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A reexamination of overlooked Midwestern architectural styles
This first-ever encyclopedia of the Midwest seeks to embrace this large and diverse area, to give it voice, and help define its distinctive character. Organized by topic, it encourages readers to reflect upon the region as a whole. Each section moves from the general to the specific, covering broad themes in longer introductory essays, filling in the details in the shorter entries that follow. There are portraits of each of the region's twelve states, followed by entries on society and culture, community and social life, economy and technology, and public life. The book offers a wealth of information about the region's surprising ethnic diversity -- a vast array of foods, languages, styles, religions, and customs -- plus well-informed essays on the region's history, culture and values, and conflicts. A site of ideas and innovations, reforms and revivals, and social and physical extremes, the Midwest emerges as a place of great complexity, signal importance, and continual fascination.
Exploring America's material culture, Common Places reveals the history, culture, and social and class relationships that are the backdrop of the everyday structures and environments of ordinary people. Examining America's houses and cityscapes, its rural outbuildings and landscapes from perspectives including cultural geography, decorative arts, architectural history, and folklore, these articles reflect the variety and vibrancy of the growing field of vernacular architecture. In essays that focus on buildings and spaces unique to the U.S. landscape, Clay Lancaster, Edward T. Price, John Michael Vlach, and Warren E. Roberts reconstruct the social and cultural contexts of the modern bungalow, the small-town courthouse square, the shotgun house of the South, and the log buildings of the Midwest. Surveying the buildings of America's settlement, scholars including Henry Glassie, Norman Morrison Isham, Edward A. Chappell, and Theodore H. M. Prudon trace European ethnic influences in the folk structures of Delaware and the houses of Rhode Island, in Virginia's Renish homes, and in the Dutch barn widely repeated in rural America. Ethnic, regional, and class differences have flavored the nation's vernacular architecture. Fraser D. Neiman reveals overt changes in houses and outbuildings indicative of the growing social separation and increasingly rigid relations between seventeenth-century Virginia planters and their servants. Fred B. Kniffen and Fred W. Peterson show how, following the westward expansion of the nineteenth century, the structures of the eastern elite were repeated and often rejected by frontier builders. Moving into the twentieth century, James Borchert tracks the transformation of the alley from an urban home for Washington's blacks in the first half of the century to its new status in the gentrified neighborhoods of the last decade, while Barbara Rubin's discussion of the evolution of the commercial strip counterpoints the goals of city planners and more spontaneous forms of urban expression. The illustrations that accompany each article present the artifacts of America's material past. Photographs of individual buildings, historic maps of the nation's agricultural expanse, and descriptions of the household furnishings of the Victorian middle class, the urban immigrant population, and the rural farmer's homestead complete the volume, rooting vernacular architecture to the American people, their lives, and their everyday creations.
How do works from film and literature—Sister Carrie, Native Son, Meet Me in St. Louis, Halloween, and A History of Violence, for example—imagine, reify, and reproduce Midwestern identity? And what are the repercussions of such regional narratives and images circulating in American culture? In The American Midwest in Film and Literature: Nostalgia, Violence, and Regionalism, Adam R. Ochonicky provides a critical overview of the evolution, contestation, and fragmentation of the Midwest's symbolic and often contradictory meanings. Using the frontier writings of Frederick Jackson Turner as a starting point, this book establishes a succession of Midwestern filmic and literary texts stretching from the late-19th century through the beginning of the 21st century and argues that the manifold properties of nostalgia have continually transformed popular understandings and ideological uses of the Midwest's place-identity. Ochonicky identifies three primary modes of nostalgia at play across a set of textual objects: the projection of nostalgia onto physical landscapes and into the cultural sphere (nostalgic spatiality); nostalgia as a cultural force that regulates behaviors, identities, and appearances (nostalgic violence); and the progressive potential of nostalgia to generate an acknowledgment and possible rectification of ways in which the flawed past negatively affects the present (nostalgic atonement). While developing these new conceptions of nostalgia, Ochonicky reveals how an under-examined area of regional study has received critical attention throughout the histories of American film and literature, as well as in related materials and discourses. From the closing of the Western frontier to the polarized political and cultural climate of the 21st century, this book demonstrates how film and literature have been and continue to be vital forums for illuminating the complex interplay of regionalism and nostalgia.
American Gardens, 1890 -1930: Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwest Regions is the first of three volumes to be published by Acanthus Press as the landscape component of its residential architecture series, Suburban Domestic Architecture. Presenting perio
Alden Dow (active 1930s-1970s) produced more than five hundred designs—often daringly modern structures. This book traces Alden Dow's life and work as well as the intensely personal philosophy that governed everything he did: houses, churches, schools, business and civic structures, and even a new town in Texas. Dow changed the face of his hometown of Midland, Michigan, leaving more than one hundred buildings, including his Home and Studio, a National Historic Landmark. 185 color and 220 black-and-white illustrations.
Moorish in the Midwest considers how and why Moorish design made its way into American architecture. This thesis positions the Alhambra (Granada, Spain) as a direct architectural source that informs the architectural design of two sites in the Midwest—Plum Street Temple in Cincinnati, OH (1865) and William Sauntry’s Recreation Hall in Stillwater, MN (1902). By tracing the Alhambra’s presence in nineteenth-century American print and visual culture, I analyze how these influences shape later choices to adopt Moorish architecture and Alhambresque design. I interrogate the motivations behind and original intent of the Midwest architectural sites by assessing Plum Street Temple and the Recreation Hall’s designs, architectural connections to the Alhambra, and local understandings of Moorish architecture and the Alhambra. This thesis seeks to fill a gap in American architectural history by highlighting one of the least studied non-European design sources. I argue that Moorinh architecture is part of American design expression by demonstrating the pervasiveness of the Alhambra in American culture and its impact on American architecture.
A visual tour of midwestern America's most important buildings and their architects
In half a century Toledo was transformed from a fever-ridden swamp into a prosperous town with all the amenities of a major Midwestern city. The 1890s signaled the beginning of Toledos greatest architectural era, with new-fangled skyscrapers being constructed up and down Madison Avenue (without any power tools), grand theaters, a new luxury hotel, and the most lavish mansions in the Old West End. New inventions gave Toledoans more time to visit Walbridge Park, shop at Tiedtkes, or attend a Mud Hens game at Swayne Field. Toledo: A History in Architecture 18901914 looks at the cities most notable buildings and at the personalities and institutions of a long vanished era. Innovations like steel framed and reinforced concrete construction were revolutionizing architecture, and Toledos architects were working overtime on what would be their most important commissions, including the Nasby Building, Valentine Theater, and Lucas County Courthouse. Elegant churches rose on Collingwood Avenue, and in 1912 the white marble Toledo Museum of Art, the citys glittering jewel, was built.