The publication of the original Great Camps of the Adirondacks in 1982 helped launch new and much needed public attention to the importance and plight of Great Camps and the rustic architecture of the Adirondack region. Before Great Camps, there were a handful of public crises and great uncertainty about their future and, on the heels of the book, came a new wave of awareness, appreciation, and stewardship of this remarkable architecture. It is our hope that this expanded edition will similarly inspire and inform readers about the state of these camps and their surrounding environments today. Truly fabulous structures, built primarily of wood and stone and set deep among the great forests, they are at once relics of a bygone age and prototypes for the contemporary architect, amateur builder, and historian. Kaiser gives a fascinating account both of the personalities who engineered and financed these fabulous structures and of the buildings themselves.
The first and foremost guide to Adirondack Rustic Style.
The foremost guide to the historic camps within the six million acre Adirondack Park.
When first published in 1982, Great Camps of the Adirondacks launched a campaign for the preservation of these architectural treasures while also sparking a trend in great camp-inspired home design, a cohesive approach to building that author Harvey H. Kaiser named Adirondack Rustic Style. In this enlarged, second edition, preservationists will find a success story. Designers and builders will discover page after page of inspiration. All readers will see the history of a region unfold as Americans from the mid-1870s to the late-1930s, including the very wealthiest New Yorkers, sought out the wilderness. The camps they built as private seasonal retreats are distinguished both as architectural responses to the Adirondack environment in the use of logs and stone, and as successful examples of buildings blended into the forest and the natural contours of the mountains and lakeshomes built to serve as beautiful complements to the land itself.
