George McCue

Even before I wrote my Guide to Contemporary New York City Architecture I was a fan of guidebooks. But researching how to lay out that book led me to get guides, old and new, that I wouldn't necessarily use as intended. They became appealing artifacts in and of themselves and great capsules of a particular time. One example is this guide to St. Louis architecture from 1967, 22 years before McCue updated it with color photos, a narrower page size, and more buildings. Even though I bought the later book years before the older guide, I like the wider, slimmer format and seeing the buildings no longer extant -- and there are plenty in St. Louis. Unfortunately many of the buildings are given short descriptions and tiny photos. Thankfully, the essays on the city's history and urban morphology provide a solid background -- something that has changed only in attitude since then.… (més)