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The National Mall in Washington, D.C., has held an important place in the American psyche since the early nineteenth century. Home to monuments and museums dedicated to the ideals upon which the United States rests, the Mall serves as a gathering place for public protest and celebration. But as the nation ages and the population diversifies, demands for additional structures and uses have sparked debates over the Mall's future and the necessity of preserving its legacy and the vision of its designers.

The National Mall addresses these issues with a novel and compelling collection of essays, the work of leading design professionals, historians, and social scientists. Supplemented by eye-catching illustrations and photographs, this cross-disciplinary examination follows the discussion over the Mall's design and use, from its conceptual origins as part of Pierre Charles L'Enfant's vision for the capital to the 1902 McMillan Plan to the present day and beyond. It assesses how architectural, societal, and political changes have altered the park-like space between the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial and explores the influence that disparate interest groups and creeping corporatism have already had on--and are likely to exert upon--America's public square.

The National Mall presents an overarching account of how a democratic society plans, creates, and expands a national ceremonial space, opening the way for a broadly based inquiry into the Mall as it was, is, and will become. Urban planners, architectural and design historians, and engaged citizens will be challenged and well served by the thoughtful essays collected by Nathan Glazer and Cynthia R. Field.

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CHOICE Review

Sponsored by a watchdog of American civic good, the Newington-Cropsey Foundation Cultural Studies Center, this publication succeeds admirably in interpreting the Mall for nonexperts and alerting those with responsibility for it to the serious threats it faces. The memorable, expansive openness, architectural integrity, and role of the Mall (the nation's best-known civic open space) in the capital's and nation's urban character is being degraded. Endangering it are new and proposed monuments, memorials and museums, and various security incursions, confusions about where responsibility lies, and political bodies that disregard the Mall's larger purpose and place in American life. In this handsome publication, ten leaders in their respective fields--ranging from the history of architecture to anthropology, and from social criticism to city planning (but with no one from the cockpit of action, the political arena)--review its past, present, and possible future. This strongly bound book with glossy paper is handsomely produced. It includes 66 figures and pictures (no book ever has enough), biographical notes about those with a role in forming the Mall and the volume's contributors, and a chronology of the Mall. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-level undergraduates through professionals/practitioners; general readers. C. W. Westfall University of Notre Dame

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Nathan Glazer is an emeritus professor of sociology and education at Harvard University. He is the author or editor of many books on public policy and urban problems, among them The Public Face of Architecture and From a Cause to a Style: Modernist Architecture's Encounter with the American City . Cynthia R. Field is the architectural historian emerita at the Smithsonian Institution and a faculty member at the Corcoran College of Art. She is the coauthor of The Castle: An Illustrated History of the Smithsonian Building .