VAF member Roger Leech presented on this topic at the VAF meeting in Annapolis prior to publication of the book in 2014. 

This study, covering the period c.1000 to c1800AD, is of the medieval and early modern houses of Bristol.  Based partly on the survey of surviving early buildings, the study also makes extensive use of documentary evidence and records of houses now demolished to analyse how town houses reveal the social structure and aspirations of Bristol’s citizens in this period.  The development of the town and city in the medieval and the early modern period is examined, then aspects of life on the urban tenement plot.  The principal house types of the medieval period are fully explored, showing aspirations and separate identity of the urban elite in the largest of such houses. 

This book demonstrates the possibilities for using documentary and physical evidence to reconstruct the fabric of a city and the social character of its different parts.  Particularly important is the development of a new way of looking at medieval and early modern urban housing, focusing specifically on the relationships between different building types and changes in building forms, both of which reveal the complex character of an evolving commercial city.

Of all building types, the skyscraper strikes observers as the most modern, in terms not only of height but also of boldness, scale, ingenuity, and daring. As a phenomenon born in late-nineteenth-century America, it quickly became emblematic of New York, Chicago, and other major cities. Previous studies of these structures have tended to foreground more avowedly modernist approaches, while those with styles reminiscent of the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe were initially disparaged as being antimodernist or were simply unacknowledged. Skyscraper Gothic brings together renowned scholars to address the medievalist skyscraper, from the flying buttresses to the dizzying spires, and from the Chicago Tribune Tower to the Woolworth Building in Manhattan.

Drawing on archival evidence and period texts to uncover the ways in which patrons and architects came to understand the Gothic as a historic style, the authors explore what the appearance of Gothic forms on radically new buildings meant urbanistically, architecturally, and socially not only for those who were involved in the actual conceptualization and execution of the projects but also for the critics and the general public who saw the buildings take shape.

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