ABSTRACT
The exporting of American architecture began in the
mid-nineteenth century as a disjointed set of personal
adventures and commercial initiatives. Some of
the adventurers were entrepreneurs selling either
building components or prefabricated structures,
such as slave structures, windmills and wharf
buildings. Others were daring individualists with a
fl air for the unknown. Still others were building and
planning consultants who were either lured abroad
by new kinds of clients or propelled overseas by
their U.S.-based headquarters. The scope of activities
associated with this small and disparate cast of
architectural exporters is easier to chart after 1876,
when visitors from overseas marvelled at examples
of American industrial technology displayed at
the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition. Roughly
two decades later, after the Chicago Columbian
Exposition in 1893, both architectural episodes and
building personalities received even greater notoriety
abroad, particularly in Europe but also further afi eld
(Lewis, 1997). However, it was not until the waning
gasp of the nineteenth century that Americans
awoke more fully to the possibilities of exporting
their construction knowledge to commercial and
cultural contexts so much further afi eld. ‘By 1900
the United States had successfully constructed one
kind of empire – territorial across the continent – and
was building another – economic as well as territorial
– overseas’ (Twombly, 1995, p. 22).
