In this illustrated in-person lecture, Kerry Dean Carso will examine historicized garden buildings known as “follies” from the nation’s founding through the American centennial celebration in 1876. In a period of increasing nationalism, historicized garden buildings - such as temples, summerhouses, towers and ruins - brought a range of European architectural styles to America. By imprinting the land with symbols of European culture, landscape gardeners brought the idea of civilization to the American wilderness and helped define gentility in the young nation. These eccentric and playful structures were built throughout the Hudson Valley in the nineteenth century, with Andrew Jackson Downing playing a key role in the proliferation of the building type.

Dr. Carso is professor of art history at the State University of New York at New Paltz where she teaches courses on American art and architecture. She is the author of American Gothic Art and Architecture in the Age of Romantic Literature (University of Wales Press, 2014), winner of the 2015 Henry-Russell Hitchcock Award from the Victorian Society in America. Her new book, Follies in America: A History of Garden and Park Architecture, was published by Cornell University Press in 2021.

This is an in-person event and is free to the general public. Please register through our Eventbrite page.