This is the first thorough and substantive examination of architect A. Hays Town's work. His 70-year career provides an ideal case study in the evolution of 20th-century American architecture, spanning from a period dominated by Beaux Arts formalism, through a period characterized by the assimilation and acceptance of European Modernism, to a period once again receptive to traditional and regional influences. This examination reveals the remarkable talent and logic which enabled him to assimilate a wide variety of influences from his education and early career as well as influences from the historical examples of his region. It contributes both to an understanding of the potential use of vernacular traditions in general, and specifically, of the rich architectural influences present through Louisiana's long and intriguing history. The study also includes a discussion of Town's habits, values and relationships, providing valuable insights into typical issues involved in the practice of architecture.

A. Hays Town changed the face of the Louisiana house. In a career that includes designing more than five hundred homes, he led architects, builders, and homeowners to embrace the finest elements of Louisiana's architectural past. Almost every home built in Louisiana during the last twenty years is in some way inspired by Town's work. The Louisiana Houses of A. Hays Town honors his legacy as Louisiana's premier residential architect. Color photographs of numerous homes -- including Town's own -- by Philip Gould combined with an illuminating text by Cyril E. Vetter produce a volume that captures the appeal and beauty of the state's finest architectural tradition. Born and raised in rural southwest Louisiana, Hays Town graduated from Tulane University with a degree in architecture in 1926 and worked for a firm in Jackson, Mississippi, for many years. He established his own successful commercial practice in Baton Rouge in 1939, but in the 1960s, Town turned to his abiding passion -- residential architecture. Throughout this chapter of his career, he perfected his inimitable style and emerged as one of the most prominent architects in the South. Town's residential designs are perceptibly influenced by the diverse culture of south Louisiana. His synthesis of the classic Acadian cottage, Spanish courtyards, and exterior French doors with Creole-influenced full-length shutters achieves an original confluence of seemingly disparate yet elegantly balanced themes and forms. Other Town trademarks include pigeonniers, tree alleys, thirteen-foot ceilings, heavy use of such woods as cypress and heart of pine, plantation-style separate structures, and brick floors with a special beeswax finish. The Louisiana Houses of A. Hays Town illuminates the momentous effect Town has had on the look of Louisiana. Crafted from the perspective of two people, Vetter and Gould, who are not architects but admirers of one man's exceptional talent, this delightful book demonstrates that each Town house is a work of art that fits both person and terrain. At the door of each home, proud owners hang a bronze plaque that says it all: A. Hays Town, Architect.

Winner of the 2023 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize Winner of the 2023 UMW Center for Historic Preservation Book Prize For over eighty years, tourists have flocked to Natchez, Mississippi, seeking the “Old South,” but what they encounter is invention: a pageant and rewrite of history first concocted during the Great Depression. In Heritage and Hoop Skirts: How Natchez Created the Old South, author Paul Hardin Kapp reveals how the women of the Natchez Garden Club saved their city, created one of the first cultural tourism economies in the United States, changed the Mississippi landscape through historic preservation, and fashioned elements of the Lost Cause into an industry. Beginning with the first Natchez Spring Pilgrimage of Antebellum Homes in 1932, such women as Katherine Grafton Miller, Roane Fleming Byrnes, and Edith Wyatt Moore challenged the notion that smokestack industries were key to Natchez’s prosperity. These women developed a narrative of graceful living and aristocratic gentlepeople centered on grand but decaying mansions. In crafting this pageantry, they created a tourism magnet based on the antebellum architecture of Natchez. Through their determination and political guile, they enlisted New Deal programs, such as the WPA Writers’ Project and the Historic American Buildings Survey, to promote their version of the city. Their work did save numerous historic buildings and employed both white and African American workers during the Depression. Still, the transformation of Natchez into a tourist draw came at a racial cost and further marginalized African American Natchezians. By attending to the history of preservation in Natchez, Kapp draws on a rich archive of images, architectural documents, and popular culture to explore how meaning is assigned to place and how meaning evolves over time. In showing how and why the Natchez buildings of the “Old South” were first preserved, commercialized, and transformed into a brand, this volume makes a much-needed contribution to ongoing debates over the meaning attached to cultural patrimony.

Featuring color photography by Philip Gould and architectural drawings, A. Hays Town and the Architectural Image of Louisiana by Carol McMichael Reese traces the evolution of Town's career, including his work on the Historic American Buildings Survey, his award-winning Modernist designs, and his later houses that came to define Louisiana's residential architecture. This work accompanies an exhibition that originated at the Hilliard Art Museum - University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 2018 and has since traveled to additional venues.

Recipient of the 2018 Special Achievement Award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters and Recipient of a 2018 Heritage Award for Education from the Mississippi Heritage Trust The perfect book for every Mississippian who cares about the state, this is a mammoth collaboration in which thirty subject editors suggested topics, over seven hundred scholars wrote entries, and countless individuals made suggestions. The volume will appeal to anyone who wants to know more about Mississippi and the people who call it home. The book will be especially helpful to students, teachers, and scholars researching, writing about, or otherwise discovering the state, past and present. The volume contains entries on every county, every governor, and numerous musicians, writers, artists, and activists. Each entry provides an authoritative but accessible introduction to the topic discussed. The Mississippi Encyclopedia also features long essays on agriculture, archaeology, the civil rights movement, the Civil War, drama, education, the environment, ethnicity, fiction, folklife, foodways, geography, industry and industrial workers, law, medicine, music, myths and representations, Native Americans, nonfiction, poetry, politics and government, the press, religion, social and economic history, sports, and visual art. It includes solid, clear information in a single volume, offering with clarity and scholarship a breadth of topics unavailable anywhere else. This book also includes many surprises readers can only find by browsing.

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