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Michele H. Bogart, Architects to the Nation: The Rise and Decline of the Supervising Architect's Office. By Antoinette J. Lee. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. xvi, 336 pp. $45.00, isbn 0-19-512822-2.), Journal of American History, Volume 88, Issue 3, December 2001, Pages 1060–1061, https://doi.org/10.2307/2700424
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The Office of the Supervising Architect of the Treasury (OSAT), a congressionally funded government bureau charged with the design and construction of federal buildings, oversaw the production of public structures throughout the nation for close to a century. Antoinette J. Lee's Architects to the Nation offers a lively, no nonsense overview of the activities and changing fortunes of this bureau and the men who presided over it. Grounded upon manuscript correspondence and documents from the National Archives and copiously illustrated with drawings and blackandwhite photographs, this detailed study extends from 1789 to the present. The bulk of the narrative concentrates on the years of OSAT's actual existence, starting with its formation under Treasury Department auspices in 1852 and ending in 1939, when the office was removed from the Treasury Department and absorbed first by the Public Buildings Administration of the Federal Works Agency and then by the General Services Administration.
