Buildings of Louisiana

Karen Kingsley (2003)
ISBN 0-19-515999-3 (hardcover)

Buildings of Louisiana provides a comprehensive guide to Louisiana’s built environment.  Organized by parish, it begins with New Orleans and moves on to cities, towns, and rural areas in each of eleven regions around the state.  It encompasses architecture in the broadest sense, from Native American burial mounds to nineteenth-century plantations to the striking twentieth-century industrial landscape along the lower Mississippi.

The cultural and ethnic diversity of Louisiana is reflected in its architecture.  This volume in the landmark Buildings of the United States series traces the French, German, Spanish, and other cultural influences that have shaped the built environment of the state and reflects the variety of plantation buildings, urban residences, factories, flood control works, and structures related to oil, mining, and lumbering that make Louisiana distinct from every other state in the Union.

Buildings of Louisiana focuses on building forms unique to the state and shows others, such as plantation houses, in unexpected variety: early houses influenced by Creole traditions and later ones that fit the columned Greek Revival image.  Rosedown in Saint Francisville and Shadows-on-the-Teche in New Iberia are only two of the many lovely antebellum examples that are included.  The book covers not only houses in New Orleans’s Garden District, the historic monuments of the French Quarter, and the massive Art Deco capitol in Baton Rouge, but buildings not found in standard tourist guides: Shreveport’s mansions, architectural gems in small downtowns, and the state’s outstanding examples of modern architecture.

Buildings and sites are described and interpreted in some 900 entries illustrated with approximately 350 photographs and keyed to 45 maps.  A substantial introduction relates the architecture of the state to its geography, climate, economy, and uniquely diverse history and mingling of cultures.

Karen Kingsley is Professor Emerita of Tulane University, New Orleans, where she taught courses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century architectural history and on modernism.  She curated the exhibition Modernism in Louisiana: A Decade of Change, 1930-40 (1984) and wrote its accompanying catalog.  She contributed the chapter “The Modern Era” in Louisiana Buildings (1997) and has written articles in both scholarly and general-interest magazines on Louisiana architecture and on gender issues in architectural design and teaching.  She is currently writing a book on the architectural firm of Curtis and Davis.

Cover image: Nottoway Plantation House, Iberville Parish (photograph by Jim Zietz)