[ebooks] Anarchy and Art: From the Paris Commune to the Fall of the Berlin Wall by Allan Antliff at Arts-Photography

Description

An important part of the New Deal; the Modernization Credit Plan helped transform urban business districts and small-town commercial strips across 1930s America; but it has since been almost completely forgotten. In Modernizing Main Street; Gabrielle Esperdy uncovers the cultural history of the hundreds of thousands of modernized storefronts that resulted from the little-known federal provision that made billions of dollars available to shop owners who wanted to update their facades.Esperdy argues that these updated storefronts served a range of complex purposes; such as stimulating public consumption; extending the New Deal’s influence; reviving a stagnant construction industry; and introducing European modernist design to the everyday landscape. She goes on to show that these diverse roles are inseparable; woven together not only by the crisis of the Depression; but also by the pressures of bourgeoning consumerism. As the decade’s two major cultural forces; Esperdy concludes; consumerism and the Depression transformed the storefront from a seemingly insignificant element of the built environment into a potent site for the physical and rhetorical staging of recovery and progress.