The Architecture Of The Renaissance In Italy: A General View For The Use Of Students And Others

London: B. T. Batsford / The Burlington Magazine, 1896. First Edition, First Printing . Red Cloth. Very Good. Plates and Photographs and Reproduced Illustrations. 155 pp + catalogue at end. TEG. Cloth worn, mainly spine, with fraying across top edge of spine. Contents clean, no marks except handwritten ownership information on half-title: "Edward B. Lee / Architect / Pittsburgh Penna___ / rebound 1916", all in the same hand. Endpapers, in a grey flower pattern, appear original, and binding is original. Edward B. Lee studied architecture at Harvard at the end of the nineteenth century. He then practiced architecture in Pittsburgh as a true tri-state architect, with numerous commissions in northern West Virginia (e.g. Morgantown), eastern Ohio (e.g. Ashtabula, Massillon) and outlying western Pennsylvania towns (e.g. Butler, Greenville, Washington). Lee practiced independently, but was also variously associated with Bilquist and Lee; Palmer, Hornbostel & Jones; James P. Piper; and Marlier, Lee, Boyd & Prack. For some years he was the local representative for Palmer, Hornbostel & Jones. Lee was a longtime leader of the Pittsburgh Architectural Club, and his contacts in business and government led to a number of important commissions. His projects included the City-County Building (1915-1917, with Palmer, Hornbostel & Jones), the Chamber of Commerce Building (1916-17, with James P. Piper), the Edgewood Club (1914), the Harvard-Yale-Princeton Club (1930), and many hospitals, school buildings and fraternal halls. In the 1930s, he was involved with early Pittsburgh-area public housing projects such as Terrace Village and Bedford Dwellings. Lee was an eclectic architect, but preferred a free classicism for his public buildings. Many of his presentation renderings reflect his predilection for colored-pencil travel sketches, hundreds of which he executed while traveling by train to outlying job sites.