Urban Romantics

Will Morgan is fast becoming one of the leading architectural historians of this country. Already, at 31, he is architecture critic of the Louisville Courier-Journal, the author or editor of half a dozen books, and chairman of the Kentucky Historic Preservation Review Board. Not bad for a fellow who only arrived in town (from New where he was teaching at Princeton) two years ago. Now he has written a superb essay on those numerous architectural styles that most of us lump together as "Victorian."

Morgan first explains where Victorian architecture came from. I had wondered. How could a college that had put up Dartmouth Hall and Reed Hall think it an advance to build Rollins Chapel? How could Americans who grew up in Georgian and Greek Revival houses themselves build mansions in Victorian Gothic and Chateauesque?

It turns out to be a combination of 19th-century romanticism and the human desire to be comfortable. As Morgan says of our earlier architecture, it offered more symmetry than ease. "It did not differentiate rooms by their function, nor was it flexible enough to accommodate new developments in kitchen design or the introduction of indoor plumbing." Not much closet space, either.

He then makes a wonderfully persuasive case that Victorian houses are not only liveable but beautiful. I hear and do in part believe. The many illustrations and descriptions of Richardsonian Romanesque houses in Louisville are especially appealing. If I were to move to Louisville, I could live very happily in the Stine-Bernheim house with its round tower and two tower rooms. Or any of 50 other houses in the part of town called Old Louisville. I could weep when I see the soaring 1885 post office and custom house, which has been demolished to make room for a J.C. Penney and a Grant s.

Since Morgan's book is exclusively about Louisville, it will naturally appeal most to Kentuckians. But anyone who wants to learn about American 19th-century architecture will find it richly rewarding.

Urban planners should be given copies.

OLD LOUISVILLE: THE VICTORIAN ERA. By William Morgan '66 and Samuel Thomas. Courier-Journal, 1975. 152 pp. Illustrated. $9.45.

Professor Perrin of Dartmouth's Englishdepartment is passionately attached to hisFederal farmhouse in Thetford. Vermont.