Download or read book Modernizing Main Street written by Gabrielle Esperdy and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-07-15 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An important part of the New Deal, the Modernization Credit Plan helped transform urban business districts and small-town commercial strips across 1930s America, but it has since been almost completely forgotten. In Modernizing Main Street, Gabrielle Esperdy uncovers the cultural history of the hundreds of thousands of modernized storefronts that resulted from the little-known federal provision that made billions of dollars available to shop owners who wanted to update their facades. Esperdy argues that these updated storefronts served a range of complex purposes, such as stimulating public consumption, extending the New Deal’s influence, reviving a stagnant construction industry, and introducing European modernist design to the everyday landscape. She goes on to show that these diverse roles are inseparable, woven together not only by the crisis of the Depression, but also by the pressures of bourgeoning consumerism. As the decade’s two major cultural forces, Esperdy concludes, consumerism and the Depression transformed the storefront from a seemingly insignificant element of the built environment into a potent site for the physical and rhetorical staging of recovery and progress.

Download or read book Main Street to Miracle Mile written by Chester Liebs and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 1995-08 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Traces the transformation of commercial development as it has moved from centralized main streets, out along the street car lines, to form the "miracle miles" and shopping malls of today ... Also explores the evolution of roadside buildings."--Back cover.

Download or read book American City written by Robert Sharoff and published by Images Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: St. Louis is one of the most architecturally impressive cities in the United States, with a heritage of innovative design stretching back to the early 1800s. This is reflected in the architecture of the downtown area and surrounding neighborhoods. More than just about any city in America, St. Louis embraced the imposing forms and lush ornamentation of the Beaux Arts tradition. Indeed, one can make the argument that only Washington, D.C. in the United States has a more impressive collection of classically inspired structures. American City: St. Louis Architecture is the first large-format book on the city's architecture since the 1920s, and includes over 100 new color photographs and text for 50 of the city's most important structures. These range from such 19th Century masterpieces as Louis Sullivan's Wainwright Building, Alfred Mullet's Old Post Office and Theodore Link's Union Station, to Eero Saarinen's Gateway Arch, Tadao Andao's Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts Building and Maya Lin's recently completed Ellen Clark Hope Plaza.

Download or read book Street Level Architecture written by Conrad Kickert and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-08-04 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides the tools to maintain and rebuild the interaction between architecture and public space. Despite the best intentions of designers and planners, interactive frontages have dwindled over the past century in Europe and North America. This book demonstrates why even our best intentions for interactive frontages are currently unable to turn a swelling tide of economic and technological evolution, land consolidation, introversion, stratification, and contagious decline. It uses these lessons to offer concrete locational, programming, design, and management strategies to maximize street-level interaction and trust between street-level architecture, its inhabitants, and the city. This book demonstrates that designers, developers, planners, and managers ultimately have to create the right preconditions for inhabitants and passersby to bring frontages to life. These preconditions connect architecture to its urban, social, economical, and technological context. Only the right frontage in the right context, with the right design, the right inhabitation, and the right attitude to the city will become part of the ecosystem of trust and interaction that supports public life. This book empowers the many participants in this ecosystem to build, inhabit, and enjoy truly urbane architecture.

Download or read book Signs Streets and Storefronts written by Martin Treu and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Treu tackles the architectural history and signage of Main Street and the strip—from painted boards nailed over crude storefronts to sleek cinemas topped with neon glitz. Honorable Mention, Architecture and Urban Planning, 2012 PROSE Awards Signs, Streets, and Storefronts addresses more than 200 years of signs and place-marking along America’s commercial corridors. From small-town squares to Broadway, State Street, and Wilshire Boulevard, Martin Treu follows design developments into the present and explores issues of historic preservation. Treu considers “common” architecture and its place-defining business signs as well as influential high-style design examples by taste-making leaders. Combining advertising and architectural history, the book presents a full picture of the commercial landscape, including design adaptations made for motorists and the migration from Main Street to suburbia. The dynamic between individual businesses and the common good has a major effect on the appearance of our country's Main Streets. Several forces are at work: technological advances, design imagination and the media, corporate propaganda, customer needs, and municipal mandates. Present-day controls have often led to a denuding of traditional commercial corridors. Such reform, Treu argues, has suppressed originality and radically cleared away years of accumulated history based on the taste of a single generation. A must-read for city planners, town councils, architects, sign designers, concerned citizens, and anyone who cares about the appearance and vitality of America’s commercial streets, this heavily illustrated book is equally appealing to armchair historians, small-town enthusiasts, and lovers of Americana.

Download or read book Architecture of the Private Streets of St Louis written by Charles C. Savage and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Down Detour Road written by Eric J. Cesal and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2010-08-06 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A young architect's search for new architectural values in a time of economic crisis. I paused at the stoop and thought this could be the basis of a good book. The story of a young man who went deep into the bowels of the academy in order to understand architecture and found it had been on his doorstep all along. This had an air of hokeyness about it, but it had been a tough couple of days and I was feeling sentimental about the warm confines of the studio which had unceremoniously discharged me upon the world.—from Down Detour Road What does it say about the value of architecture that as the world faces economic and ecological crises, unprecedented numbers of architects are out of work? This is the question that confronted architect Eric Cesal as he finished graduate school at the onset of the worst financial meltdown in a generation. Down Detour Road is his journey: one that begins off-course, and ends in a hopeful new vision of architecture. Like many architects of his generation, Cesal confronts a cold reality. Architects may assure each other of their own importance, but society has come to view architecture as a luxury it can do without. For Cesal, this recognition becomes an occasion to rethink architecture and its value from the very core. He argues that the times demand a new architecture, an empowered architecture that is useful and relevant. New architectural values emerge as our cultural values shift: from high risks to safe bets, from strong portfolios to strong communities, and from clean lines to clean energy.This is not a book about how to run a firm or a profession; it doesn't predict the future of architectural form or aesthetics. It is a personal story—and in many ways a generational one: a story that follows its author on a winding detour across the country, around the profession, and into a new architectural reality.

Download or read book The Market and the City written by Donatella Calabi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The early modern period is often characterised as a time that witnessed the rise of a new and powerful merchant class across Europe. From Italy and Spain in the south, to the Low Countries and England in the north, men of business and trade came to play an increasingly pivotal role in the culture, politics and economies of western Europe. This book takes a comparative approach to the effect such merchants and traders had on the urban history of market places - streets, squares and civic buildings - in some of the great commercial European cities between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. It looks at how this in period, the transformations of designated commercial areas were important enough to modify relationships throughout the entire urban context. Market places tend to be very ancient, continuing to function for centuries on the same location; but between the middle of the fourteenth and the first decades of the seventeenth, their structures began to change as new regulations and patterns of manufacture, distribution and consumption began to install a new uniformity and geometry on the market place. During the period covered by this study, most major European cities undertook the rebuilding of entire zones, constructing new buildings, demolishing existing structures and embellishing others. This book analyses the intentions of innovation, in parallel with sanitary and hygienic reasons, the juridical regulations of the architecture of certain building types and the urban strategies as efficient tools to better control the economic activities within the city.

Download or read book Sixteenth Street Architecture written by Sue A. Kohler and published by . This book was released on 1978 with total page 588 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book New Traditional Architecture written by Mark Ferguson and published by Random House Digital, Inc.. This book was released on 2011-03-22 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This beautifully illustrated volume presents Ferguson & Shamamian's finest work, including new houses, apartments, alterations and additions, and unbuilt design plans.

Download or read book Freestyle the New Architecture and Interior Design from Los Angeles written by Tim Street-Porter and published by Stewart, Tabori, & Chang. This book was released on 1986 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than just a stunning book on radical design, this is also an affectionate yet serious look at what's happening in Los Angeles--America's laboratory for new ideas in architecture and interior design. 200 full-color photographs.

Download or read book Architecture Unbound written by Joseph Giovannini and published by Rizzoli Publications. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 834 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the influence of twentieth-century avant-garde movements on the contemporary architectural landscape through the work of “disruptors” such as Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, and Zaha Hadid. With an irregular format designed by celebrated graphic designer Abbott Miller of Pentagram. In Architecture Unbound, noted architecture critic Joseph Giovannini proposes that our current architectural landscape ultimately emerged from transgressive and progressive art movements that had roiled Europe before and after World War I. By the 1960s, social unrest and cultural disruption opened the way for investigations into an inventive, antiauthoritarian architecture. Explorations emerged in the 1970s, and built projects surfaced in the 1980s, taking digital form in the 1990s, with large-scale projects finally landing on the far side of the millennium. Architecture Unbound traces all of these developments and influences, presenting an authoritative and illuminating history not only of the sources of contemporary currents in architecture but also of the twentieth-century avant-garde and the twenty-first-century digital revolution in form-making, and profiling the most influential practitioners and their most notable projects, including Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao and Walt Disney Concert Hall, Zaha Hadid’s Guangzhou Opera House, Daniel Libeskind’s master plan for the World Trade Center, Rem Koolhaas’s CCTV Tower, and Herzog and de Meuron’s Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium in Beijing.

Download or read book St Petersburg written by Dmitriĭ Olegovich Shvidkovskiĭ and published by Abbeville Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before becoming a city, St. Petersburg was a utopian vision in the mind of its founder, Peter the Great. Conceived by him as Russia's "window to the West," it evolved into a remarkably harmonious assemblage of baroque, rococo, neoclassical, and art nouveau buildings that reflect his taste and that of his successors, including Anna I, Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great, and Paul I. Crisscrossed by rivers and canals, this "Venice of the North," as Goethe dubbed it, is of unique beauty. Never before has that beauty been captured as eloquently as on the pages of this sumptuous volume. From the stately mansions lining the fabled Nevsky Prospekt to the magnificent palaces of the tsars on the outskirts of the city, including Peterhof, Tsarskoe Selo, Oranienbaum, Gatchina, and Pavlovsk, photographer Alexander Orloff's portrait of St. Petersburg does full justice to the vision of its founder and namesake. The text, by art historian Dmitri Shvidkovsky, chronicles the history of the city's planning and construction from Peter the Great's time to the reign of the last tsar, Nicholas II. Anyone who has ever visited--or dreamed of visiting--the city of "white nights" will find St. Petersburg irresistible.

Download or read book New Orleans Streets written by R. Stephanie Bruno and published by Pelican Publishing Company, Inc.. This book was released on 2011-01-18 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This presentation of the neighborhoods of New Orleans offers an expert's perspective on the city's architectural diversity and details, one block at a time. New Orleans Times-Picayune columnist Stephanie Bruno presents the best of her "StreetWalker" column in this illustrated resource. From the Garden District to Mid-City, each block included features photographs of the homes, a description of the buildings, and a map for easy access.

Download or read book Modern Architecture in St Louis written by Eric Paul Mumford and published by Washington University in St Louis. This book was released on 2004 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book chronicles the evolution of architecture in the St. Louis area between 1948 and 1973, with insightful essays by established architectural scholars on the significant aspects of modern architecture in St. Louis and of the Washington University School of Architecture in the flowering of mid-century American modernism. Archival photographs and drawings illustrate the authors' historical analyses, and statements about the school written by distinguished alumni and faculty, including Fumihiko Maki, a former faculty member, illuminate a rich pocket of little-known American creativity.

Download or read book Casa Mexicana written by and published by . This book was released on 1989-09-15 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies the variety and beauty of Mexican houses with more than 350 full color photographs.

Download or read book American Classicist written by Elizabeth Meredith Dowling and published by Rizzoli International Publications. This book was released on 1989 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a career that spanned the first half of this century, Philip Trammell Shutze produced over 750 architectural works. Because his production was so large, this first book to examine his buildings concentrates on the more important ones, which as a body represent an architectural achievement of a very high order of refinement, grace, and beauty. Although Shutze practiced from 1912 to 1968, covering the period of the ascendancy of modernism through its final triumph, he remained a firmly committed classicist, practicing out of an office in Atlanta where he produced an extraordinary body of monumental commercial and institutional buildings and country villas. After graduating from Georgia Tech, Shutze stayed a year at Columbia University before he won the prestigious Rome Prize in 1915. Travelling to Rome later that year, he became a member of one of the earliest classes of fellows to occupy the recently completed American Academy on the Janiculum overlooking the city. The magnificent palazzo designed by America's most renowned architectural firm, McKim, Mead, and White, did not however please the fellows, who found it "too new," and therefore not authentic (Shutze would later devote much attention to techniques for instantly aging building facades). With the coming of the First World War, Shutze and most of his classmates stayed in Rome as Red Cross volunteers, but when the war was over they returned to he Academy and to their studies. During his five years in Rome, Shutze immersed himself in learning everything he could about the great buildings of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. He painstakingly measured those buildings as well as the monuments of the Roman Empire, committing the smallest of details to paper and to memory. Returning to the U.S. in 1920, Shutze worked in New York for Mott Schmidt, who designed townhouses for such families as the Astors, Morgans, and Vanderbilts, and he also worked for F. Burrall Hoffman, whose masterpiece is Villa Vizcaya in Miami. Within a few years, though, he returned to Georgia where he remained as the epitome of the "gentleman architect," designing some of the most beautiful buildings ever to grace the American landscape.