Manhattan Atmospheres: Architecture, the Interior Environment, and Urban Crisis By David Gissen University of Minnesota Press,

What does an air conditioner in Lower Manhattan have to do with global movements of capital? Can the area around Central Park provide an adequate stand-in for the banks of the Nile River? In Manhattan Atmospheres: Architecture, the Interior Environment, and Urban Crisis, architectural historian David Gissen offers a few possible responses to those questions by closely examining seemingly non-descript technologies of environmental control within Manhattan’s interiors. These technologies control the temperature and humidity and filter air, but rather than merely describing technological advances, Gissen explores how these interiors from high-rise apartments in Washington Heights to trading desks on Wall Street participated in broader social transformations in the city over two decades starting in the late 1960s. During the years of New York City’s major financial difficulties and urban unrest, these new forms of environmental control and maintenance provided a means to not only keep out pollution, noise, and other urban annoyances, but also contributed to a new vision of urban life.

A major feature of this new vision consisted of separating well-maintained interior environments from any sign of the exterior strife. Gissen emphasizes some of the ways that implementing technologies for environmental amelioration helped produce distinctive new ways to create physical segregation. This was the case with the Ford Foundation’s headquarters in Midtown, completed in 1968 and designed by Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates, with Dan Kiley as landscape architect. The sky-lighted 200,000-cubic-foot atrium of the Ford Foundation filled with 20,000 plants acted as the central visual representation of the foundation’s primary claim to esteem: the expansion of innovative agricultural landscapes around the world, particularly in developing nations. But in Midtown, in the eyes of one planner, the atrium became a barrier “between the sealed environment of a modern office and the increasingly harsh and uncontrolled urban landscape outside.” In contrast to its location near the traffic and pollution of the Queensboro Bridge and a ConEdison electrical generator, the atrium’s leafy environs showed off the possibilities for an alternative through the power of environmental control. 

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