William H. Jordy (1917 – 10 August 1997) was a leading American architectural historian. At the time of his death, Jordy was Henry Ledyard Goddard Professor Emeritus of Art History at Brown University, where he taught for many years.
Jordy received his Ph.D. at Yale University in 1948. He joined the Yale faculty that year. Jordy studied the historical writings of Henry Adams including his nine-volume history of the United States and The Education of Henry Adams which proposed history as a response to social forces. Jordy published Henry Adams: Scientific Historian in 1952 with Yale University Press.
In 1955 he joined the Department of Art History at Brown, and began a teaching career, specializing in architectural history.
His books include two volumes of the five-volume American Buildings and Their Architects series and Buildings of Rhode Island (published posthumously) in the Society of Architectural Historians Buildings of the United States series. He contributed occasionally to the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians and wrote regularly on architectural subjects for The New Criterion.
Books
- 1952: Henry Adams: Scientific Historian, Yale University Press, New Haven
- 1972: American Buildings and Their Architects: Progressive and Academic Ideals at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, Doubleday, Garden City NY
- 1972: American Buildings and Their Architects: The Impact of European Modernism in the Mid-twentieth Century, Doubleday, Garden City NY
- 1982: (with Christopher P. Monkhouse) Buildings on Paper: Rhode Island Architectural Drawings, 1825-1945, Bell Gallery, List Art Center, Brown University, Providence RI
- 2004: (Ronald J. Onorato and William McKenzie Woodward, contributing editors) Buildings of Rhode Island, Oxford University Press, New York ISBN 0-19-506147-0
- 2005: (Mardes Bacon, editor) "Symbolic essence" and Other Writings on Modern Architecture and American Culture, Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, Yale University Press, New Haven ISBN 0-300-09448-5
References
- Pierson, William H. Jr. (1997) "William Henry Jordy: A Reflection", Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 56(4): 412–413, 538.