The Country Houses of David Adler (1882-1949) discusses in depth fifteen representative houses (many with interiors by Adler's sister, the noted interior designer Frances Elkins), illustrated with fine archival photographs and newly drawn plans. In addition, the full scope of Adler's work is documented in an illustrated catalogue raisonn .

A collection of photocopied articles published about the David Adler exhibition held at the Art Institute of Chicago, December 6, 2002 to May 18, 2003.

On Lake Michigan's North Shore, an extraordinary group of cosmopolitan and wealthy clients commissioned havens from the city's bustle during the Gilded Age.

"...school and public librarians will want to include this in their collections. The audio version...will be in great demand." - School Library Journal

Written by preservation consultant Pamela W. Fox 'North Shore'

Winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, this is one of the defining books of the 1970s, an experimental novel about a young journalist trying to navigate life in America. When Speedboat burst on the scene in the late ’70s it was like nothing readers had encountered before. It seemed to disregard the rules of the novel, but it wore its unconventionality with ease. Reading it was a pleasure of a new, unexpected kind. Above all, there was its voice, ambivalent, curious, wry, the voice of Jen Fain, a journalist negotiating the fraught landscape of contemporary urban America. Party guests, taxi drivers, brownstone dwellers, professors, journalists, presidents, and debutantes fill these dispatches from the world as Jen finds it. A touchstone over the years for writers as different as David Foster Wallace and Elizabeth Hardwick, Speedboat returns to enthrall a new generation of readers.

"This ambitious study of Staub's work by architectural historian Stephen Fox goes beyond a description of Staub's houses. Fox analyzes the roles of space, structure, and decoration in creating, defining, and maintaining social class structures and expectations and shows how Staub was able to incorporate these elements and understandings into the elegant buildings he designed for his clients. In the process, he contributes greatly to a fuller understanding of Houston's emergence as a premier American city."--BOOK JACKET.

The suburban residential area running north above Chicago along

Howard Van Doren Shaw designed stately country houses in and around Chicago—from affluent Lake Forest, Illinois, and Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, to Iowa, Minnesota, Ohio, and Indiana—from 1894 to 1926, a period in American architecture that spanned the Gilded Age, the adoption of Beaux-Arts classicism as the ideal for civic architecture, the invention of the skyscraper, and the beginning of modernism. Born in 1869, he worked for the leading industrialists of that period, including Reuben H. Donnelley of printing fame, newspaper giant Joseph Medill Patterson, Edward Forster Swift, the meatpacking king, and Edward L. Ryerson of Ryerson Steel. A contemporary of Frank Lloyd Wright, Shaw explored many of the same ideas as the Prairie School Architects within the forms of traditional architecture. Though he was recognized as one of the leading country house architects of the early twentieth century, his name was largely forgotten after his death. Like many traditional architects practicing today, Shaw was skilled at adapting historic precedents to suit contemporary living, in particular the easy flow of interior space that became a design hallmark of the period for traditionalists and modernists alike. For the new and fashionable suburb of Lake Forest, Shaw created Market Square, the town center, which was lauded for its design as both a unique town green and the first American shopping center designed to accommodate automobiles. This timely reappraisal of Howard Van Doren Shaw’s work features many previously unpublished images from the Shaw Archive in the Burnham and Ryerson Library at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Chicago History Museum, rare construction drawings, and new color photography as well as a catalogue of Shaw’s residential work. His legacy includes substantial houses in prosperous communities, many of which are still standing—including Ragdale, once Shaw’s own summer house in Lake Forest, now home to the prestigious artists’ community; the Becker Estate on Chicago’s North Shore; and The Hermann House overlooking Lake Michigan.

Birdsall P. Briscoe (1876–1971) practiced architecture from 1912 to 1956, the span of years during which Houston was transformed from an ambitious town on Buffalo Bayou into an international city, its economy powered by cotton, trade, and oil. The country houses Briscoe designed for three generations of affluent clients, sited in such Houston neighborhoods as Courtlandt Place, Shadyside, Broadacres, and River Oaks, display his exceptional skill in formulating stylistic and social identities for his wealthy clients and their families. In The Architecture of Birdsall P. Briscoe, architectural historian Stephen Fox examines the country houses designed by Briscoe, offering a glimpse into the architect’s methods as well as analyzing how Briscoe constructed a “social architecture” to frame his clientele during periods of economic expansion and contraction. Fox demonstrates how Briscoe cultivated and managed elements of taste, style, and fashion to embody assertions of class identity and solidarity in the context of Houston’s capitalist economy. Additionally, Fox shows how Briscoe and his peers interpreted and reflected early twentieth-century Progressive Era design ideals in giving shape to the vision of local civic leaders. Illustrated throughout with masterful color photography by Paul Hester, this original study of one of Texas’ most distinguished residential architects will enthrall readers with both its detail and its contextual clarity. As he did in his book on the architecture of John F. Staub, Fox delivers a treasure trove of insight into a vital period of Houston’s social history and the architect who helped design it.