Book Description

"An Architectural Travel Guide to Utah invites visitors and other explorers of Utah to use buildings and the larger built environment as a lens to understand the state's history, material culture, settlement and natural landscape.Using more than 600 buildings as examples, this guide asks visitors to travel through Utah's cities and rural villages, exploring neighborhoods and other distinctive built landscapes in every part of the state's dramatic environs.An adobe house built in the 1860s in Virgin, and many other Utah towns speaks volumes about the transmission of ideas about style, about respectability, about the places Utah's white settlers originated, and about the use of materials that quite literally came from the earth itself.The Utah State Capitol reflects the Neo-Classicism preferred for statehouses throughout the United States, but the distinctiveness of the site overlooking a canyon to the east and a view toward the Great Salt Lake and its islands to the north and south down State Street, one of the longest streets in America set it apart and make it very much of this place.From the most common vernacular cabin to the modern architecture of the bi-centennial project resulting in Abravanel Symphony Hall and the Salt Lake Arts Center, this guide uses the diversity of Utah's architecture to make a point about the diversity of the state's people, their visions for the good life, and the particular response they made with their built environment to the unique geography of this beautiful place"--