Architecture and nature : creating the American landscape / Christine Macy and Sarah Bonnemaison.

Format:

• Book

Author/Creator:

• Macy, Christine.

Contributor:

• Bonnemaison, Sarah.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

• Architecture--United States--History--20th century.
• Architecture.
• Architecture--Environmental aspects.
• United States.
• History.
• Architecture--Environmental aspects--United States.

Physical Description:

xii, 372 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color), maps ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

London ; New York : Routledge, 2003.

Summary:

The word "nature" comes from natura, Latin for birth -- as do the words nation and native. But nature and nation share more than a common root, they share a common history where one term has been used to define the other. This has been especially true in the United States, from the idea of the noble savage to the myth of the frontier. Narrated, painted and filmed, the American landscapes have been central to the construction of a national identity. This book explores changing ideas of what nature has meant for the United States and how it has been represented in buildings and landscapes over the past century. It begins with the close of the frontier and the rise of the conservation movement in the 1890s, and it ends with the opening of the "final" frontier of outer space and the rise of the ecology movement in the 1960s. In this seventy-five-year period, certain American myths about nature have endured while others have been invented, reworked or abandoned. The buildings and landscapes that have resulted from this dynamic process represent the dreams and ambitions of the country for its relationship to nature: the architecture of the National Parks, the streamlined dams of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the modernist dream houses of post-war California, and the geodesic domes of the countercultural sixties. Each of these buildings and landscapes were iconic representations in their era -- symbolizing a perfect ideal for life in harmony with nature. Commissioned by either government or business interests, they can be seen as way stations in the development of a national identity. The authors explore the meanings of these seemingly familiar buildings from a new perspective, using them to shed light on the country's complex and often controversial relationship to nature.

Contents:

• 1 Exhibiting wilderness at the Columbian Exposition, 1893 13
• 2 Accommodating the nature tourist in the national parks, 1903 71
• 3 Putting nature to work with the Tennessee Valley Authority, 1933 137
• 4 Nature preserved in the nuclear age: the Case Study Houses of Los Angeles, 1945 223
• 5 Closing the circle: the geodesic domes and a new ecological consciousness, 1967 293.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [347]-361) and index.

ISBN:

• 0415283582
• 0415283590

OCLC:

50002474