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Constructing Chicago (Paperback, New Ed)
Loot Price: R1,705
Discovery Miles 17 050
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Constructing Chicago (Paperback, New Ed)
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Chicago's impressive industrial expansion in the late nineteenth
century convinced most observers that the city was defined by the
crass pursuit of wealth and that its architecture was, as described
by Lewis Mumford, "a brutal network of industrial necessities." In
a major new book, Daniel Bluestone disputes this vision of the
city. Combining architectural history and cultural analysis,
Bluestone explores the creation of Chicago's parks, churches,
skyscrapers, and civic buildings. He finds that the structure of
the city was influenced as much by the moral, cultural, and
aesthetic aspirations of its local elite as by the untempered
forces of commerce and capital. Bluestone shows how
nineteenth-century Chicago architects and their clients attempted
to create a distinctive landscape that could distract residents and
visitors form the gritty commercial workings of the city while
demonstrating a commitment to urbanism that went beyond the
marketplace. He surveys the parks that were created to mediate
relations between social classes; the churches relocated in
residential areas so that they could avoid the dominance of new
downtown buildings; the plans for lakefront civic centers
architecturally distinguished from the forms of the city's famous
early skyscrapers-including the Rookery, the Monadnock, the
Columbus Memorial, and the Masonic Temple. And he examines these
early Chicago skyscrapers, noting how their monumental entrances,
embellished lobbies, artistic elevators, and spacious light courts
were designed to soften their commercial edges to recast the city's
image, and to cultivate an emerging middle class of white-collar
workers. A richly illustrated contribution to urban and
architectural history, Bluestone's book is also a perceptive look
at central features in the design of this quintessential American
city.
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