Andres’ book “Buildings of Vermont” looks beyond the state’s stereotypical architecture.

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. – The Preservation Trust of Vermont has honored Glenn M. Andres, professor of the history of art and architecture, for his new book “Buildings of Vermont” published this year by the University of Virginia Press.

The 504-page volume, which the Middlebury College professor co-authored with photographer Curtis B. Johnson, was deemed “an outstanding contribution to the field of historic preservation” by the preservation trust. The book will be instrumental to the preservation of Vermont’s historic places in the years to come, the trust explained.

The book goes beyond the Vermont stereotypes of white country churches and barns overlooking rolling pastures “to explain the remarkable range, quality, humanity, and persistence of a built landscape that has a compelling appeal,” the University of Virginia Press said. The volume showcases the state’s “rich stew of styles and types” from colonial and early federal New England and New York, to contributions from Canada, Scotland, Ireland, Italy, Scandinavia, and elsewhere.

Andres and Johnson traveled the state to examine some of America’s finest Federal and Greek Revival meetinghouses, early Gothic Revival churches, Victorian inns, Italianate and panel brick business rows, wood-framed general stores, robber-baron estates, water-powered mills, summer camps, and ski resorts.

The chapter on Middlebury, for example, includes essays on such classic structures as the Middlebury Inn (1827), Old Chapel (1836), and Battell Bridge (1892), and on modern buildings like the Mahaney Center for the Arts (1992) and Atwater Commons (2004).

Andres examines Vermont’s earliest settlements and discusses how industrialization, tourism, and recreation have affected the state’s architecture. Then he goes county-by-county looking at the built landscape, starting with Vermont’s oldest county, Bennington, which was organized in 1779. The chapters on Chittenden, Rutland, and Windsor Counties comprise the longest sections in the book.

The authors Andres and Johnson accepted the Vermont Preservation Award at the trust’s 20th annual Historic Preservation & Downtown Conference on May 2 in Island Pond. Glenn Andres, who also wrote “A Walking History of Middlebury,” has been a member of the Middlebury faculty since 1970.

Written by Robert Keren with photography by Paul Dahm