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Chronicles of ambition, architecture, history, and labor.
The Chrysler Building:
Creating a New York Icon Day by Day
By David Stravitz
David Stravitz stumbled across a box of negatives documenting the construction of the 77-story Art Deco masterpiece, completed in 1930, days before they were to be destroyed. This fascinating, image-stuffed book is the result.
By Thomas Kelly
Kelly's powerful novel centers on an Irishman employed in the building of the Empire State Building. Michael Briody is not just working high above Manhattan and sending money back home to support the Republican cause, he's also fallen for a gal who leads him into the city's underworld. Riveting.
Skyscrapers: A History of the World's
Most Extraordinary Buildings
By Judith Dupre
Buildings by architects Santiago Calatrava, Zaha Hadid, Philip Johnson, Cesar Pelli, Frank Lloyd Wright, and more than 50 others get the full treatment here—photos, plans, diagrams, background, technological information, and more—in a fittingly oversized tome.
Higher: A Historic Race to the Sky
and the Making of a City
By Neal Bascomb
Bascomb narrates the compelling history of two Roaring Twenties architects—William Van Alen and Craig Severance—who were once partners and became bitter adversaries. Each fought to outdo the other in claiming the tallest building in Manhattan's skyline, but their two structures (the Chrysler Building and 40 Wall Street) were soon to be put in the shade by the looming eminence of the Empire State.
By Carol Willis
The Empire State Building was the tallest building in the world for 40 years. Built in 11 months, the frame rose—incredibly—more than a story a day. Working from the detailed records of Starrett Brothers and Eken, the chief contractors on the job, Carol Willis meticulously charts the architectural icon's ascent.
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"The moral and philosophical questions that Henry wrote up as fiction and William as science," Jean Strouse writes of her subject's more famous brothers, "Alice simply lived." It took a biographer of sensitivity and brilliance to give that "simply" the profundity it deserves, and the resulting book, now reissued in the peerless NYRB Classics series, is one of the richest life stories you'll ever read.
The world of Jane Austen's fiction has long been an imaginative playground for writers and readers of a certain stripe. Shannon Hale's Austenland wittily took the next step, setting comic romance in a faux-Pemberly resort for the Darcy-smitten. Her latest returns for more Regency fun, but with a twist: does murder stalk Pembrook Park?
Childlike retreat? Arts and crafts challenge? Frugal and eco-friendly living option? The notion of the "tiny house" has the surprising potential to fire the imagination. In this exuberant volume of sketches, plans, and commentary, the artist Derek Diedricksen shares his infectious enthusiasm for the idea of the micro-mansion.
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