In Arts and Crafts Architecture: History and Heritage in New England, Maureen Meister examines the work of twelve architects, eleven men and one woman, who took leadership roles in the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts from its founding in 1897 to 1917: Robert Day Andrews, George Edward Barton, Ralph Adams Cram, Lois Lilley Howe, Alexander Wadsworth “Waddy” Longfellow Jr., Charles Donagh Maginnis, Louis Chapell Newhall, William Edward Putnam Jr., George Russell Shaw, Richard Clipston Sturgis, Charles Howard Walker, and Herbert Langford Warren. The book provides useful biographical background on these architects, charts their intersections in Boston arts and social organizations, and glosses their building designs.

Meister's intention is to flesh out our understanding of the generation of Boston architects who studied design or worked as draftsmen in the 1870s (or so) and practiced through the interwar period. Focusing on those architects who were associated with the Society of Arts and Crafts, Meister aims to “examine this Boston-based architecture in a comprehensive way, locating the architects and their buildings within the social, political, and philosophical contexts of turn-of-the-twentieth-century New England” (8). Key in this regard is the intellectual legacy of British leaders of the Arts and Crafts movement—John Ruskin and William Morris—and their champions in Boston, especially Harvard's Charles Eliot Norton.

The body of work that Meister considers coincides historically with the production of New England architects who were brought to modern scholarly attention by Vincent J. Scully Jr.'s pioneering 1955 study The Shingle Style and the Stick Style and by a number of articles that appeared in the May 1973 issue of this journal.¹

Framing the …