| This dissertation examines the role politics, social and material conditions, and cultural values play in shaping the production and reception of architecture and the ways wealth and power operate to reorganize the built landscape. I do so by closely examining the history of two buildings, the Empire State Building and the Seagram Building, and the 1932 Museum of Modern Art Exhibit “Modern Architecture: International Exhibition.” Tracing the planning, financing, construction, and reception of these buildings, I examine how they materialize the eras of their creation. Located in the city that epitomizes the restless activity of the American marketplace, these iconic skyscrapers of New York stand in for the particular mode of capitalist organization of their time. Thus, the major skyscraper of the Great Depression, the Empire State Building, is a symbol of an era rooted in the values of an older producer economy and its attendant definitions of Americanism. In turn, perhaps the most famous skyscraper of the 1950s, the Seagram Building, emerged from an expanding consumer culture that amidst the Cold War reworked the themes of Americanism and democracy the Empire State Building had addressed decades earlier. |
