An in-depth tout of Philadelphia's architectural history from the 1700s to the present day-for the general reader.

TABLE OF CONTENTS1. William Penn's Modest Utopia
2. William Birch and the Culture of Architecture in Philadelphia
3. The Author of Fairmount Park
4. "Facts and Things, Not Words and Signs": The Idea of Girard College
5. The Strange Germanness of the Academy of Music
6. "Silent, Weird, Beautiful": The Making of Philadelphia City Hall
7. The Carpenter: Owen Biddle
8. The Namesake: Peter Angelo Nicholson
9. The Impresario: Edwin Forrest Durang
10. Incognito at Haverford: George Senneff
11. The Bibliophile: Henry A. Sims
12. "He was not a Connoisseur": Peter Widener and His House
13. The Last Quaker: Robert Venturi
14. Frank Furness at Thirty: The Armory of the First City Troop
15. Louis Kahn at Thirty: The Lenin Memorial in Leningrad
16. Frank Furness, Perpetual Motion, and "The Captain's Trousers"
17. Breakthrough at Bryn Mawr: Louis Kahn's Erdman Dormitory
18. Gehry at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
19. Trashing the President's House
20. The "New" Barnes
21. A Museum that Overcomes its Correctness
22. My Favorite Building: Pembroke, Bryn Mawr College