Marble Halls: Civic and Urban Architecture in the Gilded Age [Hardcover]

Marble Halls is a companion to Craven's Gilded Mansions (2009). Craven (emer., Univ. of Delaware) focuses this new work on civic buildings, using as examples state capitals, train stations, libraries, and museums. He also includes an entire chapter on Gilded Age gentlemans clubs, though such buildings were typically accessible only to members. Craven begins as nearly all studies of Beaux arts classicism do, with a chapter on the 1893 Worlds Columbian Exposition in Chicago. In each subsequent chapter, he looks at the architects and artists who created the best-known works of the period, and provides economic and political context relevant to the creation of each building. With a few notable exceptions (the 1893 Exposition, the Boston Public Library), the examples Craven uses are located in New York City and Washington, DC. Marble Halls is written for general not academic readers and is well illustrated with images of classical American architecture and the interior decoration, polished marble, painting, and sculpture that defined the sumptuous Gilded Age.Summing Up: Recommended. General readers.Marble Halls is written for the intelligent layperson, rather than for the specialist in the history of architecture, who is interested in the architecture and interiors of America's Gilded Age as an expression of that era's quest for cultural equality with European nations, even as it paralleled the rise of the architectural style of Modernism.Marble Halls is about the great civic buildings that were designed in the style of Beaux-Arts classicism during the Gilded Age (18651918) and about the City Beautiful movement that was intended to improve the setting for the buildings and the urban environment for the people. The Industrial Revolution, which arrived belatedly in the United States, provided the wealth required for grand architecture, and the classical Beaux-style was imported from Paris to serve as a veneer to a society that saw itself as brash and culturally unrefinelÏ