Charles Lockwood, whose 1972 book, “Bricks and Brownstone: The New York Row House, 1783-1929,” both chronicled and furthered the row-house revival that transformed many New York neighborhoods, died on Wednesday at his home in Topanga, Calif. He was 63.


The cause was cancer, said Patrick Ciccone, Mr. Lockwood’s collaborator on a newly revised edition of the book, tentatively scheduled for publication next year.


The architecture critic Paul Goldberger, in his introduction to the revised edition of 2003, said “Bricks and Brownstone” gave the row-house revival “a kind of moral impetus, making it clear how much genuine architectural and urban history lay within these buildings, and how much the row houses of New York are, in fact, the underlying threads of the city’s urban fabric.”


While the book concerned New York, such revivals occurred in many cities. After the Great Depression and World War II, old brownstones had ceased being symbols of middle-class stability and affluence. Often carved into multiple dwellings, they had instead become emblems of decay, desperation and overcrowding.


Mr. Lockwood was not the first to rediscover their beauty and importance, but he and the photographer Robert Mayer documented them in exceptional detail. Mr. Lockwood placed the houses in historical context and sorted them by style and era, explaining how architectural features can give away a building’s provenance. In the Dec. 1, 2003, issue of The New Yorker, Judith Thurman called “Bricks and Brownstone” a “bible for buffs, architects and preservationists.”


Charles Lockwood was born on Aug. 31, 1948, in Washington. His mother, Allison, survives him, as do his brother, John, with whom he wrote “The Siege of Washington: The Untold Story of the 12 Days That Shook the Union” (2011), and his husband, Carlos Boyd, whom he married last September in New York.


“Bricks and Brownstone” was born in the summer of 1969, between Mr. Lockwood’s junior and senior years at Princeton University. At a New York Public Library branch, he asked where he could find a book about brownstones. (The term is often used as a synonym for row houses, even for structures clad in limestone or brick.)


“We don’t have one,” the librarian answered. “It’s never been written.”


That was all he had to hear. Buoyed by “youthful enthusiasm and more than a little naïveté,” Mr. Lockwood said, he decided to write his senior thesis on brownstones, with the hope of publishing it as a book.


While preparing the thesis, he and Mr. Mayer happened to be on West 11th Street on March 6, 1970, photographing a Greek Revival doorway, when a tremendous explosion tore through a nearby house that had been covertly turned into a bomb factory by the radical Weathermen group. They took a picture of the burning building that was published the next day on Page 1 of The New York Times.


That was Mr. Lockwood’s first appearance in The Times, but not the last. He wrote more than two-dozen articles and essays for The Times and The Wall Street Journal, as well as Smithsonian magazine and The Atlantic. He moved from New York to California in the late 1970s and wrote several books there, including “Suddenly San Francisco: The Early Years of an Instant City” (1978) and “Dream Palaces: Hollywood at Home” (1981).


But “Bricks and Brownstone” was his favorite, he said in the foreword to the 2003 edition. Working on it again, he wrote, was joyful and exhilarating — “for I will never tire of exploring New York’s historic neighborhoods.”