Chicago 1890: The Skyscraper and the Modern City

Author:   Joanna Merwood-Salisbury
Publisher:   The University of Chicago Press
ISBN:  

9780226520780


Pages:   208
Publication Date:   01 May 2009
Format:   Hardback
Availability:   In Print   Availability explained
Limited stock is available. It will be ordered for you and shipped pending supplier's limited stock.

Our Price $118.80 Quantity:  
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Chicago 1890: The Skyscraper and the Modern City


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Overview

Chicago’s first skyscrapers are famous for projecting the city’s modernity around the world. But what did they mean at home, to the Chicagoans who designed and built them, worked inside their walls, and gazed up at their façades? Answering this multifaceted question, Chicago 1890 reveals that early skyscrapers offered hotly debated solutions to the city’s toughest problems and, in the process, fostered an urban culture that spread across the country.             An ambitious reinterpretation of the works of Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, and John Wellborn Root, this volume uses their towering achievements as a lens through which to view late nineteenth-century urban history. Joanna Merwood-Salisbury sheds new light on many of Chicago’s defining events—including violent building trade strikes, the Haymarket bombing, the World’s Columbian Exposition, and Burnham’s Plan of Chicago—by situating the Masonic Temple, the Monadnock Building, and the Reliance Building at the center of the city’s cultural and political crosscurrents.             While architects and property owners saw these pioneering structures as manifestations of a robust American identity, immigrant laborers and social reformers viewed them as symbols of capitalism’s inequity. Illuminated by rich material from the period’s popular press and professional journals, Merwood-Salisbury’s chronicle of this contentious history reveals that the skyscraper’s vaunted status was never as inevitable as today’s skylines suggest.

Full Product Details

Author:   Joanna Merwood-Salisbury
Publisher:   The University of Chicago Press
Imprint:   University of Chicago Press
Dimensions:   Width: 2.20cm , Height: 0.20cm , Length: 2.90cm
Weight:   0.936kg
ISBN:  

9780226520780


ISBN 10:   0226520781
Pages:   208
Publication Date:   01 May 2009
Audience:   General/trade ,  Adult education ,  General ,  Further / Higher Education
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Out of Stock Indefinitely
Availability:   In Print   Availability explained
Limited stock is available. It will be ordered for you and shipped pending supplier's limited stock.

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Reviews

"""Chicago 1890 presents a new perspective on the skyscraper and the city, revising and extending our view of Chicago's place in modern architecture. Joanna Merwood-Salisbury very effectively links three of the most important early skyscrapers to contemporaneous thought, speculation, and debates about the modernizing city. In doing so, she illuminates the environment of imagination and experiment that surrounded the skyscrapers, a kaleidoscopic world that couldn't have diverged further from the way that twentieth-century modernists later presented it."" - Gail Fenske, author of The Skyscraper and the City"""


Chicago 1890 presents a new perspective on the skyscraper and the city, revising and extending our view of Chicago's place in modern architecture. Joanna Merwood-Salisbury very effectively links three of the most important early skyscrapers to contemporaneous thought, speculation, and debates about the modernizing city. In doing so, she illuminates the environment of imagination and experiment that surrounded the skyscrapers, a kaleidoscopic world that couldn't have diverged further from the way that twentieth-century modernists later presented it. - Gail Fenske, author of The Skyscraper and the City


Author Information

Joanna Merwood-Salisbury is assistant professor in the Department of Architecture, Interior Design and Lighting at Parsons The New School for Design.

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