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Creatively Destroying New York: Fantasies, Premonitions, and Realities in the Provisional City

Max Page: February 25, 2002; Running Time: 01:32:31

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

This lecture places the attack on the World Trade Center in the context of New York's history as a place that is seemingly destined to be destroyed and rebuilt with stunning regularity. It explores three ways of looking at a central experience, and cultural trope, about New York City: that it is a city of creative destruction, regularly destroying and rebuilding itself. Professor Page begins with a discussion of extraordinary moments of destruction, both natural and human-made (from fires and blizzards, to acts of terrorism), and then argues that it is the "regular" processes of creative destruction - through private real estate development and government urban renewal - which are far more important in shaping both New York's physical organization as well as its cultural image. Finally, he explores how the imagination of New York's destruction - in art, literature, and cinema - is not only at the heart of New York life but of American culture as a whole.

Lecture Details

Location: Room 10-485

About the Speaker

Max Page

Assistant Professor of Architecture and History

Max Page is Assistant Professor of Architecture and History at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where he teaches urban, architectural, and public history. He is the author of The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900-1940 (University of Chicago Press, 1999), which won the Spiro Kostof Award from the Society of Architectural Historians. He writes for a variety of publications about New York City, urban development and the popular uses of history. He is currently editing Constructing America: American Writings on Architecture, Urbanism, and Place, 1789 to the Present (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), a documentary history of American architecture, as well as Giving Preserving a History: Histories of Historic Preservation in the United States (Routledge, 2003), a collection of scholarly essays on the history of the historic preservation movement.