Building the Cold War
Subtitle: Hilton International Hotels and Modern Architecture
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
Published: July 1, 2001
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 272
ISBN-13: 9780226894195
Subjects: Architectural structure & design; Individual architects; Residential buildings, domestic buildings; Postwar period, 1945 to c 2000; Architecture; Criticism; History - Specific Styles; International Architecture - General; Architecture / Criticism; World - General; Architecture, Postmodern; Europe; History; Hotels; Middle East
First sentence: the first hill. Further asserting the ancient prominence of the eastern tip of the peninsula is Topkapi Palace, the successor of the Great Palace of the Byzantine emperors, and the mosque of Sultan Ahmet I, the Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia's magnificent pendant.
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."--Jacket.