Follies in America: A History of Garden and Park Architecture

by Kerry Dean Carso

Overview

Follies in America examines historicized garden buildings, known as "follies," from the nation's founding through the American centennial celebration in 1876. In a period of increasing nationalism, follies—such as temples, summerhouses, towers, and ruins—brought a range of European architectural styles to the United States. By imprinting the land with symbols of European culture, landscape gardeners brought their idea of civilization to the American wilderness.

Kerry Dean Carso's interdisciplinary approach in Follies in America examines both buildings and their counterparts in literature and art, demonstrating that follies provide a window into major themes in nineteenth-century American culture, including tensions between Jeffersonian agrarianism and urban life, the ascendancy of middle-class tourism, and gentility and social class aspirations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501755934
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	08/15/2021
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Kerry Dean Carso is Professor of Art History at the State University of New York at New Paltz. She is the author of American Gothic Art and Architecture in the Age of Romantic Literature. Follow her on X @kerrydeancarso.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. The English Landscape Garden in America
2. Temples: Neoclassicism and the Nation
3. Summerhouses: Nature Meets Culture
4. Towers: The Belvedere and the Panoptic Sublime
5. Ruins: The Nineteenth-Century Delight in Decay
Conclusion

What People are Saying About This

Sara A. Butler

Kerry Dean Carso digs below the surface whimsy of nineteenth century American follies, identifying the various meanings the ubiquitous structures have embodied. Interdisciplinary in scope, Follies in America reveals the serious role the ostensibly useless buildings have played in contemporary social and cultural discourses on urbanization, industrialization, and what it means to be American.

Michael Olmert

Follies in America deepens our appreciation of seemingly incidental structures erected in the American landscape from the earliest days of the nation. Kerry Dean Caro proposes a new interpretation of their place in American culture that will engage any reader interested in garden history and design as well as landscape architecture.

Francis Kowsky

Clearly written and persuasive, Follies in America broadens and illuminates our understanding of architecture by bringing together literature and the arts. This book is full of memorable anecdotes about things that are generally overlooked but all around us.

Editorial Reviews

Follies in America delves into the history of the ornamental structures, or follies, that dotted, as some still do, many a private garden, public park, rural cemetery, or site of natural beauty in the nineteenthcentury United States

Winterthur Portfolio

This interdisciplinary look at the cultural and architectural history of follies in America is illustrated with examples with examples from literature, the arts, and the landscape itself. Carso gives us a broad sweep using the primary model for America, the eighteen-century English landscape garden. Less concerned with style, she grapples with the meaning of this building type, one that is at once 'recreational and amusing' but also 'didactic and enlightening.

Nineteenth Century