Philadelphia City of Homes

by David S. Traub

City of Homes is an affectionate homage to Philadelphia by architect David Traub, which reveals his deep and intimate knowledge of the city’s streets and buildings. In this, his third book about Philadelphia’s architecture and streetscapes, the author takes readers on a wide-ranging and eclectic tour of the city’s homes. This book offers full-color photographs and descriptions of Philadelphia homes—homes that date from the seventeenth through the twenty-first centuries, that range from modest rowhouses to distinctive mansions, and from the historically significant to the eccentrically expressive. We see homes located in every section and nearly every neighborhood in Philadelphia, from the working-class to the more affluent. In Traub’s descriptions, these homes become portals to greater of the history of the neighborhood where they appear; of the range of architectural styles that characterize the city’s homes; and of the aesthetic effect of each building’s massing of visual elements, inflected by an open-ended curiosity about those who designed, built, or lived in these buildings—all combining to bring them to life on the page. In different chapters, we learn more about the types of homes found across Philadelphia’s many neighborhoods—including the ubiquitous rowhouse and townhouse; twin homes; courtyard and walkway homes; detached houses; mansions and carriage houses; “unusual” or somehow distinctive houses; modern houses, and the recently emerging style that Traub calls the New Vernacular.

128 pages, Hardcover

Published December 8, 2021

Reviews

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a nice coffeetable book that details some of vast diversity of Philadelphia architectural home designs, from the classic rowhome with seemingly infinite diversity within the simple working class design (with lots of different brick patterns, porches, steps, heights, window bays, trim, pillars, etc) of the 19th and early 20th century, to the Victorian twins of West and Northwest Philly, to the throwback courtyard and walkway houses, to the even less common detached houses of the landed old gentry on the outskirts, to even the mansions and carriage houses of the elite Rittenhouse. While I struggle to keep the various names as a architectural novice, such as Beaux-Arts, Bungalow, Federal, the variations on Georgian, Gothic and Greek Revivals, New Vernacular, Tudor, etc etc, I'm at least familiar with them now after seeing the descriptions matched up with all the different pictures of a homes from all over the 300+year old city. There's even a section on the more recent construction of cubist plate rowhouses in places like Fishtown which I think is ugly as sin, and I could tell the author thought so too but was being diplomatic. 

In a city like Philly, with all its history, some warm summer days, I just like to walk and walk and walk from neighborhood to neighborhood, just observing and noticing the small things, like a random ram symbol, or a colorful mural, or a window wooden ribbon design, that looks like it was built in the 1910s-20s or earlier. I felt like I was taking one of those walks while reading this.