A Reconsideration of the Equitable Building in New York

1990 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sally A. Kitt Chappell

Conventional opinion has held that the Equitable Building (1912-1915) at 120 South Broadway in New York was the embodiment of all that was wrong with skyscrapers, and that it was thus a major cause of the 1916 zoning ordinance which restricted the height, size, and arrangement of buildings in the city. A closer look at the evidence reveals that a blueprint for the zoning regulation was complete in 1913 when the Equitable had just been begun. In the clash of conflicting ideologies surrounding the zoning movement, the Equitable was more a convenient symbol, a handy scapegoat in the heat of contemporary rhetoric, than a principal cause of the new ordinance. The earlier misjudgment has obscured the building's place in two other areas in the history of architecture: elevator engineering, and the adaptation of management techniques to building construction.

Academe ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 90 (5) ◽  
pp. 82
Author(s):  
Katherine Reynolds Chaddock ◽  
Robert A. McCaughey

Istoriya ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (11 (109)) ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Vladimir Pechatnov

Based on previously unearthed documents from the Russia’s State Historical Archive and the Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire the article explores the history of the first Russian Orthodox parish in New York City and construction of Saint-Nickolas Russian Orthodox Cathedral in the city. It was a protracted and complicated interagency process that involved Russian Orthodox mission in the United States, Russia’s Foreign Ministry and its missions in the United States, the Holy Governing Synod, Russia’s Ministry of Finance and the State Council. The principal actors were the bishops Nicholas (Ziorov) and especially Tikhon (Bellavin), Ober-Prosecutor of the Holy Governing Synod Konstantine Pobedonostsev and Reverend Alexander Khotovitsky. This case study of the Cathedral history reveals an interaction of ecclesiastical and civil authorities in which private and civic initiative was combined with strict bureaucratic rules and procedures.


2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-106
Author(s):  
Thomas Wide
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  

AbstractThomas Wide visits a recent exhibition on the history of New York City


1909 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 155
Author(s):  
J. H. Innes ◽  
Schuyler Van Rensselaer

CEM ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 57-74
Author(s):  
Tiago Trindade Cruz

This article is part of a broader reflection on the digital drawing and new research metho‑ dologies in the History of Architecture. Aiming to reflect on the concept of Heritage Landscape, it starts from the old monastic structure of Monchique, in the city of Porto, as an experimental labora‑ tory for architectural and urban research. It is known that digital technology makes it possible to reconstruct elements from other eras, whose time has transformed or disappeared. In this context, and using digital drawing, the recognition of the built heritage and urban structures is sought through a synchronic and diachronic interpretation, attentive to the different historical periods and their specificities.


Author(s):  
David Faflik

Urban Formalism radically reimagines what it meant to “read” a brave new urban world during the transformative middle decades of the nineteenth century. At a time when contemporaries in the twin capitals of modernity in the West, New York and Paris, were learning to make sense of unfamiliar surroundings, city peoples increasingly looked to the experiential patterns, or forms, from their everyday lives in an attempt to translate urban experience into something they could more easily comprehend. Urban Formalism interrogates both the risks and rewards of an interpretive practice that depended on the mutual relation between urbanism and formalism, at a moment when the subjective experience of the city had reached unprecedented levels of complexity. What did it mean to read a city sidewalk as if it were a literary form, like a poem? On what basis might the material form of a burning block of buildings be received as a pleasurable spectacle? How closely aligned were the ideology and choreography of the political form of a revolutionary street protest? And what were the implications of conceiving of the city’s exciting dynamism in the static visual form of a photographic composition? These are the questions that Urban Formalism asks and begins to answer, with the aim of proposing a revisionist semantics of the city. This book not only provides an original cultural history of forms. It posits a new form of urban history, comprised of the representative rituals of interpretation that have helped give meaningful shape to metropolitan life.


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