CAROL DAVIDSON CRAGOE
Architectural historian Carol Davidson Cragoe has a passion for historic buildings and the stories they tell. A native New Yorker, she studied history at Smith College and art history at New York University, before coming to the UK to do a PhD at the University of London on the architecture of medieval English parish churches. She has worked for English Heritage, the Victoria County History, the Survey of London and freelance clients including the BBC, researching and writing about a huge range of buildings from castles to cathedrals, mills to malls, Tudor cottages to tower blocks. She has also lectured on architectural history at Birkbeck College (University of London), the University of Leicester, Anglia Ruskin University and in the extramural departments of Oxford and Cambridge.
Her first book, How to Read Buildings: A Crash Course in Architecture will be followed in 2011 by her second, England's Churches and How to Read Them. Additionally she has written a series of articles about the relationship between the English Church and the State for the BBC History website, and has had a number of articles on medieval architecture published in scholarly journals.
She lives in London and Hove with her historian husband.
LATEST BOOK: HOW TO READ BUILDINGS: A CRASH COURSE IN ARCHITECTURE
This book is a practical primer to looking at architecture and all the elements that are included in buildings, from cornices and friezes to columns and porticos - all facets of buildings are included. Each chapter takes an architectural element and looks at its variety across various historical periods and geographical locations. Examples are shown through dozens of fine engravings with extended captions, creating a dip-in read and an effective I-Spy guide. Additional sections look at the clues offerred by history, geography and religion (with a timeline showing how and where architectural elements have been introduced), and at the significance of the ornaments.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: How to Read Buildings: A Crash Course in Architecture (2008: A&C Black for UK, Rizzoli for USA, Viking Penguin for ANZ). Foreign language editions: Czech, Dutch, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, and Spanish.
