Urban Reinventions

Urban Reinventions
Author: Lynne Horiuchi
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2017-09-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0824866053

When it was built in 1937, Treasure Island was considered to be one of the largest man-made islands in the world. Located in the middle of San Francisco Bay, the 400-acre island was constructed out of dredged bay mud in a remarkable feat of Depression-era civil engineering by the US Army Corps of Engineers. Its alluring name is an allusion to the fabled remnants of the California Gold Rush found in the ocean sediment that formed the island. This collection of essays tells the story of San Francisco’s Treasure Island—an artificial, disconnected island that has paradoxically been central to the city’s urban ambitions. Conceived as a site for San Francisco’s first airport in an age of automobile and air transport, Treasure Island hosted the Golden Gate International Exposition (GGIE) in 1939 and 1940, celebrating the completion of the Golden Gate and the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridges. With particular focus on Asia and Latin America, the GGIE promoted peace, harmony, and commerce in the Pacific. Treasure Island’s planned use as an airport was scuttled when World War II abruptly reversed the exposition’s message of Pacific unity, and the US government developed Treasure Island and the adjacent Yerba Buena Island into a naval training and transfer station, which processed 4,500,000 military personnel on their way to the Pacific theater. In the midst of a twenty-first-century high-tech boom and in one of the most expensive real-estate markets in the world, the city of San Francisco and its developers have proposed an ambitious model of military base reuse and green urbanism—a new eco-city of about 19,000 residents on Treasure Island and Yerba Buena Island. The project is synonymous with a growing global trend toward large-scale, capital-intensive land developments envisioned around ideas of sustainability and spectacular place making. Seen against the successive history of development, future visions for Treasure Island are part of a process of building and erasure that Horiuchi and Sankalia call urban reinventions. This is a process of radical change in which artificial, detached, and delimited sites such as Treasure Island provide an ideal plane for tabula rasa planning driven by property, capital, and state control. With essays by contributors well known for their interdisciplinary work, Urban Reinventions demonstrates how a single site may be interpreted in multiple ways: as an artificial island, world’s fair site, military installation, a semi-derelict relic of past lives, a toxic site of nuclear waste, and a future eco-city and major real estate development. The volume offers a wide spectrum of critiques of race, imperialism, gendered Orientalism, military land use, property capital exchange, new eco-cities, sustainability, and waste as a byproduct of development. The book will be of interest to general readers as well as teachers, scholars, and practitioners in the fields of geography, architecture, city planning, urban design, history, environmental studies, American studies, Asian studies, and military history, among others.

Into the Void Pacific

Into the Void Pacific
Author: Andrew Shanken
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2015-01-16
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0520282825

Published on the occasion of the expo's 75th anniversary, Into the Void Pacific is the first architectural history of the 1939 San Francisco WorldÕs Fair. While fairs of the 1930's turned to the future as a foil to the Great Depression, the Golden Gate International Exposition conjured up geographical conceits to explore the nature of the city's place in what organizers called "Pacific Civilization." Andrew Shanken adopts D.H. LawrenceÕs suggestive description of California as a way of thinking about the architecture of the Golden Gate International Exposition, using the phrase Òvoid PacificÓ to suggest the isolation and novelty of California and its habit of looking West rather than back over its shoulder to the institutions of the East Coast and Europe. The fair proposed this vision of the Pacific as an antidote to the troubled Atlantic world, then descending into chaos for the second time in a generation. Architects took up the theme and projected the regionalist sensibilities of Northern California onto Asian and Latin American architecture. Their eclectic, referential buildings drew widely on the cultural traditions of ancient Cambodia, China, and Mexico, as well as the International Style, Art Deco, and the Bay Region Tradition. The book explores how buildings supported the cultural and political work of the fair and fashioned a second, parallel world in a moment of economic depression and international turmoil. Yet it is also a tale of architectural compromise, contingency, and symbolism gone awry. With chapters organized around the creation of Treasure Island and the key areas and pavilions of the fair, this study takes a cut through the work of William Wurster, Bernard Maybeck, Timothy Pflueger, and Arthur Brown, Jr., among others. Shanken also looks closely at buildings as buildings, analyzing them in light of local circumstances, regionalist sensibilities, and national and international movements at that crucial moment when modernism and the Beaux-Arts intersected dynamically.

World's Fairs in the Cold War

World's Fairs in the Cold War
Author: Arthur P. Molella
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2019-09-13
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0822987082

The post–World War II science-based technological revolution inevitably found its way into almost all international expositions with displays on atomic energy, space exploration, transportation, communications, and computers. Major advancements in Cold War science and technology helped to shape new visions of utopian futures, the stock-in-trade of world’s fairs. From the 1940s to the 1980s, expositions in the United States and around the world, from Brussels to Osaka to Brisbane, mirrored Cold War culture in a variety of ways, and also played an active role in shaping it. This volume illustrates the cultural change and strain spurred by the Cold War, a disruptive period of scientific and technological progress that ignited growing concern over the impact of such progress on the environment and humanistic and spiritual values. Through the lens of world’s fairs, contributors across disciplines offer an integrated exploration of the US–USSR rivalry from a global perspective and in the context of broader social and cultural phenomena—faith and religion, gender and family relations, urbanization and urban planning, fashion, modernization, and national identity—all of which were fundamentally reshaped by tensions and anxieties of the Atomic Age.

Petrocinema

Petrocinema
Author: Marina Dahlquist
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2021-01-28
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1501354159

Petrocinema presents a collection of essays concerning the close relationship between the oil industry and modern media-especially film. Since the early 1920s, oil extracting companies such as Standard Oil, Royal Dutch/Shell, ConocoPhillips, or Statoil have been producing and circulating moving images for various purposes including research and training, safety, process observation, or promotion. Such industrial and sponsored films include documentaries, educationals, and commercials that formed part of a larger cultural project to transform the image of oil exploitation, creating media interfaces that would allow corporations to coordinate their goals with broader cultural and societal concerns. Falling outside of the domain of conventional cinema, such films firmly belong to an emerging canon of sponsored and educational film and media that has developed over the past decade. Contributing to this burgeoning field of sponsored and educational film scholarship, chapters in this book bear on the intersecting cultural histories of oil extraction and media history by looking closely at moving image imaginaries of the oil industry, from the earliest origins or “spills” in the 20th century to today's post industrial “petromelancholia.”

Child Study

Child Study
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 220
Release: 1938
Genre: Child development
ISBN: