Building the Workingman's Paradise : The Design of American Company Towns

Crawford, Margaret

ISBN 10: 0860916952 / ISBN 13: 9780860916956

Published by Verso Books, 1996

Former library copy. Pages intact with minimal writing/highlighting. The binding may be loose and creased. Dust jackets/supplements are not included. Includes library markings. Stock photo provided. Product includes identifying sticker. Better World Books: Buy Books. Do Good. Seller Inventory # 14096143-6

Synopsis:

This innovative and absorbing book surveys a little known chapter in the story of American urbanism—the history of communities built and owned by single companies seeking to bring their workers’ homes and place of employment together on a single site. By 1930 more than two million people lived in such towns, dotted across an industrial frontier which stretched from Lowell, Massachusetts, through Torrance, California to Norris, Tennessee. Margaret Crawford focuses on the transformation of company town construction from the vernacular settlements of the late eighteenth century to the professional designs of architects and planners one hundred and fifty years later. Eschewing a static architectural approach which reads politics, history, and economics through the appearance of buildings, Crawford portrays the successive forms of company towns as the product of a dynamic process, shaped by industrial transformation, class struggle, and reformers’ efforts to control and direct these forces.

About the Author: Margaret Crawford is Professor and Chair of the History and Theory of Architecture Program at the Southern California Institute of Architecture. She edited The Car and the City: The Automobile, The Built Environment, and Daily Life.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Building the Workingman's Paradise : The ...
Publisher: Verso Books
Publication Date: 1996
Binding: Soft cover
Condition: Good