Lifted: A Cultural History of the Elevator
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.95 (645 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0814787169 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 309 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-08-25 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
"Interesting book. I would have given it 5 stars" according to Mark E. Interesting book. I would have given it 5 stars but there were not many illustrations and pictures which would have helped.. Five Stars Amazon Customer thoroughly enjoyable. Fascinating read about the uplifting elevatorand an excellent translation I'd never have thought that I would find a book about elevators so interesting. Lifted: A Cultural History of the Elevator by Andreas Bernard, translated by David Dollenmayer, made the technical aspects of elevators as well as their cultural importance a page-turner. I must commend the translator Dollenmayer, as the text flowed as natu
in Cultural Sciences from the Bauhaus University Weimar, and teaches cultural studies in Berlin and Lucerne, Switzerland.. He received his Ph.D. Andreas Bernard is editor of Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany’s largest daily newspaper
Whoever reads this book will view the world’s elevators with different eyes.”-Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung"Lifted is a spaciously researched and thought-out popular history. Andreas Bernard doesn’t provide any tips about elevator etiquette. He shows how modern films and novels frequently employed the elevator as a critical space for organizing narratives of city life. Bernard’s most insightful chapter identifies the elevator as the important trigger for producing fears of claustrophobia and of social mixing. For Bernard, the elevator is a Benjaminian street brought indoors and rotated on its axis: during the few seconds of ascent or descent, the perpetual ‘anaesthetising of attention’ allegedly required of the city-dweller becomes an acute anxiety."-London Revi
Before skyscrapers forever transformed the landscape of the modern metropolis, the conveyance that made them possible had to be created. The cramped elevator cabin itself served as a reflection of life in modern growing cities, as a space of simultaneous intimacy and anonymity, constantly in motion. In this elegant and fascinating book, Andreas Bernard explores how the appearance of this new element changed notions of verticality and urban space. Combining technological and architectural history with the literary and cinematic, Bernard opens up new ways of looking at the elevator--as a secular confessional when stalled between floors or as a recurring space in which couples fall in love. Rising upwards through modernity, Lifted takes the reader on a compelling ride through the history of the elevator. . While it may at first glance seem a modest innovation, it had wide-ranging effects, from fundamentally restructuring building design to reinforcing social class hierarchies by moving luxury apartments to upper levels, previously the domain of the lower classes. Invented in New York in the 1850s, the e