Below you will find the Table of Contents and the abstracts of the September
issue of the September 2001 issue of the Journal of the Society of
Architectural
Historians.
Zeynep Celik, editor

VOLUME 60 NUMBER 3 SEPTEMBER 2001

Contents

Articles
JEANNE KISACKY
History and Science: Julien-David Leroy's Dualistic Method of Architectural
History

GILES KNOX
The Colleoni Chapel in Bergamo and the Politics of Urban Space

SUSAN GILSON MILLER, ATTILIO PETRUCCIOLI, MAURO BERTAGNIN
Inscribing Minority Space in the Islamic City: The Jewish Quarter of Fez
(1438-1912)

EUGENE DWYER
The Unified Plan of the House of the Faun

Exhibitions
Art Nouveau, 1890-1914 National Gallery of Art, Washington D. C., 8 October
2000-28 January 2001; REVIEWED BY ISABELLE GOURNAY

Inventing the Skyline, The Architecture of Cass Gilbert The New York
Historical Society, New York City, 15 October 2000-21 January 2001; REVIEWED
BY STEVEN McL. BEDFORD

Books
Architects
The Architectural Drawings of Antonio da Sangallo the Younger and His
Circle, Vol. II: Churches, Villas, the Pantheon, Tombs and Ancient
Inscriptions, edited by Nicholas Adams; REVIEWED BY JAMES ACKERMAN

Robert Smith: Architect, Builder, Patriot 1722-1777, by Charles E. Peterson;
REVIEWED BY JOHN M. GROFF

John Soane: An Accidental Romantic, by Gillian Darley
Sir John Soane and the Country Estate, by Ptolemy Dean
Sir John Soane: The Royal Academy Lectures, edited by David Watkin; REVIEWED
BY DANIEL M. ABRAMSON

'Designing Women': Gender and the Architectural Profession, by Annmarie
Adams and Peta Tancred; REVIEWED BY LESLIE KANES WEISMAN

Cities
Venice and the East: The Impact of the Islamic World on Venetian
Architecture 1100-1500, by Deborah Howard; REVIEWED BY PATRICIA FORTINI
BROWN

Santa Maria della Salute. Architecture and Ceremony in Baroque Venice, by
Andrew Hopkins; REVIEWED BY ELISABETTA MOLTENI

The Creation of Modern Athens: Planning the Myth, by Eleni Bastéa; REVIEWED
BY SOKRATIS GEORGIADIS

The Albert Memorial: The Prince Consort National Memorial: its History,
Contents and Conservation, edited by Chris Brooks
Towers and Colonnades, The Architecture of Cuthbert Broderick, by Derek
Linstrum
Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Victorian London, by Linda
Nead; REVIEWED BY TIMOTHY BARRINGER

Housing Design and Society in Amsterdam. Reconfiguring Urban Order and
Identity, 1900-1920, by Nancy Stieber; REVIEWED BY MARISTELLA CASCIATO

Landscapes of Desire: Anglo Mythologies of Los Angeles, by William Alexander
McClung; REVIEWED BY CLARK DAVIS

Buildings of Nevada, by Julie Nicoletta
Las Vegas: The Social Production of an All-American City, by Mark
Gottdiener, Claudia C. Collins, and David R. Dickens; REVIEWED BY KEITH
EGGENER

Surveys and Guidebooks
Pioneers of American Landscape Design, edited by Charles A. Birnbaum and
Robin Karson; REVIEWED BY FRANCIS R. KOWSKY

A History of Interior Design, by John Pile; REVIEWED BY MARILYN CASTO

Frederick County, Virginia: History Through Architecture, by Maral S.
Kalbian
The Architecture of Jefferson Country: Charlottesville and Albemarle County,
Virginia, by K. Edward Lay
Black Churches in Texas: A Guide to Historic Congregations, by Clyde McQueen
Architecture in Fredonia, New York, 1811-1997: From Log Cabin to I. M. Pei,
by Daniel D. Reiff; REVIEWED BY DELOS D. HUGHES

Abstracts

Letters
Mario Carpo and Yves Pauwels

Obituary
James Marston Fitch, by Michael Tomlan

Papers Delivered in the Thematic Sessions of the Fifty-fourth Annual Meeting
of the Society of Architectural Historians, Toronto, 18-21 April 2001

Abstracts

History and Science: Julien-David Leroy's Dualistic Method of Architectural
History

In eighteenth-century France, the influential architect and historian
Julien-David Leroy studied ancient monuments through two different
methods-what he called the "historical" and the "architectural." These two
approaches had distinctly different intended audiences, methods, and goals.
His historical method was a traditional humanistic approach to the ancient
monuments that studied a building's architecture in relation to its specific
historic context. His architectural method, consistent with scientific
practice, considered the relations among numerous similar monuments as a
means of revealing underlying universal laws. In the eighteenth century,
history and science both promised enlightenment, but the exact shape of that
new knowledge and its implications for the present varied tremendously.
Through a comparative analysis of his two methods, and of their development,
interaction, and significance, this paper assesses the exact shape of
Leroy's dualistic thought, and its implications for architectural practice,
history, and theory.

JEANNE KISACKY
Cornell University

The Colleoni Chapel in Bergamo and the Politics of Urban Space

Bergamo's central square is dominated by the imposing Renaissance funerary
chapel of the Venetian condottiere Bartolomeo Colleoni, commissioned by him
in the 1470s from the Lombard sculptor and architect Antonio Amadeo. In the
past, analysis of this monument has focused on its place in the tradition of
Renaissance architecture, on its relation to other works by the same artist,
and on how it reflected the preoccupations of its famous patron. This essay
expands significantly on the last approach by examining the critically
important relationship of the chapel to its setting. Through a combination
of visual and iconographic parallels with the other buildings in that space,
Colleoni challenged and transformed the representation of power in the city.
In particular, political meaning emerged out of the chapel's juxtaposition
with the Gothic entrance portal of Bergamo's principal civic church, Santa
Maria Maggiore. The form, iconography, and placement of the chapel in
relation to the portal all suggested that the city should be ruled by a
virtuous individual, such as Colleoni himself, and not by a body of elected
oligarchs, the communal ideal of government represented by Santa Maria
Maggiore.

GILES KNOX
Southern Methodist University

Inscribing Minority Space in the Islamic City: The Jewish Quarter of Fez
(1438-1912)

The great city of Fez is made up of a series of smaller urban cores, each
having its own distinct character. Among them is the mellah, or Jewish
quarter, which was the home of the Jews of Fez for more than 500 years.
Gradually abandoned by the Jews during the first half of the twentieth
century, the quarter is occupied today by working-class Moroccans from the
countryside. As a result, the particular features marking the mellah as
Jewish space are disappearing. The aim of the study was to document the
domestic architecture of the mellah in relation to its surroundings and to
the historical and social processes that influenced its development.
Engaging both historians and architects, this collaborative research began
with a reading of the existing urban fabric, and then worked backward in
time to create a narrative of how the quarter evolved. Beginning with the
house, then moving to the street, and finally examining the quarter as a
whole and its placement in the larger city, we looked for continuities and
ruptures that could be explained by historical circumstances and cultural
practices.
The study found a marked conservatism and continuity in building styles
despite the periodic devastation of the quarter over the centuries.
Although buildings were destroyed, specific sites continued to have meaning
and to function as ritual, commercial, or domestic space. In domestic
architecture, many features associated with the Islamic house were
replicated, and there was little deviation from the standard courtyard type
found in the medina. Jewish elements were confined to the surface,
appearing in the decorative motifs and in the embellishment of spaces for
ritual use. The study concludes that the mellah was not an isolated quarter
but rather an integral part of the larger city, playing a vital role in
establishing the registers of similarity and difference that contributed to
the articulation of a specific urban identity.
SUSAN GILSON MILLER
Harvard University
ATTILIO PETRUCCIOLI
Polytechnic of Bari
MAURO BERTAGNIN
University of Udine

The Unified Plan of the House of the Faun

The theory that the House of the Faun, as it is known from the excavations,
was the product of at least two successive building phases meets serious
problems when the plan of the house is considered as a whole. The following
analysis of the ground plan reveals a work of architecture that seems
extraordinarily unified in its design, hence unlikely to have been
implemented in separate phases. Elements of the atrium plans (those
supposedly created in the first phase) appear to be so clearly subordinated
to the planning of the insula as a whole (the putative second phase), that
it is hard to imagine them as part of a presumably earlier building phase
separate from the one that comprises the central peristyle in its entirety.
Even more indicative of a unified plan is the consistent use of the 4:5
rectangle in three of the four major features of the house-from the
subdivision of the insula as a whole to the proportioning of the Tuscan
atrium.

EUGENE DWYER
Kenyon College