Stymieing the People: A Review of Design for the Crowd: Patriotism and Protest in Union Square

June 3, 2020.Reading time 8 minutes.

By Thai Jones Merwood-Salisbury, Joanna. Design for the Crowd: Patriotism and Protest in Union Square. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. Union Square today displays an extraordinary mania for subdivision. Its ten acres have been hardscaped by fencing and concrete into a multitude of distinct levels and impermeable zones. On the surface, these choices appear […]

Book Review: Ballparks, Baseball, and the Built Environment in the American City

March 25, 2020.Reading time 7 minutes.

By Steven Tischler Goldberger, Paul. Ballpark: Baseball in the American City. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019. Paul Goldberger deftly analyzes changing relationships between professional baseball and urban environments from the mid-19th century to the present day in Ballpark: Baseball in the American City. Goldberger uses ballparks as a lens through which to observe and […]

The Metropole Bookshelf: David Goodwin on Artists and Urbanity in the Garden State in his recent work, Left Bank of the Hudson: Jersey City and the Artists of 111 1st Street

February 27, 2020.Reading time 11 minutes.

The Metropole Bookshelf is an opportunity for authors of forthcoming or recently published books to let the UHA community know about their new work in the field. Goodwin, David. Left Bank of the Hudson: Jersey City and the Artists of 111 1st Street. New York: Empire State Publishing, 2017. By David Goodwin Jersey City, New […]

Register for the SAH Latrobe Chapter 2020 Symposium!

February 13, 2020.Reading time 1 minute.

The Washington, DC Latrobe Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians will be hosting a two-day symposium on the topic of Race, Ethnicity, and Architecture in the Nation’s Capital, April 18-19, 2020 at the Catholic University School of Architecture and Planning. The keynote lecture will be delivered by Dr. Amber Wiley of Rutgers University, a […]

Whose Style? Taste, Class, and Power in Accra’s Architecture

November 13, 2019.Reading time 15 minutes.

By Kuukuwa Manful It is commonly thought that Accra, like many other African cities, has an architectural “identity crisis”[1] because “if you look at the city, there’s nothing that tells you where we were, where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going.”[2] This view, echoed in both academic and popular discourse, is held […]

Cityscape Number 3, October 15, 2019

October 15, 2019.Reading time 6 minutes.

Cityscape is The Metropole’s monthly shortcut to recent, forthcoming, or overlooked writing, exhibits and film. The City in Print Love at Last Sight: Dating, Intimacy, and Risk in Turn-of-the-Century Berlin By Tyler Carrington. Oxford University Press, 2019 An inquiry into the sometimes risky ways of finding love in the big city. The 1914 murder of […]

Beacons of Truth: Newspaper Buildings in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

September 12, 2019.Reading time 20 minutes.

This piece by Lily Corral is the sixth and final entrant into the Third Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest. Corral takes on the life cycle of the media industry, and shows how the architecture built by newspapers reflects the industry’s birth, heyday, and now legacy. Daily news comes to us in all forms. […]

The Way Concrete Goes

August 26, 2019.Reading time 20 minutes.

In this, our third entrant into the Third Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest, Vyta Baselice takes us through the life cycle of concrete. To understand how this construction material moves from birth to death, Baselice has us travel from Pennsylvania in the late nineteenth century to mid-twentieth century New York City, before boomeranging […]

Digital Summer School, PLATFORM: “Take a stand: architecture matters”

August 7, 2019.Reading time 12 minutes.

Editor’s note: It’s the penultimate installment of Digital Summer School 2019! The editorial staff of the newly-launched site PLATFORM discuss why they chose the blog format and what challenges arise when you try to bridge the divide between architecture and politics. For all other DSS 2019 courses scroll down to the bottom for links. Knowing […]

Introducing PLATFORM, a new digital forum for urbanists

July 1, 2019.Reading time 13 minutes.

[Editor’s note: The Metropole would like to introduce a new digital forum for urbanists. Below, Hunter College Professor Matthew Lasner offers a brief introduction into the project, PLATFORM, followed by a more detailed explanation regarding exactly what the site and its editors hope to publish. Take a look!] Dear friends, I have some exciting news […]