The San Francisco Civic Center


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San Francisco is known and loved around the world for its iconic man-made structures, such as the Golden Gate Bridge, cable cars, and Transamerica Pyramid. Yet its Civic Center, with the grandest collection of monumental municipal buildings in the United States, is often overlooked, drawing less global and local interest, despite its being an urban planning marvel featuring thirteen government office and cultural buildings. In The San Francisco Civic Center, James Haas tells the complete story of San Francisco’s Civic Center and how it became one of the most complete developments envisioned by any American city. Originally planned and designed by John Galen Howard in 1912, the San Francisco Civic Center is considered in both design and materials one of the finest achievements of the American reformist City Beautiful movement, an urban design movement that began more than a century ago. Haas meticulously unravels the Civic Center’s story of perseverance and dysfunction, providing an understanding and appreciation of this local and national treasure. He discusses why the Civic Center was built, how it became central to the urban planning initiatives of San Francisco in the early twentieth century, and how the site held onto its founders’ vision despite heated public debates about its function and achievement. He also delves into the vision for the future and related national trends in city planning and the architectural and art movements that influenced those trends. Riddled with inspiration and leadership as well as controversy, The San Francisco Civic Center, much like the complex itself, is a stunning manifestation of the confident spirit of one of America’s most dynamic and creative cities.




Intercultural Urbanism


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Cities today are paradoxical. They are engines of innovation and opportunity, but they are also plagued by significant income inequality and segregation by ethnicity, race, and class. These inequalities and segregations are often reinforced by the urban built environment: the planning of space and the design of architecture. This condition threatens attainment of wider social and economic prosperity. In this innovative new study, Dean Saitta explores questions of urban sustainability by taking an intercultural, trans-historical approach to city planning. Saitta uses a largely untapped body of knowledge—the archaeology of cities in the ancient world—to generate ideas about how public space, housing, and civic architecture might be better designed to promote inclusion and community, while also making our cities more environmentally sustainable. By integrating this knowledge with knowledge generated by evolutionary studies and urban ethnography (including a detailed look at Denver, Colorado, one of America’s most desirable and fastest growing ‘destination cities’ but one that is also experiencing significant spatial segregation and gentrification), Saitta’s book offers an invaluable new perspective for urban studies scholars and urban planning professionals.”




The American City


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The Denver Civic Center


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The Denver Artists Guild


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In 1928, the newly organized Denver Artists Guild held its inaugural exhibition in downtown Denver. Little did the participants realize that their initial effort would survive the Great Depression and World War II—and then outlive all of the group’s fifty-two charter members. The guild’s founders worked in many media and pursued a variety of styles. In addition to the oils and watercolors one would expect were masterful pastels by Elsie Haddon Haynes, photographs by Laura Gilpin, sculpture by Gladys Caldwell Fisher and Arnold Rönnebeck, ceramics by Anne Van Briggle Ritter and Paul St. Gaudens, and collages by Pansy Stockton. Styles included realism, impressionism, regionalism, surrealism, and abstraction. Murals by Allen True, Vance Kirkland, John E. Thompson, Louise Ronnebeck, and others graced public and private buildings—secular and religious—in Colorado and throughout the United States. The guild’s artists didn’t just contribute to the fine and decorative arts of Colorado; they enhanced the national reputation of the state. Then, in 1948, the Denver Artists Guild became the stage for a great public debate pitting traditional against modern. The twenty-year-old guild split apart as modernists bolted to form their own group, the Fifteen Colorado Artists. It was a seminal moment: some of guild’s artists became great modernists, while others remained great traditionalists. Enhanced by period photographs and reproductions of the founding members’ works, The Denver Artists Guild chronicles a vibrant yet overlooked chapter of Colorado’s cultural history. The book includes a walking tour of guild members’ paintings and sculptures viewable in Denver and elsewhere in Colorado, by Leah Naess and author Stan Cuba.




Denver Municipal Facts


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Municipal Facts


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Municipal Facts


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Library of Congress Subject Headings


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