Eric Holcomb, executive director of the Baltimore City Commission on Historical and Architectural Preservation (CHAP), gives the final talk in Homewood Museum's fall architectural lecture series, titled "From Country Estate to Suburban Neighborhood: Development on the Edge of Baltimore, 1800-1945."

Through street layouts, landscaping, and architectural design, Baltimore City's outer neighborhoods such as Arcadia, Windsor Hills, and Walbrook manifest the suburban ideal, a harmony between urban and rural amenities. This mixing of city and country living, however, first found form in the eighteenth-century country estate. By 1800, successful merchants had built a ring of country estates surrounding Baltimore, a development pattern that reaches back to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, with antecedents into ancient history. Using Baltimore neighborhoods as illustrations, city planner Eric Holcomb will describe how Baltimore's country estates developed into neighborhoods, and discuss how the architecture and landscape design of these estates influenced the character of Baltimore's suburban communities.

Guests are invited to attend a 5 p.m. reception at Homewood Museum to see the related special exhibition A Winter's Residence: Charles Carroll of Homewood's Town Houses, 1800-1816, before the 6 p.m. lecture in Gilman Hall 50.