scholarly journals Pier Luigi Nervi negli Stati Uniti. 1952-1979

Author(s):  
Alberto Bologna

Pier Luigi Nervi (1891-1979) is the most famous Italian engineer from the twentieth century. In 1952, having reached the peak of his career as a designer and entrepreneur in Italy, Nervi decided to enter the academic and professional world in the United States. Thus he undertook a path that would lead him to achieve fame in America: he promoted the circulation of his writings and works in the top American journals, strengthened his friendship with colleagues such as Pietro Belluschi, Marcel Breuer, Mario Salvadori and José Luis Sert, and held conferences in the most prestigious US universities. In 1962 Harvard University awarded him the Charles Eliot Norton chair. Between 1958 and 1976, thanks to the fame he had won, Studio Nervi succeeded in obtaining and managing important consultancy assignments for the construction of large structures in the United States. This book analyses how Nervi managed to export an idea of construction, characterized by unmistakably original buildings, of great commercial success. The twenty years of Studio Nervi's business in the United States embrace an important part of the history of the relations between post-war Italian engineering culture and American architectural and construction praxis as well as between academia and profession, and, not least, between clients and design studios.

2010 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 305-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhiwei Xiao

AbstractNo serious study has been published on how Chinese filmmakers have portrayed the United States and the American people over the last century. The number of such films is not large. That fact stands in sharp contrast not only to the number of "China pictures" produced in the United States, which is not surprising, but also in contrast to the major role played by Chinese print media. This essay surveys the history of Chinese cinematic images of America from the early twentieth century to the new millennium and notes the shifts from mostly positive portrayal in the pre-1949 Chinese films, to universal condemnation during the Mao years and to a more nuanced, complex, and multi-colored presentation of the last few decades.


2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 461-482 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ines Prodöhl

AbstractThis article traces the complex and shifting organization of soy's production and consumption from Northeast China to Europe and the United States. It focuses on a set of national and transnational actors with differing interests in the global and national spread of soybeans. The combination of these actors in certain spatiotemporal contexts enabled a fundamental change in soy from an Asian to an American cash crop. At the beginning of the twentieth century, soy rapidly became Northeast China's cash crop, owing to steadily increasing Western demand. However, the versatility of soy – and soy oil in particular – offered a highly successful response to the agricultural and industrial challenges that the United States faced during the Great Depression and the Second World War. By the end of the war, American farmers in the Midwest cultivated more soybeans than their Chinese counterparts.


2021 ◽  

The fourth volume of The Cambridge History of America and the World examines the heights of American global power in the mid-twentieth century and how challenges from at home and abroad altered the United States and its role in the world. The second half of the twentieth century marked the pinnacle of American global power in economic, political, and cultural terms, but even as it reached such heights, the United States quickly faced new challenges to its power, originating both domestically and internationally. Highlighting cutting-edge ideas from scholars from all over the world, this volume anatomizes American power as well as the counters and alternatives to 'the American empire.' Topics include US economic and military power, American culture overseas, human rights and humanitarianism, third-world internationalism, immigration, communications technology, and the Anthropocene.


2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 134-142
Author(s):  
Esther B. Schupak

Abstract Because of its potential for fostering antisemitic stereotypes, in the twentieth century The Merchant of Venice has a history of being subject to censorship in secondary schools in the United States. While in the past it has often been argued that the play can be used to teach tolerance and to fight societal evils such as xenophobia, racism and antisemitism, I argue that this is no longer the case due to the proliferation of performance methods in the classroom, and the resultant emphasis on watching film and stage productions. Because images – particularly film images – carry such strong emotional valence, they have the capacity to subsume other pedagogical aspects of this drama in their emotional power and memorability. I therefore question whether the debate over teaching this play is truly a question of ‘censorship’, or simply educational choice.


Author(s):  
Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece

Many moments in the history of American exhibition illuminate the entanglement of hearing and discipline. But few point as clearly at the intertwining of listening, class, architecture, language, taste, and technology—all of which culminate in a particular dispositif of institutional indoctrination via sensory discipline—as the art house theatre and its promise of aspirational uplift for the price of good audience behavior. This chapter considers the relationship between exhibition, subtitling, sense-making lingual sound, cinephilia, spectatorship, and discipline in the late-1950s and early-1960s art house cinemas across the United States. It argues that spectators were trained for import film watching by the practice of subtitling foreign, especially European, cinema. Listening, watching, and interpreting the balance between the two thus constituted a network of proper attention that helped indoctrinate post-war spectators into post-war American taste and leisure culture.


Author(s):  
Laura Harris

In Experiments in Exile, I explore and compare projects undertaken by two twentieth-century American intellectuals while they lived in voluntary exiles in the United States: the Trinidadian writer and revolutionary C. L. R. James and the Brazilian visual artist and counterculturalist Hélio Oiticica. James and Oiticica never met. They lived and worked in the United States at different moments. My focus is on James’s stay during the 1940s and on Oiticica’s stay during the 1970s. Given the significant differences between them—not just at the level of nationality but at the level of race (James was black, Oiticica was white), class (James was situated within a precarious middle class, Oiticica was firmly established within an upper middle class), sexuality (James was straight, Oiticica was gay), and disciplinary locations (James is generally situated in the history of radical social theory and practice, and Oiticica is generally situated in the history of avant-garde aesthetic theory and practice)—this is surely an unlikely combination. This study is itself an experiment, one that goes beyond the usual parameters of comparativist or transnational research, to identify, in the surprising resonances between the projects pursued by these two very disparate figures, a common project I believe they, together, bring into relief....


2019 ◽  
Vol 68 (4) ◽  
pp. 40-59
Author(s):  
Pamela H. Simpson

With its roots in ancient food molds and table art for Renaissance banquets, butter sculpture in the United States debuted during the centennial and flourished in the first quarter of the twentieth century. As the dairy industry moved from farm to regional cooperative creameries and eventually to national brands, butter sculpture appeared at fairs and expositions. Both amateur and professional sculptors used this unusual medium for busts and portraits, dairy-related subjects, and models of buildings. The ephemeral nature of the medium and the novelty of food as art drew crowds to exhibits advertising butter as the natural, healthy alternative to oleomargarine.


Author(s):  
Philip M. Ferguson

This chapter uses the stories of three families, the ‘Kallikaks’, the Kennedys and the Fergusons, to narrate the key stages of the history of intellectual disability in the twentieth century. The so-called‘Kallikaks’ were used as part of the vicious eugenic libel against the intellectually disabled population that stoked the cruel mass institutionalization programmes of the early century. This section tells the story of Emma Wolverton, one of those on whose life stories the mythical Kallikaks were based and created to spread fear and drive segregational policy. The story of the famous Kennedy family shows the post-war journey of the intellectually disabled person from a hidden site of shame to the policy reforms of the community return. Finally, the story of the author’s own family shows some of the great post-reform liberating shifts towards a life of choice and inclusion that have taken place, and alerts us to the brooding threats that still lurk.


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