Summary: American pioneers had to overcome the dangerous wilderness; Americans at rest want to return to nature-not the wilderness, but a tamed and peaceful nature. Having cut down nature to build cities, we bring back the country through parks: New York's Central Park gives us a dreamlike, idealized New York with forests, lakes, hills, meadows, foot and bridle paths, and architecture to complement the...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
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Summary: Thomas Jefferson's University of Virginia—the first American campus—is like its founder in exemplifying the national capacity for self-invention. Palladio's shade hangs over the individual house-temples which line the landscaped mall—a uniquely American idea. University builders have sought to separate the campus, by locating it in the country or by erecting walls—walls of stone or of...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
View online at AVOD
Summary: A person's home is his self-image, his autobiography as ghost-written by the architect. Mark Twain's house suited him so well that he became convinced he had himself designed it. A more imposing self-portrait is Fenway Court, which ignores the Colonial past and industrial present to recreate a Venetian palazzo in Boston; the American industrialist as Renaissance Italian prince is seen in...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
View online at AVOD
Summary: Villages may spring up but great cities are laid out by surveyors measuring out divisible grids to suit the visions of real estate entrepreneurs, designers of space or social policy. The effort to renew the aged, replace the obsolete or provide for growth, to connect business with residential centers and cities with nature, has provided a range of solutions that range from Colonial...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
View online at AVOD
Summary: The corridors of power, in business and government, lead to heroic interior spaces, and business has frequently appropriated the architecture of power—that is, of government. Interior spaces symbolize as well as contain function. The ambiguous relationship to nature is seen in the American desire to bring a scaled-down outdoors inside; the incorporation of the past takes different shapes. ...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
View online at AVOD
Summary: Architecture grows out of a people's shared past. But in America, where ties to ancient cultures have been broken, we have individually and collectively invented a usable past. From the practical shelters built by the Pilgrims at Plymouth Plantation to the classic ideals of Thomas Jefferson's Monticello to the stylistic diversity of our own time, our buildings reflect the strong-willed...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
View online at AVOD
Summary: Americans dream of owning a single-family home—ideally in some leafy Arcadia not too far from the city workplace. There are many shapes to this dream—Gothic cottages and mini-castles surrounded by manicured wilderness, like the first planned suburban development in Llewellyn Park, N.J.; detached dwellings in sylvan surroundings, with restrictive land use and minimum cost regulations...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007