Manhattan atmospheres : architecture, the interior environment, and urban crisis /

Gissen (California College of the Arts) joins Max Page (The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900-1904, CH, Dec'00, 38-2344) and Matthew Gandy (Concrete and Clay, CH, Dec'02, 40-2375) in using the nation's foremost metropolis as a springboard for exploring new realms in the 20th-century history of the built environment. Gissen's temporal focus is the recent past--from the 1960s to the 1980s, when New York was in fiscal turmoil and viewed by many as a city in decline. He examines four sites, well-known to New Yorkers and many others as well, from a fresh perspective, showing how, with varying degrees of success, those involved with the sites sought to create a new, interior-oriented environment as an antidote to the city's grim conditions. The four are an unlikely group: the Washington Bridge Apartments, just east of the George Washington Bridge; the atrium of the Ford Foundation headquarters; the massive extension of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (especially that housing the Temple of Dendur); and the Merrill Lynch trading room at the World Financial Center (now Brookfield Place). Gissen's discussion of these unlikely candidates brilliantly fuses architectural, environmental, and urban history, revealing many approaches to understanding the physical legacy of the era. --Richard Longstreth, George Washington University