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An in-depth look at Boston's Prudential Center and what its story reveals about the evolution of the modern American city The Prudential Center anchors the Boston skyline with its tall, gray tower. It is also a historical beacon, representing a midcentury moment when insurance companies such as Prudential were particularly aware of how their physical presence and civic engagement reflected upon their intangible product: financial security. Looking to New York's Rockefeller Center, the creators of the Prudential Center aspired to use real estate development as a tool toward civic achievement, reinvigorating central Boston and integrating a large complex of buildings with new infrastructure for the automobile. Architectural historian Elihu Rubin tells the full story of "The Pru," placing it within the political, economic, and architectural contexts of the period. The Prudential Center played a pivotal role in the economic redevelopment of Boston and was arguably one of the most significant urban developments of the 1950s and '60s. It is an important story, and one that provides great insight into the evolution of the modern city in postwar America.
An in-depth look at Boston's Prudential Center and what its story reveals about the evolution of the modern American city The Prudential Center anchors the Boston skyline with its tall, gray tower. It is also a historical beacon, representing a midcentury moment when insurance companies such as Prudential were particularly aware of how their physical presence and civic engagement reflected upon their intangible product: financial security. Looking to New York's Rockefeller Center, the creators of the Prudential Center aspired to use real estate development as a tool toward civic achievement, reinvigorating central Boston and integrating a large complex of buildings with new infrastructure for the automobile. Now available in paperback, this award-winning book tells the full story of “The Pru,” placing it in the political, economic, and architectural contexts of the period, and providing new insights into urban renewal in postwar America.
The book is a collection of essays exploring the potential of multimedia to enrich and transform the planning field. By multimedia the authors refer to a broad range of new information and communication technologies (from film and video to digital ethnography and the internet), which are opening up new possibilities in planning practices, processes, pedagogy and research. The authors document the ways in which these ICTs can expand the language of planning and the creativity of planners; can evoke the lived experience (the spirit, memories, desires) of our 21st century mongrel cities by engaging with stories and storytelling; and can democratise planning practices. The text is epistemologica...
Timing the Future Metropolis—an intellectual history of planning, urbanism, design, and social science—explores the network of postwar institutions, formed amid specters of urban "crisis" and "renewal," that set out to envision the future of the American city. Peter Ekman focuses on one decisive node in the network: the Joint Center for Urban Studies, founded in 1959 by scholars at Harvard and MIT. Through its sprawling programs of "organized research," its manifold connections to universities, foundations, publishers, and policymakers, and its years of consultation on the planning of a new city in Venezuela—Ciudad Guayana—the Joint Center became preoccupied with the question of how to conceptualize the urban future as an object of knowledge. Timing the Future Metropolis ultimately compels a broader reflection on temporality in urban planning, rethinking how we might imagine cities yet to come—and the consequences of deciding not to.
Real estate developers are integral to understanding the split narratives of twentieth-century American urban history. Rather than divide the decline of downtowns and the rise of suburbs into separate tales, Sara Stevens uses the figure of the real estate developer to explore how cities found new urban and architectural forms through both suburbanization and urban renewal. Through nuanced discussions of Chicago, Kansas City, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Denver, Washington, D.C., and New York, Stevens explains how real estate developers, though often maligned, have shaped public policy through professional organizations, promoted investment security through design, and brought suburban models to downtowns. In this timely book, she considers how developers partnered with prominent architects, including Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and I. M. Pei, to sell their modern urban visions to the public. By viewing real estate developers as a critical link between capital and construction in prewar suburban development and postwar urban renewal, Stevens offers an original and enlightening look at the complex connections among suburbs and downtowns, policy, finance, and architectural history.
In the early nineties, a visionary special-effects guru named Marc Thorpe conjured a field of dreams different from any the world had seen before: It would be framed by unbreakable plastic instead of cornstalks; populated not by ghostly ballplayers but by remote-controlled robots, armed to the steely teeth, fighting in a booby-trapped ring. If you built it, they'd come all right.... In Gearheads, Newsweek technology correspondent Brad Stone examines the history of robotic sports, from their cultish early years at universities and sci-fi conventions to today's televised extravaganzas -- and the turmoil that threatened the whole enterprise almost from the beginning. By turns a lively historical narrative, a legal thriller, and an exploration of a cultural and technological phenomenon, Gearheads is a funny and fascinating look at the sport of the future today.
In its 114th year, Billboard remains the world's premier weekly music publication and a diverse digital, events, brand, content and data licensing platform. Billboard publishes the most trusted charts and offers unrivaled reporting about the latest music, video, gaming, media, digital and mobile entertainment issues and trends.
Essays and projects illuminate the nature of error and its creative possibilities for architecture. Architecture never goes entirely according to plan. Every project deviates from its designers' expectations, and wise architects learn to anticipate, mitigate, and sometimes celebrate the errors along the way. Perspecta 46 argues that error is part of architecture's essence: mistranslations, contradictions, happy accidents, and wicked problems pervade our systems of design and building, almost always yielding surprising aberrations. Today, with increasingly complex projects underpinned by layers of computer code, small errors can proliferate rapidly, and the dream of errorless architecture see...
The first comprehensive architectural and cultural history of condominium and cooperative housing in twentieth-century America. Today, one in five homeowners in American cities and suburbs lives in a multifamily home rather than a single-family house. As the American dream evolves, precipitated by rising real estate prices and a renewed interest in urban living, many predict that condos will become the predominant form of housing in the twenty-first century. In this unprecedented study, Matthew Gordon Lasner explores the history of co-owned multifamily housing in the United States, from New York City’s first co-op, in 1881, to contemporary condominium and townhouse complexes coast to coast. Lasner explains the complicated social, economic, and political factors that have increased demand for this way of living, situating the trend within the larger housing market and broad shifts in residential architecture and family life. He contrasts the prevalence and popularity of condos, townhouses, and other privately governed communities with their ambiguous economic, legal, and social standing, as well as their striking absence from urban and architectural history.
Part travelogue, part social history, and part family saga, this book investigates the politics of heritage tourism and collective memory. Acclaimed historian Daniel J. Walkowitz visits key Jewish heritage sites from Berlin to Belgrade to Warsaw to New York to discover which stories of the Jewish experience get told and which get silenced.