#000528
Town and Country
Mark Girouard
*Town and Country* gathers essays and articles by Mark Girouard, one of Britain's most beloved architectural historians, on buildings and the people who used them across town and countryside. Mixing deep scholarship with anecdote and a light touch, Girouard writes about the country houses he visited as a boy and how he first fell for architecture, the origins of English rococo, the making of a seaside resort, the Georgian society of Jane Austen's world, and changing attitudes to landscape from eighteenth-century Britain to twentieth-century America. It's less a systematic history than a companionable ramble through the themes he made his own. It speaks to lovers of English architecture, social history and finely written cultural essays.
more…less ▴
The author
Mark Girouard (1931–2022) was a leading British architectural historian, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries celebrated for pioneering the social history of the country house. His landmark Life in the English Country House changed how the great houses are understood — not just as buildings but as machines for a whole way of living — and he wrote with rare wit and readability.
The book
Published by Yale University Press in 1992, Town and Country collects shorter pieces written over a career, returning to and enlarging the themes of his major books. The essays move nimbly between architecture proper and the manners, money and society that shaped it.
How it reads
As a collection it rewards dipping rather than straight-through reading, and its pleasures are those of a superb guide thinking aloud. Readers new to Girouard might start with his full-length books, but admirers will relish the range and the anecdote here.
For more context
Pair it with Life in the English Country House and Cities and People.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Mark Girouard
- Publisher
- Yale University Press
- Place of publication
- New Haven
- Year
- 1992
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Art
- Location
- Colorado