During Manhattan's crisis years between the 1960s and early 1980s, the city's great park networks, sanitarian projects of light, air, and water, and its monumental public works were falling apart. Images of flooded streets, blackened air, collapsed highways, and burning buildings characterize our understanding of the city's landscape throughout this period. At the same time, architects reimagined interior spaces as a response to these urban disasters. David Gissen reveals that a new chapter in New York's environmental history was unfolding inside the city's gleaming late-modern...

During Manhattan's crisis years between the 1960s and early 1980s, the city's great park networks, sanitarian projects of light, air, and water, and its monumental public works were falling apart. Images of flooded streets, blackened air, collapsed highways, and burning buildings characterize our understanding of the city's landscape throughout this period. At the same time, architects reimagined interior spaces as a response to these urban disasters. David Gissen reveals that a new chapter in New York's environmental history was unfolding inside the city's gleaming late-modern...