Description: Professional portfolio of Alexander Benjamin Craghead
photography (50451) writing (6162) geography (431) vernacular architecture (8) urban geography (7) cultural geography (4) cultural landscape studies (1) j.b. jackson (1) arhitectural history (1) landscape studies (1)
South Portland, on the edge of downtown, is perhaps the most potent example of how architecture makes the image of the city. At first a transitional neighborhood, the area became the site of the city's first implemented urban renewal project, South Auditorium. More than eighty acres were condemned and cleared by the then-new Portland Development Commission. The resulting buildings introduced a new, modernist form of urbanism that forever changed the city. While historians sometimes discuss South Auditorium
This talk will place a significant emphasis on four distinct ways that architecture in South Portland both shaped, and was shaped by, notions of what makes the good city in the postwar era. Opportunism and architectural anxieties led to urban renewal, and within the context of national trends and regional rivalries, Portland's civic leaders sought to make South Auditorium a re-founding that would change the city's image both for itself and for the outside world. Throughout, architecture was virtually person
This talk is in conjunction with the exhibit South Portland and the Long Shadow of Urban Renewal . To register, click here .