Buildings of Louisiana (Buildings of the United States)

"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." "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."--BOOK JACKET.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.