You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The 1939-1940 New York World's Fair promised a new age of global communication, nationwide superhighways, and suburban living-and it delivered. Crafted by designers such as Walter Dorwin Teague, Norman Bel Geddes, and Raymond Loewy, the twelve-hundred-acre fair in Flushing Meadows sold visitors a streamlined world of consumer goods-teardrop cars and smoking robots, electric dishwashers and nylon stockings-manufactured by companies such as Westinghouse, General Motors, and AT&T. In New York's 1939-1940 World's Fair, insightful narrative accompanies dazzling postcards, advertisements, and illustrations of Democracity, Futurama, the Lagoon of Nations, and the famed Trylon and Perisphere, recalling the promise and optimism of a fair that enchanted forty-five million visitors.
An essential exploration of how Russian ideas about the United States shaped architecture and urban design from the czarist era to the fall of the U.S.S.R. Idealized representations of America, as both an aspiration and a menace, played an important role in shaping Russian architecture and urban design from the American Revolution until the fall of the Soviet Union. Jean-Louis Cohen traces the powerful concept of “Amerikanizm” and its impact on Russia’s built environment from early czarist interest in Revolutionary America, through the spectacular World’s Fairs of the 19th century, to department stores, skyscrapers, and factories built in Russia using American methods during the 20th century. Visions of America also captivated the Russian avant-garde, from El Lissitzky to Moisei Ginzburg, and Cohen explores the ongoing artistic dialogue maintained between the two countries at the mid-century and in the late Soviet era, following a period of strategic competition. This first major study of Amerikanizm in the architecture of Russia makes a timely contribution to our understanding of modern architecture and its broader geopolitics.
A gripping account of how the automobile has failed NYC and how mass transit and a revitalized streetscape are vital to its post-pandemic recovery In 1969, as all students of New York City history think they have learned, master builder Robert Moses lost his long battle to urbanist Jane Jacobs over his planned Lower Manhattan Expressway. The ten-lane elevated expressway would have sliced across SoHo and Little Italy, demolishing historic buildings, and displacing thousands of families and businesses. Jacobs and her neighbors defeated Moses, and as a result, New York became the only major American city with no interstate highway running through its core. Like many global cities, though, New Y...
This book explores the changing food culture of the urban American South during the Jim Crow era by examining how race, ethnicity, class, and gender contributed to the development and maintenance of racial segregation in public eating places. Significant legal changes later supported the unprecedented progress of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
"A deep . . . dive into urban society's need for--and relationship with--trees that sought to return the natural world to the concrete jungle."--Adrian Higgins, Washington Post Winner of the Foundation for Landscape Studies' 2019 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize Today, cities around the globe are planting street trees to mitigate the effects of climate change. However, as landscape historian Sonja Dümpelmann explains, the planting of street trees in cities to serve specific functions is not a new phenomenon. In her eye-opening work, Dümpelmann shows how New York City and Berlin began systematically planting trees to improve the urban climate during the nineteenth century, presenting the his...