Shaping the Postwar Landscape

Shaping the Postwar Landscape
Author: Charles A. Birnbaum
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018
Genre: Landscape architects
ISBN: 9780813941738

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Shaping the Postwar Landscape is the latest contribution to the Cultural Landscape Foundation's well-known reference project, Pioneers of American Landscape Design, the first volume of which appeared nearly a quarter of a century ago. The present collection features profiles of seventy-two important figures, including landscape architects, architects, planners, artists, horticulturists, and educators. The volume focuses principally on individuals whose careers reached their height during the period between the end of World War II and the American Bicentennial. In that postwar era, landscape architects played an important part in the revitalization of American cities, introducing new typologies for public spaces in the civic realm. Among these were parks that capped freeways, plazas and gardens atop buildings, promenades on revitalized waterfronts, "vest pocket" parks on tiny urban plots and derelict sites, and pedestrian-friendly downtown malls. Practitioners were also active on the new suburban frontier, their influence extending as far as Levittown and mobile-home communities. They created new outdoor living environments tailored to the California climate, and their work shaped landscaped in the American South, East, West, and Heartland. At a time when interest in midcentury architecture is flourishing, Shaping the Postwar Landscape offers a substantial parallel contribution to the field of landscape studies. It belongs not only on the bookshelves of serious students and scholars but in the office of every landscape architect sensitive to significant works of the recent past.

White Ethnic New York

White Ethnic New York
Author: Joshua M. Zeitz
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2011-09-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807872806

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Historians of postwar American politics often identify race as a driving force in the dynamically shifting political culture. Joshua Zeitz instead places religion and ethnicity at the fore, arguing that ethnic conflict among Irish Catholics, Italian Catholics, and Jews in New York City had a decisive impact on the shape of liberal politics long before black-white racial identity politics entered the political lexicon. Understanding ethnicity as an intersection of class, national origins, and religion, Zeitz demonstrates that the white ethnic populations of New York had significantly diverging views on authority and dissent, community and individuality, secularism and spirituality, and obligation and entitlement. New York Jews came from Eastern European traditions that valued dissent and encouraged political agitation; their Irish and Italian Catholic neighbors tended to value commitment to order, deference to authority, and allegiance to church and community. Zeitz argues that these distinctions ultimately helped fracture the liberal coalition of the Roosevelt era, as many Catholics bolted a Democratic Party increasingly focused on individual liberties, and many dissent-minded Jews moved on to the antiliberal New Left.

Negotiating Postwar Landscape Architecture

Negotiating Postwar Landscape Architecture
Author: Jeffrey Scott Fulford
Publisher:
Total Pages: 103
Release: 2013
Genre: Landscape architects
ISBN:

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While documentation of the work of a select group of modernist landscape architects of the mid-twentieth century is available, little is known about the professional contributions of transitional landscape architects active in the period following World War II. Using selected projects framed by existing literature covering contemporary social, economic, political, and artistic influences, this study examines the career of one such transitional figure, Sidney Nichols Shurcliff (1906-1981). Project descriptions and analysis measure the scope of Shurcliff's work and the degree to which he contributed to the discipline and its transition to modernism, thereby augmenting the history of landscape architecture practice.

The Federal Landscape

The Federal Landscape
Author: Gerald D. Nash
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 1999-08-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0816545146

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The vastness of the American West is apparent to anyone who travels through it, but what may not be immediately obvious is the extent to which the landscape has been shaped by the U.S. government. Water development projects, military bases, and Indian reservations may interrupt the wilderness vistas, but these are only an indication of the extent to which the West has become a federal landscape. Historian Gerald D. Nash has written the first account of the epic growth of the economy of the American West during the twentieth century, showing how national interests shaped the West over the course of the past hundred years. In a book written for a broad readership, he tells the story of how America’s hinterland became the most dynamic and rapidly growing part of the country. The Federal Landscape relates how in the nineteenth century the West was largely developed by individual enterprise but how in the twentieth Washington, D.C., became the central player in shaping the region. Nash traces the development of this process during the Progressive Era, World War I, the New Deal, World War II, the affluent postwar years, and the cold-war economy of the 1950s. He analyzes the growth of western cities and the emergence of environmental issues in the 1960s, the growth of a vibrant Mexican-U.S. border economy, and the impact of large-scale immigration from Latin America and Asia at century’s end. Although specialists have studied many particular facets of western growth, Nash has written the only book to provide a much-needed overview of the subject. By addressing subjects as diverse as public policy, economic development, environmental and urban issues, and questions of race, class, and gender, he puts the entire federal landscape in perspective and shows how the West was really won.

Preserving Modern Landscape Architecture II

Preserving Modern Landscape Architecture II
Author: Charles A. Birnbaum
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2004
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780974963204

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"In Preserving Modern Landscape Architecture II: Making Postwar Landscapes Visible, noted historians, writers, preservationists, and landscape architects discuss the challenges of preserving and managing modern landscapes."--BOOK JACKET.

The Hub's Metropolis

The Hub's Metropolis
Author: James C. O'Connell
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2022-06-07
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0262545861

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The evolution of the Boston metropolitan area, from country villages and streetcar suburbs to exurban sprawl and “smart growth.” Boston's metropolitan landscape has been two hundred years in the making. From its proto-suburban village centers of 1800 to its far-flung, automobile-centric exurbs of today, Boston has been a national pacesetter for suburbanization. In The Hub's Metropolis, James O'Connell charts the evolution of Boston's suburban development. The city of Boston is compact and consolidated—famously, “the Hub.” Greater Boston, however, stretches over 1,736 square miles and ranks as the world's sixth largest metropolitan area. Boston suburbs began to develop after 1820, when wealthy city dwellers built country estates that were just a short carriage ride away from their homes in the city. Then, as transportation became more efficient and affordable, the map of the suburbs expanded. The Metropolitan Park Commission's park-and-parkway system, developed in the 1890s, created a template for suburbanization that represents the country's first example of regional planning. O'Connell identifies nine layers of Boston's suburban development, each of which has left its imprint on the landscape: traditional villages; country retreats; railroad suburbs; streetcar suburbs (the first electric streetcar boulevard, Beacon Street in Brookline, was designed by Frederic Law Olmsted); parkway suburbs, which emphasized public greenspace but also encouraged commuting by automobile; mill towns, with housing for workers; upscale and middle-class suburbs accessible by outer-belt highways like Route 128; exurban, McMansion-dotted sprawl; and smart growth. Still a pacesetter, Greater Boston has pioneered antisprawl initiatives that encourage compact, mixed-use development in existing neighborhoods near railroad and transit stations. O'Connell reminds us that these nine layers of suburban infrastructure are still woven into the fabric of the metropolis. Each chapter suggests sites to visit, from Waltham country estates to Cambridge triple-deckers.

Central European Jewish Émigrés and the Shaping of Postwar Culture: Studies in Memory of Lilian Furst (1931-2009)

Central European Jewish Émigrés and the Shaping of Postwar Culture: Studies in Memory of Lilian Furst (1931-2009)
Author: Julie Mell
Publisher: MDPI
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2018-10-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3906980561

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This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue "Between Religion and Ethnicity: Twentieth-Century Jewish Émigrés and the Shaping of Postwar Culture" that was published in Religions

Cities of Tomorrow

Cities of Tomorrow
Author: Peter Hall
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 646
Release: 2014-06-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1118456475

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Peter Hall’s seminal Cities of Tomorrow remains an unrivalled account of the history of planning in theory and practice, as well as of the social and economic problems and opportunities that gave rise to it. Now comprehensively revised, the fourth edition offers a perceptive, critical, and global history of urban planning and design throughout the twentieth-century and beyond. A revised and updated edition of this classic text from one of the most notable figures in the field of urban planning and design Offers an incisive, insightful, and unrivalled critical history of planning in theory and practice, as well as of the underlying socio-economic challenges and opportunities Comprehensively revised to take account of abundant new research published over the last decade Reviews the development of the modern planning movement over the entire span of the twentieth-century and beyond Draws on global examples throughout, and weaves the author’s own fascinating experiences into the text to illustrate this authoritative story of urban growth

Bulldozer

Bulldozer
Author: Francesca Russello Ammon
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2016-04-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300220545

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Although the decades following World War II stand out as an era of rapid growth and construction in the United States, those years were equally significant for large-scale destruction. In order to clear space for new suburban tract housing, an ambitious system of interstate highways, and extensive urban renewal development, wrecking companies demolished buildings while earthmoving contractors leveled land at an unprecedented pace and scale. In this pioneering history, Francesca Russello Ammon explores how postwar America came to equate this destruction with progress. The bulldozer functioned as both the means and the metaphor for this work. As the machine transformed from a wartime weapon into an instrument of postwar planning, it helped realize a landscape-altering “culture of clearance.” In the hands of the military, planners, politicians, engineers, construction workers, and even children’s book authors, the bulldozer became an American icon. Yet social and environmental injustices emerged as clearance projects continued unabated. This awareness spurred environmental, preservationist, and citizen participation efforts that have helped to slow, though not entirely stop, the momentum of the postwar bulldozer.