Skyscraper: The Politics and Power of Building New York City in the Twentieth Century [Hardcover]

Benjamin Flowers (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0812241843 | ISBN-13: 978-0812241846 | Publication Date: September 14, 2009

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2010

Nowhere in the world is there a greater concentration of significant skyscrapers than in New York City. And though this iconographic American building style has roots in Chicago, New York is where it has grown into such a powerful reflection of American commerce and culture.

In Skyscraper: The Politics and Power of Building New York City in the Twentieth Century, Benjamin Flowers explores the role of culture and ideology in shaping the construction of skyscrapers and the way wealth and power have operated to reshape the urban landscape. Flowers narrates this modern tale by closely examining the creation and reception of three significant sites: the Empire State Building, the Seagram Building, and the World Trade Center. He demonstrates how architects and their clients employed a diverse range of modernist styles to engage with and influence broader cultural themes in American society: immigration, the Cold War, and the rise of American global capitalism.

Skyscraper explores the various wider meanings associated with this architectural form as well as contemporary reactions to it across the critical spectrum. Employing a broad array of archival sources, such as corporate records, architects' papers, newspaper ads, and political cartoons, Flowers examines the personal, political, cultural, and economic agendas that motivate architects and their clients to build ever higher. He depicts the American saga of commerce, wealth, and power in the twentieth century through their most visible symbol, the skyscraper.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Examining the life and times of New York City's most iconic buildings, Georgia Tech architecture instructor Flowers reveals not only how the city's skyscrapers are inextricably tied to the city's economic booms and busts, planning and day-to-day functioning, but also how the skyscraper "is a material expression" of social conditions and personal relationships, "of the course chartered by capital" through urban tribes. Chapter three, "Capital Nightmares," paints a gritty picture of the bleak 1930s, as well as the opportunism and corruption it bred. In matters of analysis, however, Flowers can reach: comparing the Seagram Building with the Lever House across the street, he questions Seagram's need for similarly clean lines, and finds that, short of a reflection of "already-extant corporate identities (e.g., cleanliness and soap, as is the case with Lever House)... We are left with the conclusion that it was the opportunity to use a design that elided the past and could simultaneously serve to garner cultural capital and respectability." Still, Flowers's broader conclusion, that companies rely on their buildings to promote cultural capital as well as financial, is solid, and makes this an interesting volume for those who like their architecture in proper social and economic perspective. 51 illus.
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Review

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2010, "Highly Recommended." --Choice Magazine

A must-read for anyone interested in high-rise construction in the U.S. --Planning

Flowers delves deeply into the larger meanings--architectural, cultural, economic--of the structures in question [and] sheds light on the motives and machinations of the people and organizations that made the structures possible.
--Civil Engineering

"Examining the life and times of New York City's most iconic buildings, . . . Flowers reveals not only how the city's skyscrapers are inextricably tied to the city's economic booms and busts, planning, and day-to-day functioning but also how the skyscraper 'is a material expression' of social conditions and personal relationships."—Publishers Weekly

"Flowers offers a book with value on many levels. . . . [Skyscraper] presents a strong justification for, and demonstration of, a difficult but powerful way of examining buildings. . . . Highly recommended."—Choice

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press (September 14, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812241843
• ISBN-13: 978-0812241846
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 6.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #170,859 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Benjamin Flowers is Associate Professor of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His writing focuses on the different ways politics, culture, and power intersect with architecture to form the built landscape. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and his BA from Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT. He spent his youth in Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, Bulgaria, Romania and Washington, DC.