46 BOOK REVIEWS ticeable how detailed the plans for country house gardens were constructed and further highlights how many of these have been recently swallowed up and destroyed for market driven 'exclusive' infill developments, Similarly, it is interesting to note that while the placing of pedestrian buildings out of context may seem innovative, i.e. Snowdon Summit Railway, such ideas do not necessarily stand the test of time. Would such a building be allowed in Snowdonia National Park today? In conclusion, while the book does not contain many architectural surprises, it provides a compact, well presented history of an architect's work and style, when land was not at a premium and high density, relatively inexpensive housing did not appear to be a consideration; and as such is a worth while addition to a book collection. Jackie Dryhurst HEAVY METAL DISCS Manhole Covers. M. Melnick and R. A. Melnick. MIT Press 1996. Cambridge, Mass. & London. Softback. ISBN0 262 13302 4. £18.95 This book does have a serious purpose and it will be useful to conservationists, but more of this later. It is the idea of Manhole Covers which gives such joy. Available for the first time in a luxurious soft-cover edition in September 1996, it represents years of dedicated work and travel by its author, Mimi Melnick - an LA jazz pianist-- and by her husband, Bob, a photographer who died in 1982. In 1974 the couple had publishedManhole Covers of Los Angeles, a small book which is now a collectors' piece, and the present volume originated as a hardback in 1994 to extend their coverage of the chosen topic as far as the East Coast. The Melnicks' fascination with these bulky 300 lb castings began with the chance mention at a social occasion of a friend's intention to make a rubbing of a nearby manhole cover in the street. She was to make a screen-print out of it, no doubt dually inspired by Andy Warhol's new-found use for this graphic medium and by the elevation in Pop Art of the most banal household objects as fit subjects for figuration. Already collectors of industrial art - 'scraps of metal and wire, old gears, bedsprings, doorknobs, escutcheons, carpet beaters, faucet handles, stove lids, saws, chains ... ' - the Melnicks were now firedup to set out on a new quest. At first it was for a single manhole cover which was destined to fill empty wallspace over their domestic sofa. Attempts to purchase the said item fell foul of an employee at City Hall sanitation department: "Do you know how much these things weigh, lady?" Despite this rebuff the die was cast. (It can be noted, even at this early point, that we are in High Bohemia territory, not in Steptoe's Yard.) No longer eligible for the sitting-room wall, the manhole covers were now, instead, to be photographed. Within a short while the documentation was complete for the 1974 Los Angeles book, and, until his fatal illness curtailed his travelling, Bob took his camera all round the USAlater in the 1970s in search of the treasure beneath his feet. Bob's photographs were art, not mere documents. Here is a book without a single human form. No people, no feet are seen on the pavement. The circular and rectangular forms of the covers are printed in sober black and white, simply and severely presented on the page. Each print is sharply focused, shadow-free, and tonally rich. Initials and whole words cast into the iron denoting the city or utility company give out their blunt message with mute directness. Mass-produced metal is elevated to celebrity-status for the duration of our gaze. What was created to be merely useful gets itself recruited on these pages into the aesthetic realm. The straight-faced humour of Manhole Covers of Los Angeles is compared here in the Preface by Allan Sekula with somewhat earlier deadpan pseudo-surveys Some Los Angeles Apartments (1965) and Thirty-Four Parking Lots (1967), both by Ed Ruscha. It comes as a disappointment that the all-America survey, Manhole Covers, comes with historical notes, captions, and lists of the kinds of uses to which the covers are put. We are told who made them, how they get older as you travel from West Coast to East Coast, and how the 'Person-covers' are being made lighter now so that female employees can also raise the metal slabs. The loss through resurfacing of part of this 'heritage', the consequent listing, and the introduction of such concepts as Designer identity for castings are other developments recorded in 1996, but still unknown when the Melnick quest began in the 1970s. Useful though this information might be in the new book it destroys the original force of the identity which had been established for the castings in the pioneering Manhole Covers of Los Angeles. Get a copy of that if you can, but, meanwhile, no library is complete without Manhole Covers. Graham Tite 'TISVULGAR TO BE SEENINTOWN The Georgian Villa. Edited by Dana Arnold. Alan Sutton Publishing, Stroud, Glos., Hardback 247 X 187 mm. 180pp + xii inc. 78 b&w photos & illus. ISBN 0 7509 1020 8. £25.00 A study of Andrea Palladio's Villa Paulo Almerico (also known as the Rotonda), built near Vicenza between 1566 and 1569, was considered to be essential to the completion of an architectural education by Charles Barry in 1820 just as it had been by every major British architect since Burlington's visit a century earlier. The villas of the ancients, as recreated by Palladio, exactly suited the aspirations of the Georgian enlightenment as a rural retreat for relaxation and contemplation which could be designed for the ostentatious display of wealth without compromising the desire for privacy. The development and variety of the concept of the villa is explored in this series of essays (originally presented to a Georgian Group conference in February 1995) through the 18th century and across the land. The Georgian villa is acknowledged therefore to be more a state of mind than an architectural, social or historical actuality and the concept of a large group of related building types, distinguishable, divided and yet all, arguably, villas, is summarised by Deborah Howard as a "reconciliation of opposites" -town and country, public and private, formal and informal, modern and nostalgic. This variety of form, function, appearance and location is pursued as a consistent theme by each contributor through a broadly chronological structure of essays. Early Palladian influence is examined in the responses of Inigo Jones, his disciple John Ja mes and of course Lord Burlington and Colen Campbell, whose architectural forms were based closely upon the ancient fundaments of geometric proportion, symmetry and harmony. Mid-18th century work of architects such as Robert Adam and Robert Taylor is explained as a more derivative form with articulation by bow windows and the added consequence of wings. Finally, Soane and Barry are observed to move further from the confines of Palladio's 'studied uniformity' in the last part of the Georgian era, producing designs for villas with less direct relationship to the ancient or aristocratic tradition. These observations on the origin, development and variety of villa designs throughout the Georgian era are interspersed by an interesting collection of essays on social or historical perspectives and on further architectural derivatives. Julius Bryant provides an insight into the contemporary attitude of the 'villa viewer', emphasising the importance of the villa's conspicuous privacy and likening popular 18th-century excursions on the Thames at Twickenham to the Hollywood tour bus. Jane Austen's aversion to the term 'villa' is also revealing, as is the tale of developer/architect Decimus Burton and his conflict with the planned ideal of Nash's Regents Park. Irish and Scottish derivative villa forms are also well represented, together with an analysis of the marine villa - sublime, picturesque and even gothicised, which leads neatly into the Victorian era when the suburban villa became the aspiCONTEXT 52
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