The Architecture of the Shakers

The Shakers conducted nineteenth-century America's most successful experiment in utopian living. From Maine to Kentucky, they established communal villages and worked to build a heaven on earth. Designed to accommodate hundreds of celibate believers, Shaker buildings included meeting houses, dwelling houses, barns, factories, and schools.

This volume is the first definitive study of these buildings. Julie Nicoletta's perceptive text and Bret Morgan's striking color photographs celebrate the spare harmonies of Shaker architecture and reveal the essential practicality of the many building types. Design, construction, materials, and use are explored, illuminating regional variations in Shaker buildings, as well as their functional and stylistic evolution over the course of two centuries.

As this book demonstrates, Shaker architecture reflects the complexities of a society that sought to reconcile its rigorous faith with the demands of daily life in a rapidly changing world. The buildings evoke the dichotomies of Shaker life: the separate but equal spheres of the sexes, the desire to withdraw from "the world" while remaining economically connected to it, a simultaneous embrace of technological progress and a nostalgia for the certainties of the past.

The functional beauty of Shaker buildings anticipated the Modernist aesthetic in architecture and design. Today, while Shaker life continues at just one active community, appreciation of the Shaker legacy grows broader and deeper. Architects and designers, curators and collectors, and an ever-widening public seek inspiration in Shaker life, art, and architecture. The Architecture of the Shakers is a book for all those who wish to learn more about these remarkable buildings.