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Building Seagram

Building Seagram

Follow @yaleARTbooks The Seagram building rises over New York’s Park Avenue, seeming to float above the street with perfect lines of bronze and glass. Considered one of the greatest icons of twentieth-century architecture, the building was commissioned by Samuel Bronfman, founder of the Canadian distillery dynasty Seagram. Bronfman’s daughter Phyllis Lambert was twenty-seven years old […]

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Pevsner's Architectural Glossary App

Announcing Pevsner’s Architectural Glossary App

Follow @yaleARTbooks Follow @YalePevsner The perfect way to check architectural terms when you are out and about, exploring buildings. Just in time for National Landscape Architecture month, Yale University Press is pleased to announce the release of Pevsner’s Architectural Glossary app. Based on the 2010 publication of Pevsner’s Architectural Glossary, this iOS app will allow […]

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City: Urbanism and Its End

The Rise and Fall of Urbanism: Douglas W. Rae’s City

Settled by Puritans in 1638, New Haven, Connecticut was the first planned city in America. A few weeks ago in New Haven, a group of citizens met in the basement of a middle school to discuss the well-being of their town. Issues like “food deserts,” street crime, and health problems came to the forefront as dozens […]

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The Cloisters

Building the Cloisters

Follow @yaleARTbooks At first glance The Cloisters might be seen as an anachronism to its northern Manhattan neighborhood. Nestled within Fort Tryon Park (opened 1935), sitting above a grid of 1920s low-rise apartments, 1950s high-rise housing projects and the requisite array of fast food franchises, parking garages, and bodegas that dot the city, The Cloisters […]

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Berenice Abbott

Happy Birthday, Berenice Abbott!

After exploring her creative urges through journalism, sculpture, poetry, and theater, Berenice Abbott (1898–1991) found a home for her artistic talents in photography while working in Paris as a darkroom assistant to Man Ray. Abbott knew Ray from an earlier encounter in New York, and though at the beginning of her tenure as his assistant […]

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Aalto and America

Aalto’s “American Town in Finland”

The renowned Finnish architect and designer Alvar Aalto (1898-1976) created several landmarks of modern design in America—the Finland Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair in 1939, the MIT’s Baker House dormitory completed in 1949, and the Mount Angel Abbey Library completed in 1947 in Oregon.  Although Aalto’s career was, for the most part, based […]

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Savoy, Venice from the Water, Figure 90

The Venetian Book Tour

Are you spending your holiday in the romantic city of Venice this summer?  We’re not, either.  We have happily entertained fantasies about such a getaway, though, thanks to two recent Yale University Press books about Venetian architecture.  We also recently learned that one of our summer interns spent time in Venice this past year, and […]

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Venice from the Water

Sustainable Venice

When read together, Venice from the Water and Venice & Vitruvius present a multi-sided picture of the complex history and fate of the famous floating city of Venice. In many ways, the books complement one another, engaging in the same subject through different perspectives and offering interrelated conclusions. This dynamic can be discerned through an […]

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Insuring the City

Talking About the Prudential

Both before it was built and since, people have been boosting and bashing Boston’s Prudential Center, whose construction began in earnest fifty years ago. Insuring the City: The Prudential Center and the Postwar Urban Landscape, by architectural historian Elihu Rubin and published today by Yale University Press, captures and explains what the conversation has been about. Here, […]

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Hitler's Berlin

Architectural Space in Hitler’s Berlin

Seventy years after the end of WWII, we tend to associate Hitler and the German Reich with destruction. Yet, as Hitler rose to power in the 1920s and 1930s, construction was a key part of his political agenda, a fact that Thomas Friedrich makes clear in Hitler’s Berlin: Abused City, translated by Stewart Spencer. In […]

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