Building the Cold War
Subtitle: Hilton International Hotels and Modern Architecture
Edition: New Ed edition
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
Published: March 2, 2004
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 272
ISBN-13: 9780226894201
Subjects: Houses, apartments, flats, etc; Postwar period, 1945 to c 2000; Architecture; General; History / General
First sentence: The city. The advertisement designed to promote the new Istanbul Hilton shortly after its opening in 1955 features a wash drawing by J. Hammer (see frontispiece and fig.1).
Description: "In postwar Europe and the Middle East, Hilton hotels were quite literally "little Americas." For American businessmen and tourists, a Hilton Hotel - with the comfortable familiarity of an English-speaking staff, a restaurant that served cheeseburgers and milkshakes, trans-Atlantic telephone lines, and, most important, air-conditioned modernity - offered a respite from the disturbingly alien. For impoverished local populations, these same features lent the Hilton a utopian aura.

The Hilton was a space of luxury and desire, a space that realized, permanently and prominently, the new and powerful presence of the United States." "Building the Cold War examines the architectural means by which the Hilton was written into the urban topographies of the major cities of Europe and the Middle East as an effective representation of the United States."--BOOK JACKET.