516 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Historical Building Construction: Design, Materials, and Technology. By Donald Friedman. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995. Pp. 238; illus trations, figures, appendices, notes, bibliography, index $48.00 (cloth). The history ofAmerican building technology is not a subject that has attracted much research. A few recent books focus on building materials and methods, e.g., Cecil Elliot’s Technics and Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992). But for an overview of the development ofbuilding technology since the beginning ofindustri alization, Carl Condit’s classic American Building studies are still the best sources. This lack of attention is surprising, if for no other rea son than that obsolete construction technologies have more than historical interest: they continue to hold up buildings that are still in service. While the idea of saving and reusing old buildings has entered the cultural mainstream, preservation of structures as a whole—the interiors as well as the facades—has been slower to gain acceptance. Yet there are sound practical and economic, as well as historical, reasons to preserve a building’s interior structure. These develop ments—the increase in renovation and the recent interest in con serving buildings as a whole—form the background to Donald Fried man’s book. An engineer whose practice has involved maintaining and adapting the structures of old buildings, Friedman’s purpose in writing this book was to give his colleagues a better idea about the structural systems that they are likely to encounter in a renovation project. As he explains what is behind the walls and under the floors, Mr. Friedman recounts the story of the development of building sys tems in the United States since 1840. This is what makes the book relevant for historians of technology. In scope, the book is rather narrow, for it covers city buildings— New York City buildings, to be precise. Each chapter treats a topic within a specified time frame. Although it opens with a chapter on “traditional construction,” most of the text concerns high-tech de velopments: cast iron facades, skeleton frames, floor systems that were alternatives to wood, curtain walls, fireproof buildings, and “modern” steel construction. The book offers a collection ofpoints rather than a sustained argu ment, and many of the points will be new and informative for most readers. But the useful points are sprinkled among others that are misleading or incorrect. In many cases, Friedman relies too much on secondary sources, and he suggests how things “must have been” rather than troubling to find out how they were. An example of this frustrating combination of the useful and the misleading is his chap ter on cast iron building fronts. He explains that a cast iron front building is merely that: a brick and wood building with one (rarely more) cast iron facade. This will be a revelation to most people. But TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 517 he then devotes little space to describing these buildings, dismissing them as technologically stagnant. Consequently, the reader never learns exactly what ordinary cast iron front buildings were (and are) like. Most of this chapter is devoted to a discussion of the fire resis tance of cast iron, a matter that was much debated in the 19th cen tury, and Friedman does his best to convince the reader that cast iron is an unsatisfactory building material. However, his evidence does not support this conclusion. One example he uses to show the vulnerability of cast iron fronts was the burning of the Manhattan Savings Institution Building in 1895 (p. 37). Yet contrary to what Friedman writes, this building did not have a cast iron front. Unfortunately, readers searching for the informative nuggets will probably be discouraged in their quest by the writing. This book needed a thorough editing, which it did not get. The text is repeti tious; for example, the material on pages 36-37, even the quotation, is repeated on page 57. The awkward phrasing, extraneous detail, and repetition, moreover, will not only put offall but the most deter mined readers; they often obscure the author’s point. Yet the case studies that discuss the structures of extant old build ings are worth reading. The most...
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Feb 22, 2023
Jenessa Duncombe 
