Clay Lancaster

Clay Lancaster (30 March 1917 – 25 December 2000), was an authority on American architecture, an orientalist, and an influential advocate of historical preservation. According to The New York Times, Lancaster's 1961 study of the architecture of Brooklyn Heights "proved to be one of the earliest and loudest shots in the historic preservation struggle in New York City.

Lancaster's best-known books of architectural and art history are Architectural Follies in America (1960), Ante Bellum Houses of the Bluegrass (1961), Old Brooklyn Heights: New York's First Suburb (1961), The Japanese Influence in America (1963), Prospect Park Handbook (1967), The Architecture of Historic Nantucket (1972), New York Interiors at the Turn of the Century (1976), Nantucket in the Nineteenth Century (1979), The American Bungalow (1985), Antebellum Architecture of Kentucky (1991), The Arts and Crafts of the Animals (1993), The Breadth and Depth of East and West (1995), and Pleasant Hill: Shaker Canaan in Kentucky (2000). A collection of his photographs appears in James D. Birchfield, Clay Lancaster's Kentucky: Architectural Photographs of a Preservation Pioneer (2007).

Lancaster was, as well, a writer and illustrator for children.The Periwinkle Steamboat (1961) was later redesigned and re-published as The Flight of the Periwinkle (1987). Michiko, or Mrs. Belmont's Brownstone on Brooklyn Heights was published in 1965. The Toy Room appeared in 1988, Figi in 1989, and The Runaway Prince in 1991.

Lancaster's style received high praise. Alan Priest, former curator of Far Eastern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art noted in his introduction to The Japanese Influence in America that "the prose is most agreeable to read and the subject matter so interesting that one is led to read almost as if it were a historical novel." The poet Marianne Moore, introducing Lancaster's Prospect Park Handbook (1967), writes: "his pages are art."

Lancaster was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and studied at the University of Kentucky. He spent half of 1936 at the Art Students League of New York. Returning to Lexington, he served as stage designer for the university's Guignol Theatre and was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He took his A.B. in Art in 1938.

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