Architecture in the family way : doctors, houses, and women, 1870-1900 /

Adams offers a novel and perceptive look at some of the thinking that influenced middle-class domestic architecture in late-19th-century Britain. Building design, traditionally the purview of the professional architect, increasingly came to reflect the ideas of physicians, who were concerned with making dwellings healthy environments, and women, seen by the Victorians as guardians of the home. Such domestic concern coincided with wider innovations in urban sewage treatment and the delivery of pure water. Although a revised dissertation, Adams's work is free of jargon and overly technical language. Documentation is thorough, and the more than 70 monochrome illustrations are adequate, save for hard-to-read details in some of the plans. The book's relatively short length makes for a focused study, and yet there are places where Adams could have drawn more parallels with similar activities elsewhere and supplied more examples to bolster her arguments. Nevertheless, this is a thought-provoking study, a good mixture of architectural and social history, and a worthwhile supplement to Helen C. Long's The Edwardian House (CH, Nov'93). General; two-year technical program students; upper-division undergraduates; graduate students; faculty; professionals. W. S. Rodner Tidewater Community College