With many contributors and a significant number of entries, Encyclopedia of Urban America: The Cities and Suburbs details selected major cities, suburbs, people, places, concepts, contemporary issues, history, and development of urban America. Topics range from problems typically associated with urban life such as crime, pollution, and congestion to the arts and humanities, social concerns, religion, infrastructure, key individuals, and economic issues.

This definitive, first full-scale biography of Olmsted--famed designer of New York's Central Park--reveals him also as a brilliant political and social reformer.

Carr delves into the planning and motivations of the people who wanted to preserve America's scenic geography. He demonstrates that by drawing on historical antecedents, landscape architects and planners carefully crafted each addition to maintain maximum picturesque wonder. Tracing the history of landscape park design from British gardens up through the city park designs of Frederick Law Olmsted, Carr places national park landscape architecture within a larger historical context.

In 1928, Arthur A. Shurcliff (1870-1957) began what became one of the most important examples of the American Colonial Revival landscape--Colonial Williamsburg, a project that stretched into the 1940s and included town and highway planning as well as residential and institutional gardens. Elizabeth Hope Cushing, in this richly illustrated biography, traces Shurcliff's route from early years and planning work in Boston to his largest and most significant contribution to American landscape architecture.

This thoroughly illustrated classic study traces the history of the world-famous Chicago school of architecture from its beginnings with the functional innovations of William Le Baron Jenney and others to their imaginative development by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. The Chicago School of Architecture places the Chicago school in its historical setting, showing it at once to be the culmination of an iron and concrete construction and the chief pioneer in the evolution of modern architecture. It also assesses the achievements of the school in terms of the economic, social, and cultural growth of Chicago at the turn of the century, and it shows the ultimate meaning of the Chicago work for contemporary architecture. "A major contribution [by] one of the world's master-historians of building technique."—Reyner Banham, Arts Magazine "A rich, organized record of the distinguished architecture with which Chicago lives and influences the world."—Ruth Moore, Chicago Sun-Times