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Awards
OverviewMoving away from the standard survey that takes readers from architect to architect and style to style, Building the Nation: Americans Write About Their Architecture, Their Cities, and Their Landscape suggests a wholly new way of thinking about the history of America's built environment and how Americans have related to it. Through an enormous range of American voices, some famous and some obscure, and across more than two centuries of history, this anthology shows that the struggle to imagine what kinds of buildings and land use would best suit the nation pervaded all classes of Americans and was not the purview only of architects and designers. Some of the nation's finest writers, including Mark Twain, W. E. B. Du Bois, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Lewis Mumford, E. B. White, and John McPhee, are here, contemplating the American way of building. Equally important are those eloquent but little-known voices found in American newspapers and magazines which insistently wondered what American architecture and environmental planning should look like. Building the Nation also insists that American architecture can be understood only as both a result of and a force in shaping American social, cultural, and political developments. In so doing, this anthology demonstrates how central the built environment has been to our definition of what it is to be American and reveals seven central themes that have repeatedly animated American writers over the course of the past two centuries: the relationship of American architecture to European architecture, the nation's diverse regions, the place and shape of nature in American life, the design of cities, the explosion of the suburbs, the power of architecture to reform individuals, and the role of tradition in a nation dedicated to being perennially young. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Steven Conn , Max PagePublisher: University of Pennsylvania Press Imprint: University of Pennsylvania Press Dimensions: Width: 17.80cm , Height: 2.20cm , Length: 25.40cm Weight: 0.870kg ISBN: 9780812218527ISBN 10: 0812218523 Pages: 424 Publication Date: 23 June 2003 Audience: College/higher education , Tertiary & Higher Education Format: Paperback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: Out of stock The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available. Table of Contents"Chapter 1. Introduction Chapter 2. ""They Do Things Better in Europe"": Americans View the World Chapter 3. So Glorious a Landscape: Shaping Nature the American Way Chapter 4. One Nation, of Many Parts: Regionalism and the Built Environment Chapter 5. Urbanism, Real and Imagined Chapter 6. Taming the Crabgrass Frontier: The Triumph of the Suburbs Chapter 7. Better Buildings, Better People: American Architecture and Social Reform Chapter 8. Monuments and Memory: Building and Protecting the American Past Index Acknowledgments"ReviewsThis anthology will undoubtedly open new paths of inquiry into the making, shaping, preservation, and use of the American landscape. -Daniel Bluestone, University of Virginia Some anthologies seem slapdash or opportunistic; others are labors of love, informed by a mastery of a particular field and a passion for sharing the heterogeneous richness of their documents. Building the Nation is happily one of the latter... Vastly useful. -Preservation This anthology will undoubtedly open new paths of inquiry into the making, shaping, preservation, and use of the American landscape. -Daniel Bluestone, University of Virginia Some anthologies seem slapdash or opportunistic; others are labors of love, informed by a mastery of a particular field and a passion for sharing the heterogeneous richness of their documents. Building the Nation is happily one of the latter... Vastly useful. -Preservation Author InformationSteven Conn is Associate Professor of History at The Ohio State University. He is the author of Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926 and Metropolitan Philadelphia: Living with the Presence of the Past, the latter also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press. Max Page is Associate Professor of Architecture and History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the author of The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900-1940. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |