Tryon Architecture & Landscape

by Michael J. McCue.

This forthcoming volume presents a new approach to the heritage of architecture in Western North Carolina, a region of surprising cultural diversity.  A team of photographers with diverse artistic approaches are recording and interpreting buildings in the vicinity of Tryon, a mountain town with an especially rich architectural heritage.  The emphasis of the work is not only to show the exterior building design, but how these structures relate to natural topography and designed landscape. 

Interior photography, also, is a major objective of the book.  In total there are six images of each selected property, which allows for developing an understanding of its landscape context, exteriors, and interiors as well.  The images, however, are not like Architectural Digest.  Each property is photographed candidly as it is lived in or worked in, without artificial arrangement for the camera.

The places selected are a balance of grand and small, typical and atypical. The time period is from the eighteenth century through the beginning of the twenty-first.  While the book includes vernacular designs typical of the region and the times, there is emphasis on unusual architecture and on structures designed by architects who can positively be identified.  Examples of work by many of these architects have never before been published, and some of the Tryon structures are by nationally-known architects whose work in North Carolina is not widely known.  A few of the places are easily seen by a casual visitor but, like much of the region’s most interesting architecture, most are hidden away from public view.  Some of these places are unfamiliar even to people who have lived in Tryon for a long time.

The volume is a generous format 9.5 x 11 inches, four pages per property.  Michael McCue, historian and design scholar, is authoring essays about each place to point out key architectural features, the historical significance, and how these properties enable us to understand the cultural heritage of Western North Carolina.  Some of the photographers working on the project are Christopher Bartol, Elaine Pearsons, Chris Talbot, Brenda Gray, Brooke Sanders, Carolyn Ashburn, Chuck Hearon, Mara and Ford Smith.  Vintage images are used to supplement features on historic properties, and to explicate the original designs of several Tryon structures that have been significantly altered or that are gone.

Price:  TBA

Projected publication date:  2010