Dan Pezzoni’s A New Look for a New Age: The Midcentury Architecture of Cleveland County, North Carolina tells the story of an exciting period in the architectural development of a prosperous western Piedmont county. The book picks up where Architectural Perspectives of Cleveland County, North Carolina (2003, edited by Dan Pezzoni) left off, focusing on the 1945 to 1980 period. The “new look” of the title is Modernism, of which the county has some of the finest examples in the state, buildings like the 1961 Kings Mountain Country Club with its cubist jumble of brick planters (below) and the crisp rationalist boxes of the early 1960s Cleveland Savings & Loan and Union Trust Company buildings in Shelby. The book profiles the work of local architects V. W. Breeze, Fred Van Wageningen, Peg Holland, Jack Riviere, Claude Vaughan, and Fred Simmons. Not everything was Modernist—there are also many fine Historicist buildings from the era as well as mimetic architecture like the 1960s Burger Barn and Little Moo restaurants, built to look like barns.

A New Look for a New Age: The Midcentury Architecture of Cleveland County, North Carolina is the first countywide architectural history in North Carolina to focus on the “near past” of the mid-twentieth century. The book is in production with publication to follow.