From monuments to Mount Vernon to Mount Washington, here are a few recommendations from the architecture desk's bookshelf this year:

"Monuments: America's History in Art and Memory" by Judith Dupre (Random House, $45 hardcover).

As a nation we are quick to build monuments and memorials but reluctant later to evaluate them. So "Monuments" is a welcome backward look at 38 commemorative sites, from the Alamo, Statue of Liberty and Washington Monument to more obscure ones such as North Side-based artist Diane Samuels' "Luminous Manuscript" monument to Jewish history at New York's Center for Jewish History.

The introductory essay, which explores the meaning and purpose of memorials and monuments, is followed by one tracing their evolution from ancient pyramids and obelisks to the spontaneous and temporary memorials of today. For each of the 38 projects, Dupre discusses how it came to be, the designer's intention and the public reaction.

All but one -- the 1928 World War I Chateau-Thierry Monument in France -- are in the United States, and most are large-scale civic works, although sometimes in unusual form. The riverside Irish Hunger Memorial, at Battery Park City in Lower Manhattan, conjures a rural Irish landscape and stone cottage to evoke the homestead of a 19th-century potato farmer. It "offers moments of poignancy and commemorative insight and has enjoyed popularity beyond measure with the Irish and non-Irish alike," Dupre writes.

She discovered the process of erecting a memorial is similar across time and place: Public consensus that an event should be commemorated is followed by criticism of those in charge of realizing it, until somehow the "dissected, reconfigured, tweaked, adjusted" design gets built. And then: "Over time, the monument fades into the fabric of the landscape, until one day it disappears and no one sees it anymore. You might say that what is finally built is only a marker of the soul-searching process that brought it into being."

"Buildings of Pittsburgh" by Franklin Toker ($45 hardcover; $25 paperback).

Published by the Society of Architectural Historians and the Center for American Places, this is the 11th volume in the Buildings of the United States series. Toker's guide (with maps and driving tours) to the city's most significant historic and contemporary buildings also offers a chance to learn how the University of Pittsburgh architectural historian regards what's been built here in the past 20 years, since the 1986 publication of his "Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait" (a revised edition comes out next year).

Downtown's CAPA high school is "half-traditional, half-outrageous," with a "strikingly polyphonic and intentionally jarring exterior." The Municipal Courts Building on First Avenue "overcame a pedestrian function, a miserable site, and a meager budget to deliver far more than the client had the right to expect."

The book also includes a chapter on day trips from Pittsburgh by Lu Donnelly, whose own much anticipated book in the series, on Western Pennsylvania buildings, debuts in 2009.

"Houses of the Founding Fathers" by Hugh Howard; photographs by Roger Strauss III (Artisan; $50 hardcover).

With so much recent literary interest in the figures of the American Revolution, "Houses of the Founding Fathers" probably was inevitable. Subtitled "The Men Who Made America and the Way They Lived," it's a big, sumptuously illustrated survey book with a big ambition: Tell the stories of the personal and domestic lives of the founding fathers without lingering too long on any one (although Thomas Jefferson and Monticello, deservedly, get the biggest splash).

The book also makes an effort to report on the founding mothers as well as the homes' architects and builders and, in the South, the slaves who made so much of "the Way They Lived" possible. Sidebars on aspects of domestic life round out the homey picture. All 40 houses from Maine to Georgia are open to the public, but this volume is perfect for armchair traveling on a snowy winter's night, when those kitchen hearths, elaborately set dinner tables and elegant parlors look oh-so-inviting. The book is a testament to America's preservation movement and a reminder that, as Howard puts it, "the Founders were the rich and famous of their time."

"Julia Morgan: Architect of Beauty" by Mark A. Wilson (Gibbs Smith, $60).

If there's a young woman who's considering a career in architecture on your shopping list, there may be no more inspirational gift than this richly illustrated book about Morgan's life and work. Morgan came of age as the Arts and Crafts movement was blossoming in reaction to Victorian-era excess, and while she was fluent in many styles, the handmade Craftsman aesthetic informed her work for the next 40 years. With her mentor Bernard Maybeck, she was a leader in the First Bay Tradition, a regional design movement that espoused the honest use of natural materials and the marriage of historical forms and traditional craftsmanship with modern building materials and construction methods.

Petite and fearless, Morgan studied engineering before she became, in 1898, the first woman to attend the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and she was the first woman in the United States to be a certified architect with a full-time, independent practice. From her San Francisco office she oversaw almost 750 structures during her 42 years of active practice, an output, Wilson writes, that was larger than that of any other major American architect, including Frank Lloyd Wright.

Unlike Wright's, Morgan's was a client-oriented practice, and most of her clients were in California. While she's best known for William Randolph Hearst's grandiose San Simeon, the body of her work consists of churches, social clubs, academic buildings and residences, where the same attention to detail was brought to bear on a smaller, simpler scale. Wilson's last chapter is an assessment of Morgan's buildings, disparaged during Modernism's heyday for being derivative and now cherished for their timeless quality and the sense of well-being their inhabitants experience.

In a revealing foreword by Morgan's goddaughter, who was the daughter of Morgan's longtime private secretary, we learn the architect was a workaholic who kept her practice going until she was 78, fueled mostly by "coffee and candy bars."