Look Up Asheville is a creative exploration of Asheville’s architecture rendered through stunning photography by Michael Oppenheim and creative prose by Laura Hope-Gill.

This journey through Asheville’s eclectic architecture takes us back in time to the early 20th century, the Golden Age of Engineering and the rise of this mountain town to international regard as the “Paris of the South.” Between the years 1900 and 1929, architects experimented with new materials while exploring styles of the past, from Romanesque to Renaissance, and reaching for new styles such as the Art Deco.

The dream of becoming a Manhattan of the mountains ground to a halt in 1929. But there is a saying, “Poverty is a friend to Preservation.” Because Asheville voted to pay back its debt rather than sink further into it, the architecture remained intact while other cities demolished their own early treasures in favor of urban development. Asheville became the sleeping beauty of the eclectic age of architecture. Whereas in the fairy tale, the castles were covered in thorny vines, our buildings were covered with polymerized plastic and brightly colored aluminum until, in the late 1980s Julian Price and Roger Maguire and a team of other forward-seeing individuals, as well as today’s own master architects, recognized the beauty buried in its sleep. And it now wakes.

This is the story of the buildings and of the men who built them. It is also the story of the early 20th century artists, men and women, whose work adorns the friezes, windows and of the people who lived among them through a century of national and global great change.  Whether you live here in town or are just passing through, Look Up Asheville will open your eyes to the detail and history of buildings by such luminaries of engineering as Richard Sharp Smith, Douglas Ellington, Fred Sealy, Raphael Guastavino, Edward L. Tilton, James Vester Miller, Albert C. Wirth, Ronald Greene as well as the post-war work of Anthony Lord.

Look Up Asheville opens our eyes to the science, wonder and poetry of Asheville’s buildings. And in the stories of these buildings, we find a microcosm of the 20th century itself.