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Huxtable, Ada Louise ListingsIf you cannot find what you want on this page, then please use our search feature to search all our listings. Click on Title to view full description
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UNREAL AMERICA ARCHITECTURE AND ILLUSION
Huxtable, Ada Louise
1997 43011 Pulitzer Prize-winner Ada Louise Huxtable meditates on modern American architecture and its implications in The Unreal America: Architecture and Illusion, a book based on a lecture she delivered to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Huxtable argues that theme parks, shopping malls, historic restorations, and towns like Disney's Celebration create "surrogate environments" detached from the reality of everyday experience. She rails against historic preservation, claiming that attempts to re-create the past in such places as Ellis Island and Boston's Faneuil Hall result in hollow shadows of the originals that have little to offer the modern viewer. The marriage of culture and consumerism in these places also gets Huxtable's gourd. She seems to feel that much of this architecture is designed for the sole purpose of impelling consumerism. In the preface, Huxtable writes that as a young journalist she was told to "tell the reader what you think," and here she does exactly that with fervor and clarity. From Library Journal In her first book since The Tall Building Artistically Reconsidered (LJ 6/15/85), architecture critic Huxtable here critiques the American devotion to invented environments. She looks at the artificial towns, streetscapes, and ambiance of Disney parks, Williamsburg, and many other places built in this century but of no time. The American comfort with these created worlds disturbs Huxtable. Her contempt for what has become a common taste?nearly a universal aesthetic of cleaned-up, socially sanitized environments?has sound intellectual footing and is offered with appropriate passion, but it is also rooted in the elitism of the intelligentsia, offended and distrustful of the popular partly because it is popular. The fear that quality architecture will lose out to the designs driven by marketers, consumerism, and entertainment has been a presence in specialized circles for many years. The issue is given a thoughtful, if admittedly one-sided, airing here for a broader audience by the much admired Huxtable. Norton* 1-56584-055-0 / 9781565840553
Hardcover Very good Condition New York, New York, U.S.A.
Price:
32.83 USD
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