Follow this tag to curate your own personalized Activity Stream and email alerts.
For retailers, daylight offered one additional advantage the advertisements did not mention: the implication of moral virtue. Large department stores were described as cesspools of fraud, filth, poor working conditions, child labor, anti-competitiveness, potential press censorship (because of their advertising clout), disease, drunkenness, savagery, prostitution, suicide and darkness. A well-lit interior, it was said, could do much to counter such negative associations. — Places Journal
Earlier this year on Places, Keith Eggener assessed the career of the now forgotten early 20th-century Kansas City architect Louis Curtiss, and argued that Curtiss's obscurity has less to do with intrinsic merit than with the politics of professional reputation. In a new article... View full entry
If you drove far enough, from Maine to Georgia, from the Midwest to Southern California, or simply from one end of Los Angeles to the other, you would start to notice that there were different ecologies, and that some were geographical and some were cultural, but that they intersected and collaged to form a vast, sprawling, layered network whose patterns were discernible only if you took the long view and just kept driving. — Places Journal
In an essay for Places, Gabrielle Esperdy (of American Road Trip) follows architectural critic Reyner Banham out of Los Angeles and out onto the open road, placing him in the tradition of European travelers, from de Tocqueville and Dickens to Alistair Cooke and Stephen Fry, whose observations... View full entry
How should the state pursue the goal of making decent housing affordable and accessible to all its citizens? How can we mobilize our collective resources in the service of social justice? In what other ways might we imagine living together? What is a house? — Places Journal
On Places, architectural historian Jonathan Massey puts Occupy Wall Street and the 99 Percenters into the historical context of housing in America. Walking us from the 1920s to the present day, he explores how governmental and banking policies have worked to promote the ideal of home... View full entry
