Margaret Culbertson. American House Designs: An Index to Popular and Trade Periodicals, 1850-1915. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. xiv + 326 pp. $79.50 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-313-29202-6.

Reviewed by Michael Alcorn (University of Nevada at Las Vegas)
Published on H-Local (June, 1995)

American House Designs by Margaret Culbertson is an important bibliography for students of American domestic or vernacular architecture. House designs which appeared in thirty-five periodicals addressed to carpenters, women, or the general public are indexed by both architect and location. The importance of this work is that it makes readily available access to popular turn of the century house designs by pattern book architects, low profile architects and local architects in remote locations who have seldom been acknowledged by the professional architectural journals. The history of domestic architecture as written in the journals which Culbertson indexes is the story of architecture as a consumer commodity rather than as a fine art and helps explain the townscape of virtually every small town in the United States. Scholars of vernacular architecture and regional historians will find this bibliography valuable in their work.

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Citation: Michael Alcorn. Review of Culbertson, Margaret, American House Designs: An Index to Popular and Trade Periodicals, 1850-1915. H-Local, H-Net Reviews. June, 1995.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=81

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