Wolfgang Broonner ; Die buurgerliche Villa in Deutschland 1830––1900 ; Worms: Wernersche Verlagsgesellschaft, 2009, 678 b/w and 288 color illus. €€ 78 (cloth), ISBN 9783884622865 Maiken Umbach ; German Cities and Bourgeois Modernism 1890––1924 ; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, 55 b/w illus. ££55 (cloth), ISBN 9780199557394 These two books cover a substantial period of German architecture, supplementing each other in a very direct way; Broonner's book presents everything that was hated by the reformers in Umbach's book. The very feel of the books contrasts in a corresponding way: Umbach's small and smartly modest-looking; Broonner's large, lavish, colorful——and although many times heavier than Umbach's, it costs only a little more. The deutsche Villa, as presented in Broonner's very substantially upgraded version of the editions of 1987 and 1991, was a German architectural success story, at least so it was thought until 1900. Rising high, lavishly decorated, bulky or slender, these houses still dominate many of the inner suburban areas in virtually every town of the German-speaking lands (although this book deals with the area of present-day Germany only). Most of the color photographs are recent, and almost all the objects seem to be in an excellent state of preservation. Above all, German villas never repeat each other. Among the 850 or so buildings in the almost 1,000 illustrations in this book, it would be hard to spot any two that are the same in many of their features. All this stands in sharp contrast to the earlier kinds of standardized and sparsely decorated suburban house and even more so to the German trend toward standardization in the 1920s and '30s. Among comparable nineteenth-century Western kinds of dwellings, the German story also differs considerably. In England, after the idea of the stylistically diverse villa flourished in the 1830s and '40s, the very term began to be eclipsed, and by the 1880s the non-speculatively built suburban house demonstrated modesty rather than splendor. In France, pronounced diversity, splendor, and grandeur were not common in the suburbs. Broonner deals with the subject both systematically and diachronically. The first of the book's …