Paula Lupkin
Paula Lupkin is an architectural historian, author, speaker, and teacher. Her interdisciplinary work focuses on the spatial production of modernity under capitalism, investigating its impact on cities, architecture, and interiors. environments.
Her scholarship, including Manhood Factories: YMCA Architecture and the Making of Modern Urban Culture (Minnesota, 2010) and Shaping the American Interior: Structures, Contexts, and Practices, co-edited with Penny Sparke, (Routledge 2018), address the ways that architecture, cities, and landscapes shaped and were shaped by new ways of living, working, and consuming.
This book, as well as current projects on architectural regionalism and the cultural landscape of beer, have been supported by the Charles Warren Center at Harvard, the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Study in the Fine Arts, The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin, and the Texas State Historical Association.
Paula, a member of the faculty of art history at the University of North Texas, has also taught at Washington University in St. Louis, the Illinois Institute of Technology, Colorado College, and Denison University.
Her scholarship, including Manhood Factories: YMCA Architecture and the Making of Modern Urban Culture (Minnesota, 2010) and Shaping the American Interior: Structures, Contexts, and Practices, co-edited with Penny Sparke, (Routledge 2018), address the ways that architecture, cities, and landscapes shaped and were shaped by new ways of living, working, and consuming.
This book, as well as current projects on architectural regionalism and the cultural landscape of beer, have been supported by the Charles Warren Center at Harvard, the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Study in the Fine Arts, The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin, and the Texas State Historical Association.
Paula, a member of the faculty of art history at the University of North Texas, has also taught at Washington University in St. Louis, the Illinois Institute of Technology, Colorado College, and Denison University.
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How did the city achieve this status as metropole and imperial city? Strenuous, coordinated planning efforts were necessary to establish economic and cultural hegemony. Although booster literature commonly and boldly asserted the “natural” or “tributary” relationship between an imperial city and its hinterland, in the late nineteenth century such linkages were artificial constructions, or, as William Cronon suggests, “second” nature. In St. Louis as in many other places, second nature was engineered by the city’s business community. Groups of financial and commercial elites, connected through membership in the chamber of commerce, mercantile exchange, and interlocking corporate directories, developed and funded semi-public agencies and organizations to carry out and administer privately sponsored, urban projects. This common agenda included the infrastructure of trade, like warehousing and railyards, but also symbolic landscapes of imperium, like boulevards and fairgrounds. Under their guidance the city assumed the function of a mechanism to conquer and maintain control over their hinterland. Together these projects shaped St. Louis, both functionally and symbolically, into an imperial city.
Through analysis of the broad range of city-building projects initiated by business leaders in St. Louis this paper will shed light on the particular form and configuration of the American imperial city, and even more importantly, on and the motives and strategies of those who were responsible for shaping it. The role of business leaders, and business organizations, in early city planning is well-established, but their motives and the overall impact of their involvement in the development of urban form remains under-examined. Through the lens of empire this paper reexamines the definition of city planning and the identity of planners before the emergence of the planning profession, identifying the strategies business communities used to shape the urban landscape as an economic tool.
Global networks and the Architecture of Port Cities, Carola Hein, Bryn Mawr College
Carbon Copies: Architects, lawyers, stockbrokers and the production of Pennsylvania coal landscapes, Deryck Holdsworth, Pennsylvania State University
Mills and Mansions: Northern California’s Landscapes of Lumber, James Buckley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Sassoon and the Shanghai Skyscraper, Parker James, Brandeis University
Capital Flows and Premium Pressures, Sara Stevens, [Princeton University]