Building Reputations: Architecture and the Artisan, 1750-1830

摘要

Matthew and Mary Darly's satirical engraving The Macaroni Bricklayer' appropriately adorns the cover of Conor Lucey's Building Reputations: Architecture and the Artisan, 1750-1830, a brilliant study of the arti-sanal building trades in the urban centres of the British Atlantic world. Fashionably dressed, bewigged, and beribboned, this apparent gentleman's trade is evident only by the bricklayer's trowel in his hand. Lucey's insightful book illuminates the paradox at the heart of the Darlys' caricature: is the builder one of the newly prosperous tradesmen with a legitimate claim to politeness as conferred by profession, or is he a pretender in the Enlightenment Republic of Taste?1 'The Macaroni Bricklayer' makes its denunciation clear, but Building Reputations offers ample evidence for an opposite conclusion. Through four carefully researched and cogently argued chapters, Lucey makes the case for the creative capacity of the carpenter, the bricklayer, and the plasterer—the artisanal trades of architecture. He argues that, like architects, artisans too were designers, agents of taste, decorators, and sometimes commercial sellers. Taking the brick terrace house, or 'row house', that dominated the streets of London, Dublin, Philadelphia, and Boston from the middle of the eighteenth century until the first decades of the nineteenth century as its focus, Lucey's study provides important new scholarship on one of the most ubiquitous, yet understudied and misunderstood, architectural forms of the Georgian and Federal eras.