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Title:
Designing the American century: The public landscapes of Clarke and Rapuano, 1915-1965

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Summary:
Gilmore D. Clarke and Michael Rapuano were the foremost spatial designers of the American century. Their vast portfolio of public landscapes propelled the legacy of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux into the motor age, touching the lives of millions and changing the face of the nation. This book recovers the forgotten legacy of Clarke and Rapuano, whose parks and parkways, highways and housing estates helped modernize—for better or worse—the American metropolis. With the patronage of public-works titan Robert Moses, Clarke and Rapuano transformed New York over a span of fifty years, revitalizing the city’s immense park system but also planning expressways, public housing, and urban renewal projects that laid waste to entire sections of the city. In this work, Thomas J. Campanella describes how Clarke and Rapuano helped create some of the metropolitan region’s most iconic landscapes, from the Central Park Zoo and Conservatory Garden to the Henry Hudson Parkway and Riverside Park, Jones Beach, the Palisades and Taconic State Parkways, and the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. He shows how they left their mark far beyond Gotham as well, with projects as diverse as Yellowstone’s Mammoth Hot Springs, the Mount Vernon Memorial Highway, site plans for the Pentagon and CIA headquarters, and Montreal’s Olympic Park.

Title:
Brooklyn: the once and future city

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$48.95
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Summary:
America's most storied urban underdog, Brooklyn has become an internationally recognized brand in recent decades—celebrated and scorned as one of the hippest destinations in the world. In ''Brooklyn: The Once and Future City,'' Thomas J. Campanella unearths long-lost threads of the urban past, telling the rich history of the rise, fall, and reinvention of one of the world’s most resurgent cities.

Title:
The Concrete Dragon: China's urban revolution and what it means for the world

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$38.95
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Summary:
In the early 1980s, China launched the greatest building boom in human history, beginning a period of wholesale construction and destruction unlike anything the world has ever seen. There were fewer than two hundred cities in China in the late 1970s; today there are nearly seven hundred. While the United States has nine cities with more than a million residents, China now has 102 such cities. And in a single decade more Chinese families have been displaced by redevelopment than by thirty years of urban renewal in the United States. The scale of this urban revolution is breathtaking: China is now home to the largest malls on earth, the biggest airport, many of the planet's tallest buildings and longest bridges, the biggest gated community, the largest bowling alley, and even the worlds largest skateboard park. China's rich urban architectural legacy is being sacrificed to make way for icons of progress and modernity.