of Native American architectural traditions. They argue that “Indians were deeply attached to their architectural patterns, found them practical and enjoyable, and resisted the white man’s attempts to change them” (p. 12). Indeed, they see the houses and other buildings as the central expression of Native American cultures. I'he authors classify and describe the types of buildings constructed in the nine commonly accepted Native American cultural areas of North America. The focus is on housing, but ceremonial structures, temporary dwellings, gravesites, and community plans are not ne glected. Although the culture area approach often leads to a rather vulgar environmental determinism, Nabokov and Easton have pro duced a sophisticated study that rejects all forms of determinism. The 306 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE various building forms were the product of six elements—technology, climate, economics, social organization, religion, and history. Each of the nine chapters, devoted to the characteristic forms of building in a particular region, is divided into segments devoted to the six categories. Each includes the characteristics of the climate and geography, building materials available, and history and culture of the people as the basis for descriptions of the building forms. Especially interesting are the descriptions of building methods, handed down from generation to generation. In the northwest coast region, for example, planks were split from cedar, which was the preferred wood because, although soft, it is “of a wonderful firmness and, in a good tree, so straight-grained it will split true and clean into forty foot planks, four inches thick and three feet wide with scarcely a knot” (pp. 228—29). The chapters conclude with a section on the continu ation of the building tradition into the present. Regarding technology, the authors show that “the question of Indian architecture is less what they could build than what they wanted to build.” Materials, construction techniques, and climate were important, but “did not restrict the ideas of builders, who often pushed materials to their limits as they made structures in all shapes and sizes” (p. 18). IO be sure, technology was limited; buildings were to a great extent tied, wrapped, and knotted together. But this did not prevent the Kwakiutl from achieving the impressive plank houses of the northwest coast, and the Anasazi the cliff dwellings of southwest ern Colorado. This is the first attempt to present a comprehensive view of Native American architecture since Eewis Henry Morgan produced his 1881 survey...
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Oct 1, 1991
John Trinkaus 
Open Access