Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (1948). Classic account of major technological innovations affecting ordinary life in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Virginia Savage McAlester, A Field Guide to American Houses: The Definitive Guide to Identifying and Understanding America's Domestic Architecture (1984, revised edition 2013). A classic field guide, well worth owning if you're interested in identifying different kinds of domestic architecture.
Rachel Carley, The Visual Dictionary of American Domestic Architecture (1994). Simpler, more distilled, probably more accessible as a starting point than McAlester's field guide above.
John Milnes Baker, American House Styles: A Concise Guide (2nd ed, 2018). Even simpler as an introductory field guide to domestic architectural style.
Thomas Paradis's Architectural Styles of America and Europe
https://architecturestyles.org
Excellent basic web overview.
If you prefer an overview of all these different styles in single infographics, check out the extraordinarily detailed posters linked from this page:
https://99percentinvisible.org/article/style-house-visual-guides-domestic-architectural-designs/
especially this one:
https://99percentinvisible.org/app/uploads/2016/08/american-vernacular-houses-guide.png
Lester Walker, American Homes: The Landmark Illustrated Encyclopedia of Domestic Architecture (1981, revised edition 1996). Another basic overview, organized as two-page spreads for each style, with great drawings pointing out characteristic features of each style. Quite a few of the illustrations I used in lecture came from this excellent book. Highly recommended.
Edward Allen, How Buildings Work: The Natural Order of Architecture (3rd ed, 2005). This one concentrates not on architectural style but on the construction and engineering of buildings, offering a wonderfully accessible overview of the major systems that make buildings work the ways they do. Many of the sketch diagrams of domestic technologies that I showed toward the end of the lecture came from this excellent book. Highly recommended.
Kate Ascher, The Heights: Anatomy of a Skyscraper (2011). Like Ascher's visual guide to New York City infrastructure, this illustrates the architectural and engineering guts of a typical skyscraper.
Anyone interested in the topics introduced in today's lecture should be aware of the extraordinary online documentation for different buildings, structures, and landcapes that have been generated by the Historic American Buildings Survey, Historic American Engineering Record, and Historic American Landscapes Survey, curated by the Library of Congress. Their home page is here:
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/hh/
For background of how these came into being and how they're organized, start here:
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/hh/background.html
There are enormous numbers of drawings and photographs on these sites, all of them copyright free.
As was true of the note sheet for mining, architectural styles and engineering construction practices have a vast array of resources available on the Web. Wikipedia alone has literally hundreds of relevant pages touching on myriad styles, designs, and technologies that may be helpful if you want to go exploring the built architectural environment. I've added a very selective appendix at the bottom of this note sheet suggesting some helpful pages to begin such explorations.
I want to start by connecting today's lecture about the built environment to last week's lecture on electrical systems. As everyone was entering the lecture hall, I projected on the screen the 1867 birds-eye view of Madison that we've seen in class before,
https://www.loc.gov/item/73694546/
paired with a roughly similar oblique Google Maps view of the city in 2014:
https://goo.gl/maps/gGhxabutZqu
You could ponder these two images for hours without exhausting the wide range of landscape changes they illustrate. (By the way, this 45-degree-angle oblique view in Google Maps is reached by clicking the little 3D button in the lower right-hand corner of the satellite view.)
In today's lecture, we'll take a whirlwind tour of architectural history by looking at two main themes: the history of construction and engineering that made possible the built environments we inhabit today; and the history and aesthetics of architectural styles in different regions and periods around North America. Construction technologies and design aesthetics are of course related, though architectural designs sometimes obscure the engineering infrastructure that lies beneath the surface of buildings. Today I'll try to narrate the history of American architecture--the constructed landscapes mainly of cities and suburbs in the United States--by examining the domestic landscapes of the houses and neighborhoods where people live.
I'll mention at the outset that the lecture owes a debt to a book that might interest many of you: Siegfried Giedion's Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York: Oxford Univesity Press, 1948). In this classic if eccentric monumental work of scholarship, Giedion traced the origins and development of a great many of the basic technologies that transformed ordinary life over the course of the past three centuries. We'll encounter a number of them over the course of today's lecture, but for now let's start with just one: heat.
Today, buildings like the one we're in today are heated with forced air transported on this campus by steam pipes and forced air, using systems we now collectively label as "HVAC" -- heating, ventilation, and air conditioning. If we went back to colonial New England and ask how Pilgrims heated the buildings in which they lived, we'd see that firewood burned in open fireplaces was their main source of heat both for ambient heating and for cooking. An open hearth was an extraordinarily inefficient way to heat one's home and cook food. With influxes of German immigrants in the Middle Atlantic colonies, especially Pennysylvania, new and more efficient models of iron stoves were introduced to North America. By burning fuel (first wood and later coal) in an enclosed metal firebox, rates of combustion slowed, and much more heat was captured in the form of radiant energy from the hot stove. As a result, combustion became significantly more efficient.
One of the people who studied domestic technologies like these German stoves was Benjamin Franklin, who adopted aspects of their design to invent what we now call the Franklin Stove, but which was really a metal insert to render his "Pennsylvania Fireplace" more efficient. He introduced to stove design a number of baffles, metal pieces that slowed the movement of hot air out of the chimney flue, so that more of the heat of the fire could be radiated into the house before exiting up the chimney. Ever-more elaborate systems, and systems that combined different activities--a fireplace, a boiler for hot water, and an oven, for example--continue to emerge. As fuelwood became scarcer and more expensive, the efficiency of stoves like these became a matter of growing concern, which was also related to the shift from wood to coal that we've already observed in earlier lectures. Stove manufacturer underwent a series of technological improvements from 1750 forward that track some of the other kinds of changes we've been observing all semester. There's a good narrative of these change fireplace and stove designs in this 2013 Popular Mechanics article:
https://www.popularmechanics.com/home/how-to/g1085/know-your-wood-burning-stoves/
and there's additional information in Wikipedia at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stove
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_stove
So we've talked about how to heat a house. Now I want to shift to talking about how to build a house you'd want to heat. If we look at the architectural design of the classic 1680s farmhouse you can visit today at the Saugus Iron Works National Historic Site in Saugus, Massachusetts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saugus_Iron_Works_National_Historic_Site
you'll see construction techniques that go back to medieval England: a series of vertical posts tied together and held in place by large horizontal beams, with diagonal rafters above forming the roof. One attribute of these structures is that they are not held together with metal but entirely with wood. Posts and beams were joined with a mortise (a socket or groove) and a tenon (a tongue), slightly misaligned so that when a pin was driven into holes carved in each member, creating a strong joint. No nails or glue were used in such construction. Great skill and much labor with an ax and adz was needed to shape the timbers that supported such buildings. We'll see later in the lecture the ways in which later innovations reduced the amount of skill needed on site to erect domestic dwellings, as well as the size of the timbers needed to support them, with a host of industrial innovations on the factory floor making such changes possible.
Timber frame buildings like these are often called post-and-beam
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timber_framing
and were common all over northern Europe before being brought to North America
The cladding one put on the outside of such structure depended on the period and the region of the country in which one lived. Keeping wood dry so it won't rot has always been a key dilemma for any type of wooden building that relies on wood, which accounts for a host of common building designs like foundation sills, overhanging eaves, and so on. Immigrants moving from England to North America in the 17th and 18th centuries were accustomed to landscapes where wood was increasingly scarce and expensive, so their typical house designs used earthen materials--mud, clay, "wattle and daub"--to form exterior walls, and thatch or slate shingles to cover roofs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wattle_and_daub
(Wood scarcity was also the reason that coal consumption began to increase in England during this same period.) European immigrants coming to North America were stunned by the abundance of wood in eastern forests, which meant that they could use clapboards to cover exterior walls and wooden shingles to cover roofs--uses of wood that would have been inconceivable in England. Germans brought with them to places like Wisconsin the fachwerk (half-timbering) building style that used grasses for the roof and mud daub to clad the exterior of their houses for these same wood-conserving reasons. You can see examples of such buildings on the reconstructed German homesteads at the Wisconsin Historical Society's Old World Wisconsin historic site, especially at the Koepsel House (which uses bricks to fill in the spaces between exterior timbers) and the Schultz Stable:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_World_Wisconsin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Schultz_Stable_Old_World_Wisconsin.jpg
https://oldworldwisconsin.wisconsinhistory.org/life-on-the-farms/
The stolid timber-frame structures we associate with the Saugus site gradually become the one- or two-room "Cape Cod cottages" that typify so much of the New England landscape by the latter part of the 18th century and early part of the 19th. These become more elaborate over time as the families who owned them became wealthier and/or needed more space, with the result that they began adding rooms to the small house with which they began. Modular additions made it possible for houses and farm buildings to grow by accretion. Often they do so on the back side of the building, so that it expanded toward the back yard. That sort of architectural form is well-suited to the northern lattitudes of the U.S., where we can see an increasingly number of long and connected buildings to the barn in the rear, making it possible for farmers to reach animals in the barn in midwinter while minimizing their own time outdoors.
In the South, there were still some of the same architectural styles, but also some regionally different styles. The "shotgun house" in the American South--so named because a gun fired through the front door would run all the way through the house through the backdoor--was just one room wide. The form may have been first introduced to North America by free blacks migrating to Louisiana from Haiti, where this style of architecture represented a combination of African, French, and native Arawak building traditions. Shotgun houses are still common in African-American and working-class neighborhoods all over the South, and also be found from Chicago to California.
Contrast these relatively humble structures with a much wealthier style of domestic architecture: Thomas Jefferson's Monticello and his design of the University fo Virginia, which made conscious use of Greco-Roman design motifs. The classic architectural orders of Antiquity, in which arcades and doorways like those of the Acropolis are framed with Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian columns. In the wake of the American Revolution, in the Early Republic, these architectural motifs were understood to gesture at the republican values of Fifth Century Athens and the early Roman republic--anti-monarchical republican governments on that the leaders of the new United States aspired to emulate. You'll remember from my earlier lecture on the history of nineteenth-century landscape painting the romantic artist Thomas Cole, who arguably helped invent the painting of the American wilderness as a new artistic genre. The little temple in the second canvas of Cole's "Course of Empire" sequence -- the painting called "The Arcadian or Pastoral State" which Cole clearly viewed as the ideal state not just of landscape but of republican society--was akin to what Thomas Jefferson had in mind as he was designing his house at Monticello.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Course_of_Empire_(paintings)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monticello
The 1770s-1840s were a period of Greco-Roman revival in the U.S., characterized by the placement of columns at the porticoed entrances to houses owned by wealthy individuals. This was in stark contrast with classic frontier architecture: the sod houses we've already seen on the Great Plains in the second half of the nineteenth century, and, much earlier, the log cabins that characterized more wooded parts of the U.S. especially in the East. The initial log cabins in the U.S. appeared in the Delaware River Valley, and were generally an architectural form that was brought from Germany and Scandinavia. Some of the earliest were first built in New Sweden, in the area that is today southwestern New Jersey and southeastern Pennsylvania.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log_cabin
Notice the relatively modest skill required to build these structures. The walls and roof are held up by the logs themselves, with fewer of the complex mortise-and-tenon joints that characterized the vertical and horizontal beams of timber-frame structures. Logs still needed to notched to tie them together to make the walls rigid and to keep logs from slipping when the load-bearing roofs became much heavier during winter snows. But anyone with access to straight trees and able to use an ax could construct a log cabin. Here in the northern latitudes of the U.S., snowloads continue to be among the fundamental challenges associated with keeping buildings from falling down. In more southerly latitudes,
Swedes may have been the first ones to introduce the log cabin to America, but many ethnic groups would adopted this built very basic architectural form in forested landscapes of North America where wood for timber was readily available--and where trees had to be cut down anyway to clear fields for planting crops and grazing livestock. With the log cabin came a proliferation of folk architectural forms that modified the basic cabin to create larger structures: one-room log cabin, saddlebag cabin, and dog-trot cabin. These forms migrated out from their point of origin in the Mid-Atlantic colonies to other parts of the country: to the southern Appalachians, the Old Northwest, and eventually to the Great Plains as far as timber was available.
Still other architectural patterns came to characterize the colonial empires we encountered in earlier lectures. By the 18th century, we've seen the French settling in the Mississippi Valley, and the Spanish settling in Texas, New Mexico, and California. What do these groups bring? In French territory, in addition to the long lots that are still visible in satellite photographs, we see expansive porches stretching around all sides of a building to offer shade and cool breezes during summer heat. Villa Louis in Prairie du Chien is a classic example, even though it was constructed after the U.S. had gained control of the Upper Mississippi Valley. Among the Spanish, we see mud-walled pueblo architecture and walled colonial forms with central courtyards, whether in the form of presidios, missions, or haciendas. See the notesheet for the "Course of Empires" lecture for examples of these architectural forms.
We've talked about folk architectural forms on the American frontier, as well as the Greco-Roman architectural revival of the Early Republic. I now want briefly to consider the 19th century and make a few observations about the industrial revolution and the many impacts it would eventually have on building construction and architectural forms, both because of new technologies for constructing buildings and new materials that began to be available.
Water power (which I discuss more fully in a lecture in History/Geography/Environmental Studies 460) was typified by the Merrimack River, which flowed from New Hampshire into the area just north of Boston, powering the mills at Lowell and Lawrence, Massachusetts. It relied on capturing the potential energy in a drop of water--at, say, a waterfall or a rapids--and converting it into mechanical energy with a waterwheel or turbine beneath a factory. Leather belts transferred that mechanical energy vertically and drove machines from more belts located on different floors of a multi-story factory.
We've watched the rise of coal power in this class in the form of stationary steam engines, and then later with railroad locomotives, which you can think of as mobile boilers using coal to heat water to produce steam to drive shafts that turn wheels. The rate of adoption of steam power happened least quickly in New England, where there there were more vertical drops in rivers. By contrast, the Midwest moved towards coal-fired steam because of a lack of vertical drops suitable for water mills in Midwestern rivers.
A steam-powered industrial revolution necessarily presupposed a parallel revolution in the manufacture of iron and then steel. Without iron and steel--immensely strong materials capable of bearing great loads and enduring high temperatures--none of what I'm going to narrate in the rest of today's lecture would have been possible. So bear that in mind always that technologies emerge in ways that rely synergistically on the possibilities they create together. Major steel manufacturing centers emerged in Gary, Indiana; Chicago; Cleveland; and Pittsburgh. J. P. Morgan's creation of the U.S. Steel Corporation in 1901 in and around Pittsburgh made that company the largest steel producer and the largest corporation in the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Steel
With coal and steel we see the emergence of a growing belt of industrial belt cities in the Northeast and Great Lakes regions. The nation was becoming continuously more and more urban, with a growing fraction of the population living and working in cities. By the time of the 1920 census, more than half the population of the United States would be living in cities, many of them laboring in factory jobs in the new industrial metropolises.
We also see new construction techniques during this same period. For contrast, consider St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City, constructed over the course of twenty years between 1858-1878, a structure built entirely of stone using techniques that dated back to the Gothic cathedrals of the Middle Ages. By the time the cathedral was completed, the stone of which it was made, and especially the techniques used to hold up its walls and roof with that stone, were far from the norm for most American architecture.
One crucial innovation that gradually evolved over the course of the nineteenth century was the balloon frame. It revolutionized domestic architecture by replacing timber-framing architectural techniques dating back to the Middle Ages with mass-produced materials that required much less labor and skill to assemble. The balloon frame needed an industrial revolution in order to be possible because it required the following inputs:
For more on this revolution in framing and building construction, see the overview at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_(construction)
Cheap mass-produced wood, nails to hold that wood together, and interchangable parts: these things together eventually yielded a revolution in architectural design. As builders and architects realized the far-reaching possibilities of the new materials with which they were working, publishers began to sell a proliferation of pattern books filled with do-it-yourself designs and blueprints for buildings patterned on different architectural styles. Andrew Jackson Downing, publicist for the field of landscape architecture in the Hudson Valley, published a number of books about gardening, orchards, and country houses, but he was only one of the earliest of many such authors. If you're interested, you here's a copy of Downing's 1850 book The Architecture of Country Houses:
https://archive.org/details/architectureofco00down/page/n5
These pattern books were brought out by more and more publishers in the 19th century, as book publishing itself was undergoing a mechanical revolution that made it possible for an ever growing number of books to published at ever-declining prices. Out of these pattern books would pour the plans for a proliferating set of architectural styles, among which the fussily ornate Queen Anne exemplifies the possibilities of the new materials and designs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Anne_style_architecture
Not only were there more elaborate house patterns across the 19th century, but one could also increasingly open a catalog from Montgomery Ward or Sears, Roebuck and Company to order by mail any number of decorative elements to add to one's building. The ever more elaborate residential buildings constructed during the latter half of the 19th century would have been impossible without the proliferation of the balloon frame and the mass production of uniform building materials.
By the late nineteenth century and later, there was an explosion of architectural revivals: the Colonial Revival, Spanish Colonial Revival, the Richardsonian Romanesque (think of the red brownstones of Manhattan), the Italianate Revival, Tudor Revival. UW-Madison's Old Red Gym and Science Hall are examples of this Richardsonian revival, though Science Hall has an underlying steel structure--foreshadowing the construction techniques that would become ever more dominant for large structures from the 1880s forward) that would not have typified the original Richardsonian style. The original, central portion Memorial Union exemplifies the Italianate Revival. And the University Club is a good example of Tudor Revival.
Typically we point to the Columbian Exposition in 1893, also called the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, as the inspiration for a widespread Greco-Roman revival in the U.S., a revival style we typically label as Neo-Classical or Beaux Arts. The fairgrounds were designed by Daniel Burnham, who went on to become one of the leading architects and urban planners in the United States. Burnham designed Union Station in Washington, DC, and had a major role in promoting the new design of the National Mall in Washington that was proposed in 1902.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Burnham
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World's_Columbian_Exposition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Mall
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMillan_Plan
But despite this sudden post-1893 American love affair with Greco-Roman architectural aesthetics, these buildings were all constructed with steel instead of stone. Madison's Capitol and the Wisconsin Historical Society could not be more Greco-Roman in their aesthetic forms...but they could hardly be more modern in the steel-based construction technologies that hold up their walls and roofs. These grand styles were meant to exemplify the power and importance of governmental buildings (and their inhabitants) by suggesting that they were in the grand tradition of Greece and Rome. That is why so many of the downtowns of major American cities have buildings patterned after Greco-Roman designs, in response to what is often called the City Beautiful Movement. But again: it was structural steel that made these faux Greco-Roman buildings possible.
The 1893 Chicago World's Fair didn't just excite interest in Greco-Roman architectural styles, but also in electricity--particularly the electrical kitchen. We've already seen that the Fair's Electricity Building was part of the debate that led to the adoption of the alternating current (AC) system that Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse promoted against Thomas Edison's direct current (DC). There's a nicely curated onlline collection of artifacts from the Fair's Electricity Building here:
https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/where-the-future-came-from-a-trip-through-the-1893-chi-743942247
and a contemporary description of the exhibits here:
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89067683839
Now I want to go inside of the domestic buildings we've been exploring to see the ways in which electrical technologies transformed them over the course of the twentieth century, remaking housework in the process.
One change was an evolution in stoves: from stoves fueled by wood and coal to gas and electrical ranges. They were one part of a larger impulse to innovate: new mechanical devices--from the egg beater to the apple corer--proliferated in American kitchens in the early 20th century. Washing laundry became a mechanized form of activity with the adoption of the electrical washing machine. Additionally, by the 1950s, the refrigerator was replacing the icebox, alongside the freezer; in-sink disposals and mechanical dishwashers were also appearing in many kitchens. Housework was dramatically altered as a result. But remember: these changes inside houses were predicated on the expanding supply networks for electricity (and natural gas) that we explored in the last lecture.
There were also revolutions to the bathroom. The bathroom sink--along with the kitchen sink--presupposed the standardization of fixtures and implements, along with the growing scale and reliability of water and sewage systems. The advent of the hot water heater also radically changed what the experience of bathing. Among the institutions that helped standardize the American bathroom experience was the hotel, and eventually the apartment building, urban structures that mass-produced bathrooms for large numbers of people. The height and size of such buildings meant that their builders and engineers had to solve sewer and pipe-building challenges that would be central to remaking bathrooms in homes across the country.
Buildings were getting taller, with growing numbers of floors, because steel provided their structural support. It was capable of carrying much greater compressive and tensile loads than the stone, brick, and wooden materials that had limited the height of all previous buildings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_steel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strength_of_materials
As buildings grew vertically, it was no longer feasible for people to climb stairs up to their residence or office. The elevator thus became a crucial innovation. Less noticed was the braking mechanism that Elisha Otis invented to make possible the safe stopping of descending elevators.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisha_Otis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elevator
Notice: this one invention was necessary to make possible the dramatic increase in heights of urban buildings. The city of Chicago was one of the propagators of new vertical building styles as a result of the 1871 Chicago Fire, which motivated an interest in non-wooden, non-flammable structures--i.e. buildings supported by steel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_skyscrapers
Remember that as one builds vertically, one is left with this engineering challenge: what can bear the weight of the growing load? What kind of foundation can support such a building? How does one keep the building from blowing over in high winds? With a steel framework now bearing the load, the exterior walls no longer need to be load-bearing, so materials like glass windows could be increasingly integrated into a building's external cladding. Ever larger sheets of glass made possible by new manufacturing technologies could now be deployed to cover the increasing spaces made possible by steel. This in turn changed architectural aesthetics and made many of the characteristic features of "modern" architecture possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyscraper
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_architecture
We'll close with this thought: notice that all modern buildings now share certain fundamental characteristics:
Whether we're talking about skyscrapers or the smaller domestic buildings that proliferated across the 20th century--bungalows, ranch houses, split-levels, with newer platform framing systems replacing the older 19th-century balloon frame--the technology and aesthetics involved in constructing such buildings shaped each other, and relied on a growing number of standardized parts and industrial processes.
The online resources for these topics are truly enormous, so all I've tried to do here is to suggest some helpful places to start exploring.
Especially good sites that provide introductory overviews to these topics include:
Thomas Paradis's Architectural Styles of America and Europe
https://architecturestyles.org
Excellent basic overview of styles.
If you prefer an overview of all these different styles in single infographics, check out the extraordinarily detailed posters linked from this page:
https://99percentinvisible.org/article/style-house-visual-guides-domestic-architectural-designs/
especially this one:
https://99percentinvisible.org/app/uploads/2016/08/american-vernacular-houses-guide.png
Jackie Craven, House Style Guide to the American Home, ThoughtCo.com
https://www.thoughtco.com/house-style-guide-american-home-4065233
Very detailed overview with abundant photographs; an excellent page to peruse for more knowledge of this topic.
General Services Administration (Federal):
https://www.gsa.gov/real-estate/historic-preservation/explore-historic-buildings
Interesting site provides overview of historic building owned and operated by the federal government.
Guide to Residential Styles, Realtor Magazine
https://magazine.realtor/home-and-design/guide-residential-styles
A very basic overview of styles and structural elements with clear, simple drawings from the National Association of Realtors.
OldHouses.com
https://www.oldhouses.com/styleguide
Good basic introduction to styles, with lots of links to books and online sources...but beware, it's a commercial site, not especially scholarly in approach, that will carry you to many sites that will try to sell you things.
Wikipedia has entries for an extraordinary range of different architectural styles and engineering practices. As you'd expect, there are a number of category, outline, and overview pages that suggest some of the entries on these topics that might possibly be of interest. Here are just a few examples to get you started:
Wikipedia Portal: Architecture
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Architecture
(You know you have a truly vast topic when Wikipedia creates a special portal for it!)
Architecture of the United States:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_of_the_United_States
Category: American Architectural Styles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_architectural_styles
History of Architecture:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_architecture
List of Architectural Styles:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_architectural_styles
History of Construction:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_construction
Outline of Construction
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_construction
History of Structural Engineering:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_structural_engineering
House
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House
List of House Types
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_house_types
List of House Styles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_house_styles
Category: House Styles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:House_styles
Technological and Industrial history of the United States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_and_industrial_history_of_the_United_States
Skyscraper
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyscraper