Virginia Architecture in the Seventeenth Century

This concise study invites listeners on a visual journey through Virginia’s earliest built environment, drawing on the author’s own sketches, photographs, and on‑site investigations of surviving structures and foundations. As a practicing architect with deep family ties to the colony’s first families, he blends scholarly research with personal insight, offering a clear picture of how design, materials, and purpose shaped the landscape of the 1600s.

The narrative begins with the sophisticated, though largely wooden, architecture of the native peoples who inhabited the region long before the first English ships arrived. By examining mound‑building techniques, settlement layouts, and surviving artifacts, the book establishes the indigenous foundations that would later influence colonial building practices. Listeners will come away with a vivid sense of the cultural layers that underlie Virginia’s architectural heritage, all presented before the story moves into the later European styles that followed.