Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes (Urban and Industrial Environments)
The corporate campuses, estates, and office parks that are the focus of this study have become a significant component of the American landscape since World War II. These white-collar business developments have been central in reshaping metropolitan settlement patterns and, with them, the nature of daily life for millions of people.Pastoral Capitalismis likely to be the major work on this subject -- essential reading for historians of architecture, landscape, and urbanism and also important for many architects, landscape architects, and planners.(Richard W. Longstreth, Director of Historic Preservation and Professor of American Studies, George Washington University)Louise Mozingo offers us the first serious look at the largest and most ambitious works of twentieth-century landscape architecture in the United States. If suburban bedroom communities represented 'white flight' from the city, suburban corporate campuses, estates, and office parks, visually appealing as they were, constituted a parallel middle-class flight from urban social diversity and the realities of industrial work.Pastoral Capitalismis the best of recent studies of the corporate landscape and an incisive history of the making of the contemporary American cultural landscape.(Dell Upton, Professor of Architectural History, UCLA)This book represents the first full-scale scholarly study of a widespread phenomenon in the American built environment--the suburban office park or corporate campus. This will be a significant addition to the growing field of suburban history. The book will be of interest to design professionals, historians of American culture and the built environment, and historians of suburbia.(Amy Lyford, Professor of Art History and the Visual Arts, Occidental College, author ofSurrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Post-World War I Reconstruction in France)Mozingo is no apologist for suburban corporate expansion, and in sketching out its history, builds to a conclusion not much different from many other critics of urban planning -- that sprawling development has reinforced an unsustainable dependency on cars…Mozingo has provided a backstory to the business park that weaves together corporate history, academic-commercial collaboration, and design innovation to fill in an unfairly overlooked chapter in the modern geography of life and work.(Anthony PalettaBookforum)