Suchergebnisse

From the acclaimed landscape designer, historian and author of American Eden, a lively, unique, and accessible cultural history of modern cities-from suburbs, downtown districts, and exurban sprawl, to shopping malls and "sustainable" developments-that allows us to view them through the planning, design, architects, and movements that inspired, created, and shaped them. Dream Cities explores our cities in a new way-as expressions of ideas, often conflicting, about how we should live, work, play, make, buy, and believe. It tells the stories of the real architects and thinkers whose imagined cities became the blueprints for the world we live in. From the nineteenth century to today, what began as visionary concepts-sometimes utopian, sometimes outlandish, always controversial-were gradually adopted and constructed on a massive scale in cities around the world, from Dubai to Ulan Bator to London to Los Angeles. Wade Graham uses the lives of the pivotal dreamers behind these concepts, as well as their acolytes and antagonists, to deconstruct our urban landscapes-the houses, towers, civic centers, condominiums, shopping malls, boulevards, highways, and spaces in between-exposing the ideals and ideas embodied in each. From the baroque fantasy villages of Bertram Goodhue to the superblocks of Le Corbusier's Radiant City to the pseudo-agrarian dispersal of Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City, our upscale leafy suburbs, downtown skyscraper districts, infotainment-driven shopping malls, and "sustainable" eco-developments are seen as never before. In this elegantly designed and illustrated book, Graham uncovers the original plans of brilliant, obsessed, and sometimes megalomaniacal designers, revealing the foundations of today's varied municipalities. Dream Cities is nothing less than a field guide to our modern urban world. Illustrated with 59

"Braided Waters sheds new light on the relationship between environment and society by charting the history of Hawaii's Molokai island over a thousand-year period of repeated settlement. From the arrival of the first Polynesians to contact with eighteenth-century European explorers and traders to our present era, this study shows how the control of resources--especially water--in a fragile, highly variable environment, has had profound effects on the history of Hawaii. Wade Graham examines the ways environmental variation repeatedly shapes human social and economic structures and how, in turn, man-made environmental degradation influences and reshapes societies. A key finding of this study is how deep structures of place interact with distinct cultural patterns across different societies to produce similar social and environmental outcomes, in both the Polynesian and modern eras--a case of historical isomorphism with profound implications for global environmental history"--Provided by publisher