Exhibitions : review : "The architect's library : notable books on architectural themes in the Vassar College Library"

• Published in: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians Vol. 74; no. 1; pp. 129 - 131
• Main Author: Siry, Joseph M
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 01.03.2015
• ISSN: 0037-9808

Reviews the exhibition "The architect's library : notable books on architectural themes in the Vassar College Library," which was on view at the Vassar College Library and Art Center in Poughkeepsie, New York, from 21 January-15 June 2014. Over the past several years a combination of serendipitous discoveries and systematic searching has revealed that Vassar College has an extraordinary collection of rare architectural books from the 16th through the 20th centuries. It includes early editions of canonical works by Vignola, Alberti, Palladio, Piranesi, and other Italian Renaissance and Baroque architects, theorists, and printmakers; a rich collection of titles from the 18th and 19th centuries, including a full set on the Gothic Revival with the major works of Augustus Pugin, John Ruskin, William Morris, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, and many other lesser-known figures; 19th-century American treatises and pattern books, including works on domestic and landscape architecture by A. J. Downing, Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Calvert Vaux, and Gervase Wheeler; and a wealth of original editions of canonical works of the modern movement, including books by Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and Walter Gropius, among many others. [Revised Publication Abstract]