Building The New World

An essential exploration of how Russian ideas about the United States shaped architecture and urban design from the czarist era to the fall of the U.S.S.R. Idealized representations of America, as both an aspiration and a menace, played an important role in shaping Russian architecture and urban design from the American Revolution until the fall of the Soviet Union. Jean-Louis Cohen traces the powerful concept of “Amerikanizm” and its impact on Russia’s built environment from early czarist interest in Revolutionary America, through the spectacular World’s Fairs of the 19th century, to department stores, skyscrapers, and factories built in Russia using American methods during the 20th century. Visions of America also captivated the Russian avant-garde, from El Lissitzky to Moisei Ginzburg, and Cohen explores the ongoing artistic dialogue maintained between the two countries at the mid-century and in the late Soviet era, following a period of strategic competition. This first major study of Amerikanizm in the architecture of Russia makes a timely contribution to our understanding of modern architecture and its broader geopolitics.

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 .

Building a New World Order: Sustainable Policies for the Future demonstrates how the conditions for sustainable development might be created, and why all our futures are dependent on a global engagement and involvement, not just that of a few selected statesmen.

Topics addressed include masters and journeymen, skilled women workers, carpenters, the skilled men of the metal trades in the Hillside workshops, the construction of a political culture based on class and the shifting meanings of that word.

These essays are the result of a study of the Dunedin working-class suburb of Caversham. Olssen discusses a number of important theoretical issues the writing of history, the question of class, the role of gender, the nature of work and the growth of the labor movement are all explored.

The church is an organizing body. No matter how big or small the membership roll, no matter a rural or urban setting, churches organize people. So what might happen if churches organized (more) effectively for community impact, for policy reform, for justice? Building Up a New World explores possible—and practical—answer to this critical question from culturally diverse perspectives. Written by community organizers, ministers, healers, and resisters, Building Up a New World is the guiding fire that congregations needs to rise up for such a time as this.

With an original introduction by Luce Irigaray, and original texts from her students and collaborators, this book imagines the outlines of a more just, ecologically attuned world that flourishes on the basis of sexuate difference.