Building The Modern World

Download or read book Building the Modern World written by Michael H. Hodges and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-16 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A photographically rich biography of protean architect Albert Kahn. Building the Modern World: Albert Kahn in Detroit by Michael H. Hodges tells the story of the German-Jewish immigrant who rose from poverty to become one of the most influential architects of the twentieth century. Kahn’s buildings not only define downtown Detroit, but his early car factories for Packard Motor and Ford revolutionized the course of industry and architecture alike. Employing archival sources unavailable to previous biographers, Building the Modern World follows Kahn from his apprenticeship at age thirteen with a prominent Detroit architecture firm to his death. With material gleaned from two significant Kahn archives—the University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library and the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution—Hodges paints the most complete picture yet of Kahn’s remarkable rise. Special emphasis is devoted to his influence on architectural modernists, his relationship with Henry Ford, his intervention to save the Diego Rivera murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts (unreported until now), and his work laying down the industrial backbone for the Soviet Union in 1929–31 as consulting architect for the first Five Year Plan. Kahn’s ascent from poverty, his outsized influence on both industry and architecture, and his proximity to epochal world events make his life story a tableau of America’s rise to power. Historic photographs as well as striking contemporary shots of Kahn buildings enliven and inform the text. Anyone interested in architecture, architectural history, or the history of Detroit will relish this stunning work.

Download or read book Crafting a Modern World written by Kurt Helfrich and published by Princeton Architectural Press. This book was released on 2006-10-12 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Crafting a Modern World examines a missing chapter in the history of mid-century modernism: the story of husband and wife design team Antonin and Noemi Raymond. This is the first comprehensive book in English on the duo that creatively transformed design from 1917 to 1966."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Making the Modern World written by Vaclav Smil and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-10-02 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How much further should the affluent world push its material consumption? Does relative dematerialization lead to absolute decline in demand for materials? These and many other questions are discussed and answered in Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization. Over the course of time, the modern world has become dependent on unprecedented flows of materials. Now even the most efficient production processes and the highest practical rates of recycling may not be enough to result in dematerialization rates that would be high enough to negate the rising demand for materials generated by continuing population growth and rising standards of living. This book explores the costs of this dependence and the potential for substantial dematerialization of modern economies. Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization considers the principal materials used throughout history, from wood and stone, through to metals, alloys, plastics and silicon, describing their extraction and production as well as their dominant applications. The evolving productivities of material extraction, processing, synthesis, finishing and distribution, and the energy costs and environmental impact of rising material consumption are examined in detail. The book concludes with an outlook for the future, discussing the prospects for dematerialization and potential constrains on materials. This interdisciplinary text provides useful perspectives for readers with backgrounds including resource economics, environmental studies, energy analysis, mineral geology, industrial organization, manufacturing and material science.

Download or read book Building the New World written by Valerie Fraser and published by Verso. This book was released on 2000 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brasilia, Caracas, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro ... these are cities synonymous with some of the most innovative and progressive architecture of the twentieth century. The period between 1930 and 1960 in particular, when many Latin American economies expanded rapidly, was an era of incomparable inventiveness and creative production, as the various governments strove to shake off their colonial pasts and make public their modernising intentions. This book focuses on major state-funded architectural projects, featuring not only the high-profile prestigious building like the House of Representatives in Barsilia but also social architecture such as schools and los-cost housing developments. Architects like Pani, Costa, Reidy and Niemeyer, who undertook this work with considerable autonomy and significant financial resources, in effect became social planners, their avant-garde aesthetic and technical experimentation often being teamed with radical social agendas. By 1960, the year in which Brasilia was inaugurated, economic growth in the region was slowing and faith in the modernist project in general was faltering. The English-speaking world, which had previously endorsed and even envied Latin American architectural production, changed its opinion and largely dismissed it from the history of twentieth-century architecture. Building the New World redresses the balance. It provides an accessible introduction to the most important examples of state-funded modernism in Latin America during a period of almost unimaginable optimism, when politicians and architects saw architecture as, literally, a way of building themselves out of underdevelopment and into the new world of a culturally rich and socially inclusive future .

Download or read book Building Modern Turkey written by Zeynep Kezer and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2015-12-29 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Building Modern Turkey offers a critical account of how the built environment mediated Turkey's transition from a pluralistic (multiethnic and multireligious) empire into a modern, homogenized nation-state following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. Zeynep Kezer argues that the deliberate dismantling of ethnic and religious enclaves and the spatial practices that ensued were as integral to conjuring up a sense of national unity and facilitating the operations of a modern nation-state as were the creation of a new capital, Ankara, and other sites and services that embodied a new modern way of life. The book breaks new ground by examining both the creative and destructive forces at play in the making of modern Turkey and by addressing the overwhelming frictions during this profound transformation and their long-term consequences. By considering spatial transformations at different scales—from the experience of the individual self in space to that of international geopolitical disputes—Kezer also illuminates the concrete and performative dimensions of fortifying a political ideology, one that instills in the population a sense of membership in and allegiance to the nation above all competing loyalties and ensures its longevity.

Download or read book The Origins of the Modern World written by Robert Marks and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2007 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did the modern world get to be the way it is? How did we come to live in a globalized, industrialized, capitalistic set of nation-states? Moving beyond Eurocentric explanations and histories that revolve around the rise of the West, distinguished historian Robert B. Marks explores the roles of Asia, Africa, and the New World in the global story. He defines the modern world as marked by industry, the nation state, interstate warfare, a large and growing gap between the wealthiest and poorest parts of the world, and an escape from environmental constraints. Bringing the saga to the present, Marks considers how and why the United States emerged as a world power in the 20th century and the sole superpower by the 21st century; the powerful resurgence of Asia; and the vastly changed relationship of humans to the environment.

Download or read book The Quest written by Daniel Yergin and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-09-26 with total page 834 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A sprawling story richly textured with original material, quirky details and amusing anecdotes . . .” —Wall Street Journal “It is a cause for celebration that Yergin has returned with his perspective on a very different landscape . . . [I]t is impossible to think of a better introduction to the essentials of energy in the 21st century. The Quest is . . . the definitive guide to how we got here.” —The Financial Times This long-awaited successor to Daniel Yergin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Prize provides an essential, overarching narrative of global energy, the principal engine of geopolitical and economic change A master storyteller as well as a leading energy expert, Daniel Yergin continues the riveting story begun in his Pulitzer Prize–winning book, The Prize. In The Quest, Yergin shows us how energy is an engine of global political and economic change and conflict, in a story that spans the energies on which our civilization has been built and the new energies that are competing to replace them. The Quest tells the inside stories, tackles the tough questions, and reveals surprising insights about coal, electricity, and natural gas. He explains how climate change became a great issue and leads readers through the rebirth of renewable energies, energy independence, and the return of the electric car. Epic in scope and never more timely, The Quest vividly reveals the decisions, technologies, and individuals that are shaping our future.