Download or read book Mall Maker written by M. Jeffrey Hardwick and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2015-08-18 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The shopping mall is both the most visible and the most contentious symbol of American prosperity. Despite their convenience, malls are routinely criticized for representing much that is wrong in America—sprawl, conspicuous consumption, the loss of regional character, and the decline of Mom and Pop stores. So ubiquitous are malls that most people would be suprised to learn that they are the brainchild of a single person, architect Victor Gruen. An immigrant from Austria who fled the Nazis in 1938, Gruen based his idea for the mall on an idealized America: the dream of concentrated shops that would benefit the businessperson as well as the consumer and that would foster a sense of shared community. Modernist Philip Johnson applauded Gruen for creating a true civic art and architecture that enriched Americans' daily lives, and for decades he received praise from luminaries such as Lewis Mumford, Winthrop Rockefeller, and Lady Bird Johnson. Yet, in the end, Gruen returned to Europe, thoroughly disillusioned with his American dream. In Mall Maker, the first biography of this visionary spirit, M. Jeffrey Hardwick relates Gruen's successes and failures—his work at the 1939 World's Fair, his makeover of New York's Fifth Avenue boutiques, his rejected plans for reworking entire communities, such as Fort Worth, Texas, and his crowning achievement, the enclosed shopping mall. Throughout Hardwick illuminates the dramatic shifts in American culture during the mid-twentieth century, notably the rise of suburbia and automobiles, the death of downtown, and the effect these changes had on American life. Gruen championed the redesign of suburbs and cities through giant shopping malls, earnestly believing that he was promoting an American ideal, the ability to build a community. Yet, as malls began covering the landscape and downtowns became more depressed, Gruen became painfully aware that his dream of overcoming social problems through architecture and commerce was slipping away. By the tumultuous year of 1968, it had disappeared. Victor Gruen made America depend upon its shopping malls. While they did not provide an invigorated sense of community as he had hoped, they are enduring monuments to the lure of consumer culture.
Download or read book Official Report of the Calcutta International Exhibition 1883 84 written by and published by . This book was released on 1885 with total page 738 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Paved Paradise written by Henry Grabar and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2023-05-09 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Consistently entertaining and often downright funny.” —The New Yorker “Wry and revelatory.” —The New York Times "A romp, packed with tales of anger, violence, theft, lust, greed, political chicanery and transportation policy gone wrong... highly entertaining." —The Los Angeles Times An entertaining, enlightening, and utterly original investigation into one of the most quietly influential forces in modern American life—the humble parking spot Parking, quite literally, has a death grip on America: each year a handful of Americans are tragically killed by their fellow citizens over parking spots. But even when we don’t resort to violence, we routinely do ridiculous things for parking, contorting our professional, social, and financial lives to get a spot. Indeed, in the century since the advent of the car, we have deformed—and in some cases demolished—our homes and our cities in a Sisyphean quest for cheap and convenient car storage. As a result, much of the nation’s most valuable real estate is now devoted exclusively to empty and idle vehicles, even as so many Americans struggle to find affordable housing. Parking determines the design of new buildings and the fate of old ones, patterns of traffic and the viability of transit, neighborhood politics and municipal finance, the quality of public space, and even the course of floodwaters. Can this really be the best use of our finite resources and space? Why have we done this to the places we love? Is parking really more important than anything else? These are the questions Slate staff writer Henry Grabar sets out to answer, telling a mesmerizing story about the strange and wonderful superorganism that is the modern American city. In a beguiling and often absurdly hilarious mix of history, politics, and reportage, Grabar brilliantly surveys the pain points of the nation’s parking crisis, from Los Angeles to Disney World to New York, stopping at every major American city in between. He reveals how the pathological compulsion for car storage has exacerbated some of our most acute problems—from housing affordability to the accelerating global climate disaster—ultimately, lighting the way for us to free our cities from parking’s cruel yoke.
Download or read book Old Clocks and Watches and Their Makers written by Frederick James Britten and published by . This book was released on 1899 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Old Clocks and Watches Their Makers written by Frederick James Britten and published by . This book was released on 1911 with total page 832 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book From Main Street to Mall written by Vicki Howard and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2015-06-04 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richly illustrated with archival photos, this comprehensive study of the American department store industry traces the changing economic and political contexts that brought about the decline of downtown shopping districts and the rise of big-box stores and suburban malls.
Download or read book Acoustic Territories written by Brandon LaBelle and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2010-04-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A remarkable exploration of how sound permeates all aspects of life - from the streets to our homes, and from shopping malls to the underground.
Download or read book Motor Age written by and published by . This book was released on 1928 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Former Clock Watchmakers and Their Work written by Frederick James Britten and published by . This book was released on 1894 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mall City written by Stefan Al and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2016-11-30 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hong Kong is the twenty-first-century paradigmatic capital of consumerism. Of all places, it has the densest and tallest concentration of malls, reaching tens of stories. Hong Kong’s malls are also the most visited, sandwiched between subways and skyscrapers. These mall complexes have become cities in and of themselves, accommodating tens of thousands of people who live, work, and play within a single structure. Mall City features Hong Kong as a unique rendering of an advanced consumer society. Retail space has come a long way since the nineteenth-century covered passages of Paris, which once awed the bourgeoisie with glass roofs and gaslights. It has morphed from the arcade to the department store, and from the mall into the “mall city”—where “expresscalators” crisscross mesmerizing atriums. Highlighting the effects of this development in Hong Kong, this book raises questions about architecture, city planning, culture, and urban life.
Download or read book Cheap written by Ellen Ruppel Shell and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009-07-02 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A myth-shattering investigation of the true cost of America's passion for finding a better bargain From the shuttered factories of the Rust Belt to the strip malls of the Sun Belt-and almost everywhere in between-America has been transformed by its relentless fixation on low price. This pervasive yet little- examined obsession with bargains is arguably the most powerful and devastating market force of our time, having fueled an excess of consumerism that blights our landscapes, escalates personal debt, lowers our standard of living, and even skews of our concept of time. Spotlighting the peculiar forces that drove Americans away from quality, durability, and craftsmanship and towards quantity, quantity, and more quantity, Ellen Ruppel Shell traces the rise of the bargain through our current big-box profusion to expose the astronomically high cost of cheap.
Download or read book Target Markets International Terrorism Meets Global Capitalism in the Mall written by Suzi Mirgani and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2017-03-31 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the points of convergence between corporate capitalist and terrorist practice. Assessing an increase in the number of terrorist attacks directed at commercial entities in urban areas, with an emphasis on the shopping mall in general and Nairobi's Westgate Mall in particular, Suzi Mirgani offers a fascinating and disturbing perspective on the spaces where the most powerful forces of contemporary culture - the most mainstream and the most extreme - meet on common ground.
Download or read book The Singapore Mall Generation written by Dr Liew Kai Khiun and published by Marshall Cavendish International Asia Pte Ltd. This book was released on 2022-04-15 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yesterday’s malls as today’s heritage. This book unearths Singapore’s latent histories, cultures and communities that grew within its now ageing modern shopping centres, envisioned in the 1960s futuristically as “Arcades in the Air”. Contributors for this edited book highlight some of such unexpected narratives from the pioneering “Planned Shopping Centres”. They include: malls as historical and photographical sites, as homes for pioneering arcade gamers, youths cultures and veteran rock musicians, and as platforms for artistic imaginations and exhibitions. As largely individually owned shops units within the buildings, the older malls have also fostered more diverse and autonomous communities and businesses. Amidst Singapore’s constantly changing urban landscape, these otherwise dated shopping centres stand precariously as venerable sites of collective social and cultural memories. Includes essays from: Chua Beng Huat, Yu-Mei Balasingamchow, Darren Soh, Roy Kheang, Eunice Lim, Elena Yeo, Steve Ferzacca, Kar-men Cheng, Wee Li Lin
Download or read book Indoor America written by Andrea Vesentini and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2018-11-27 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cars, single-family houses, fallout shelters, air-conditioned malls—these are only some of the many interiors making up the landscape of American suburbia. Indoor America explores the history of suburbanization through the emergence of such spaces in the postwar years, examining their design, use, and representation. By drawing on a wealth of examples ranging from the built environment to popular culture and film, Andrea Vesentini shows how suburban interiors were devised as a continuous cultural landscape of interconnected and self-sufficient escape capsules. The relocation of most everyday practices into indoor spaces has often been overlooked by suburban historiography; Indoor America uncovers this latent history and contrasts it with the dominant reading of suburbanization as pursuit of open space. Americans did not just flee the city by getting out of it—they did so also by getting inside. Vesentini chronicles this inner-directed flight by describing three separate stages. The encapsulation of the automobile fostered the nuclear segregation of the family from the social fabric and served as a blueprint for all other interiors. Introverted design increasingly turned the focus of the house inward. Finally, through interiorization, the exterior was incorporated into the all-encompassing interior landscape of enclosed malls and projects for indoor cities. In a journey that features tailfin cars and World’s Fair model homes, Richard Neutra’s glass walls and sitcom picture windows, Victor Gruen’s Southdale Center and the Minnesota Experimental City, Indoor America takes the reader into the heart and viscera of America’s urban sprawl.
Download or read book The Old Clock Book written by N. Hudson Moore and published by . This book was released on 1911 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book New Perspectives on Critical Marketing and Consumer Society written by Elaine L Ritch and published by Emerald Group Publishing. This book was released on 2021-03-01 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Digital communication has altered the flow of global information,evolved consumer values and changed consumption practices worldwide.New Perspectives on Critical Marketing and Consumer Society provides an illuminating, challenging and thought-provoking guide for all upper-level students of marketing,branding and consumer behaviour.
Download or read book Shopping written by Deborah C. Andrews and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2014-11-25 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We all shop. The essays in this wide-ranging anthology demonstrates how a material culture perspective—a focus on the mutual creation of people and their things—yields significant insights into multiple aspects of consumption in American culture.
