Customer Reviews

Prodigy Houses of Virginia: Architecture and the Native Elite

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The first thing potential readers should know it that this is a serious piece of scholarship, intended for architectural historians, art historians and sociologists as much as the general public. In that sense, it is beautifully done.

While the writing style is quite accessible, the topic is esoteric. This book is as much about sociology as it is about houses, it's as much about colonial wealth creation as it is about architecture. It is not a catalog of grand plantation houses in Virginia. Don't buy this book if that's what you're expecting.

Illustrated throughout in black & white, this book explains how the colonial gentry in Virginia chose to express their wealth in architecture as a substitute for the things they could not achieve, namely, the vast hereditary wealth of the English aristocracy. The book brings to mind Rhys Isaac more readily than Richard Wilson or Calder Loth.

The book is a relatively small, robust hardback, well constructed by the University of Virginia Press.