Moving away from the standard survey that takes readers from architect to architect and style to style, Building the Nation: Americans Write About Their Architecture, Their Cities, and Their Landscape suggests a wholly new way of thinking about the history of America's built environment and how Americans have related to it.
Through an enormous range of American voices, some famous and some obscure, and across more than two centuries of history, this anthology shows that the struggle to imagine what kinds of buildings and land use would best suit the nation pervaded all classes of Americans and was not the purview only of architects and designers. Some of the nation's finest writers, including Mark Twain, W. E. B. Du Bois, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Lewis Mumford, E. B. White, and John McPhee, are here, contemplating the American way of building. Equally important are those eloquent but little-known voices found in American newspapers and magazines which insistently wondered what American architecture and environmental planning should look like.
Building the Nation also insists that American architecture can be understood only as both a result of and a force in shaping American social, cultural, and political developments. In so doing, this anthology demonstrates how central the built environment has been to our definition of what it is to be American and reveals seven central themes that have repeatedly animated American writers over the course of the past two centuries: the relationship of American architecture to European architecture, the nation's diverse regions, the place and shape of nature in American life, the design of cities, the explosion of the suburbs, the power of architecture to reform individuals, and the role of tradition in a nation dedicated to being perennially young.
I am a Professor of Architecture and History at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. I am the author of The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900-1940 (University of Chicago Press, 1999), which won the Spiro Kostof Award of the Society of Architectural Historians, for the best book on architecture and urbanism. I write for a variety of publications about New York City, urban development, and the politics of the past. I am also the co-editor (with Steven Conn) of Building the Nation: Americans Write About Their Architecture, Their Cities, and Their Environment (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), as well as the co-editor (with Randall Mason) of Giving Preservation a History: Histories of Historic Preservation in the United States (Routledge, 2003). For the hundredth anniversary of Times Square in 2004, I curated an exhibition on the history of the Square at the AXA Gallery in New York City. My latest book, The City's End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York's Destruction was published by Yale University Press in 2008. You can learn more about The City's End at www.thecitysend.com. I am a recipient of fellowships from the Howard Foundation, Fulbright Commission, and Guggenheim Foundation. My next book project is entitled Priceless: Rethinking Historic Preservation in the 21st Century.
