Customer Reviews

Architecture of the Old South: Greek Revival & Romantic

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"Architecture of the Old South" is a rich and immensely-informative volume.

Mills Lane spent over fifteen year of "exploration, research, and writing" to produce this now classic work. He has attempted (and succeeded) in documenting how, surprisingly, "the great buildings of the Old South were created by outsiders and newcomers, especially New Englanders, whose contribution to Southern society and culture has been long underestimated."

Laudable buildings from such great cities as Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans are amply represented here, as are country houses and plantation estates. And to Lane's credit, he includes some quirky homes and frontier houses that have architectural connections to some of the region's more familiar buildings.

Van Jones Martin's color photography is crisp and unfussy. The best pictures include William Bryd II's handsome 18th-century mansion, in Westover, Virginia; Charleston's elegant, 18th-century Unitarian Church; and the grand, curving stair in Peter Wilson Hairston's 19th-century, two-story home in Advance, North Carolina.

A fine Bibliography and Index can also be found in this handsome and important work.

This is a wonderful book on some of the most spectacular buildings in American. The text is highly informative and the images are crisp and vivid, the author does a fine job of capturing the buildings in their best light, and he is quite thorough. The south is a special place, with it's own pace and culture, much is made of the divide of European and African American's, but as a southerner I can tell you that, both groups understand each other totally, for better or worse and for the most part work and live together better than in other parts of the country, these buildings where built for the most part by the whole of the south, and the styles reflect the culture, be it french, spanish, english, irish, african, scottish or whatever. The architecture of the great southern cites, Charlston, New Orleans, Natchez, and Savannah are on display here as are the wonderful rural plantations. I highly recommend this book to anyone with any interest in the architecture of the south or just enjoys well conceived books on interesting topics.

I thought this book was only OK for what I needed. I wanted very specific information about architectural features for Southern homes. The pictures were great, but the writing was very general and talked about specific houses only, but not about Southern architecture in general, drawing out some of the characteristics that were common to the Southern Belles. I wanted information that was more specific to the general architecture of the South; not information about specific Southern mansions.