[Download] "Building More Value Into the World We Build (In DEFENSE OF Beauty) (Essay)" by Modern Age " Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Building More Value Into the World We Build (In DEFENSE OF Beauty) (Essay)
- Author : Modern Age
- Release Date : January 22, 2007
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 347 KB
Description
Throughout history, great civilizations have left powerful imprints on the human habitat. From Angkor Wat to Yucatan, beauty and grandeur in the design of temples, palaces, memorials--even whole precincts or cities--have resulted. During the half century that Modern Age has been in print, however, the United States has emerged as the first preeminent power in the history of the world that has signally failed in these monumental endeavors. After World War II, our civic and religious buildings became test tubes for one forlorn architectural theory or other, our civic monuments became unmonumental or even anti-monumental--think of the pathetic, sprawling FDR Memorial in Washington, DC--and our community planning eschewed qualitative visions in three dimensions for essentially quantitative, two-dimensional blueprints. World War II marks not just a point of transition but a veritable chasm in the annals of American civic art because we were doing quite well on the whole during the first decades of the twentieth century. Just check out a survey like The American Architecture of Today, published in 1927 and written by the Harvard scholar G. H. Edgell, and you'll see what I mean.