Impossible Heights: Skyscrapers, Flight, and the Master Builder

Description

Demonstrating how aerial movement and height intersect with popular "superman" discourses of the time, Adnan Morshed reveals the relationship between architecture, art, science, and interwar pop culture. Featuring a marvelous array of never before published illustrations, this richly textured study of utopian imaginings illustrates America's propulsion into a new cultural consciousness.

Adnan Morshed is associate professor of architecture and architectural history at the Catholic University of America.

"Impossible Heights is an original account of the American fascination with the skyscraper and the airplane and the enthusiasm for the new perspective on high from which people surveyed the city and landscape. Adnan Morshed examines the intersections between intellectual biography, visuality, and cultural history and brings together the 'art of architecture' with mass culture and spectatorship. In doing so, he illuminates 'the aesthetics of ascension' as a widely shared cultural phenomenon that characterized the interwar period." -Gail Fenske, author of The Skyscraper and the City: The Woolworth Building and the Making of Modern New York "A valuable contribution to the tradition of scholarship on aerial perspective and the history of visuality by focusing upon the interwar period and the American fascination with aviation and skyscrapers."-CHOICE "Impossible Heights. . . offers a site of rich cultural exploration regarding the architectural history of flight."-Science Fiction Studies "Impossible Heights is driven by extensive archival research presented in clear, accessible prose capable of engaging architectural historians as well as readers intrigued by the twentieth century's unquenchable reach for the skies. In a fascinating read that is enhanced with over a hundred images, Morshed's Impossible Heights brings to life this period of spectacular vision for the American metropolis."-Journal of American Studies