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Capital Speculations: Writing and Building Washington, D.C. (Becoming Modern: New Nineteenth-Century Studies) | 
 enlarge | Author: Sarah Luria
Publisher: New Hampshire
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
Buy New: $17.16
You Save: $8.84 (34%)
New (5) Used (6) from $13.85
Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 189878
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 232
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.8
ISBN: 158465502X
Dewey Decimal Number: 810.9357
EAN: 9781584655022
ASIN: 158465502X
Publication Date: November 4, 2005
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Product Description
In this lively study, Sarah Luria pursues the vital political connection between architecture and literature in the formation in 1791 of America's grand new capital city. City planners believed that designing Washington, D.C. as a physical model of the Constitution and its balance of powers would help citizens bond with the newly created nation. Although wildly ambitious, this design was made feasible through financial speculation. Dazzled by the plans for an "American Rome," citizens would buy up its empty lots and make the nation's capital their home. Luria demonstrates how political and financial speculation combined to build Washington and, once established, how the capital became a stage for the visions of subsequent reformers.
Luria examines five political reformers and the Washington sites they used to promote their ideas: George Washington and the design of the "Federal City"; Abraham Lincoln and the enlargement of the Capitol dome during the Civil War; Walt Whitman and the capital's Civil War hospitals; Frederick Douglass and his impressive estate overlooking the Capitol; and Henry Adams and the double house that he built with poet-statesman John Hay on Lafayette Square. Although each author's work describes a different dynamic relationship between text and physical space, all five combine political speculation and marketplace psychology. They construct their visions and attract investment in them through their novelty, boldness, and extravagant scale.
Clarifying the dynamic relations among discourse, economics, politics, and the built environment, Luria's book demonstrates how keenly architectural history is interwoven into American literary and political life.
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| Customer Reviews:
The Gnesis of a Capital January 13, 2006
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
This is a book that belongs on the coffee table of every thinking person living in or interested in the city of Washington. A masterfully researched history, it shows how the city's designers set out to capture the essence of America: a respect for tradition combined with the prospects of a limitless future. Streets laid out in a conventional grid represent the former, while diagonal avenues radiating outward, seemingly to the horizon, represent the latter.
Mistakenly, I had always thought that Washington's design was the brainchild of Peter Charles L'Enfant alone, but this fascinating history graphically illustrates how it evolved over the next century, influenced by the thoughts and writings of Henry Adams, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman, among others. Nor has that evolution ended. A growing Metro that stitches the city into its surroundings, and an ever-expanding Mall that honors our cultural diversity and the many who died to defend our liberties, stand as a welcome counterpoint to the political squabblings that dominate the daily headlines. Washington's architecture captures the spirit of America, and Dr. Luria's perceptive history brilliantly chronicles its evolution.
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