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"Without Blare of Trumpets" provides a fresh look at the twentieth-century open shop movement. It reveals the central role played in that movement by the National Erectors' Association and by its commissioner, Walter Drew. Fine presents an absorbing account of the union-organized dynamiting campaign and illuminates the critical behind-the-scenes part played by Drew in one of the greatest labor trials in all of American history. This important book adds to our understanding of the building and construction industry employer resistance to unionism, the role of the government in industrial relations, and the impact of the New Deal labor-management relations. "Without Blare of Trumpets" makes a major contribution to the fields of labor history, business history, and industrial relations. It will be of interest to students and scholars in many areas of American history, and to all those interested in the welfare of American jobs and American workers. Sidney Fine is Andrew Dickson White Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Michigan, and the author of numerous books and articles.

"John Tishman is a true pioneer in the Construction Management industry. Through his CM leadership, some of America's most well-known buildings have been brought to successful completion."
---Bruce D'Agostino, president and chief executive, Construction Management Association of America

"Building Tall will provide readers with insights into John Tishman's career as a visionary engineer, landmark builder, and great businessman. Responsible for some of the construction world's most magnificent projects, John is one of the preeminent alumni in the history of Michigan Engineering. His perspectives have helped me throughout my time as dean, and his impact will influence generations of Construction Management professionals and students."
---David C. Munson, Jr., Robert J. Vlasic Dean of Engineering, University of Michigan
 
In this memoir, University of Michigan graduate John L. Tishman recounts the experiences and rationale that led him to create the entirely new profession now recognized and practiced as Construction Management. It evolved from his work as the construction lead of the "owner/builder" firm Tishman Realty and Construction, and his personal role as hands-on Construction Manager in the building of an astonishing array of what were at the time the world's tallest and most complex projects.  These include

• The world's first three 100-story towers---the original "twin towers" of the   World Trade Center in Manhattan and the Hancock Tower in Chicago.              
• The Epcot Center at Disney World.
• The Renaissance Center in Detroit.
• New York's Madison Square Garden.

Tishman interweaves the stories behind the construction of these and many other important buildings and projects with personal reminiscences of his dealings with Henry Ford, Jr., Disney's Michael Eisner, casino magnate Steve Wynn, and many others into a practical history of the field of Construction Management, which he pioneered.

This book will be of interest not only to a general public interested in the stories and personalities behind many of the most iconic construction projects of the post–World War II period in the United States but to students of engineering and architecture and members of the new field of Construction Management.

A sweeping history of New York that chronicles the construction of one of the world’s great cities.
 
Between the 1880s and the 1930s, New York City experienced explosive growth as nearly a million buildings, dozens of bridges and tunnels, hundreds of miles of subway lines, and thousands of miles of streets were erected to meet the needs of an ever-swelling population. This landscape—jagged with skyscrapers, rattling with the sound of mass transit, alive with people—made the city world-famous.
 
Building the Metropolis offers a revelatory look at this era of urban development by asking, “Who built New York, and how?” Focusing on the work of architects, builders, and construction workers, Alexander Wood chronicles the physical process of the city’s rapid expansion. New York’s towering buildings and busy thoroughfares aren’t just stylish or structural marvels, Wood shows, but the direct result of the many colorful personalities who worked in one of the city’s largest industries. This development boom drew on the resources of the whole community and required money, political will, creative vision, entrepreneurial drive, skilled workmanship, and hard physical labor. Wood shows this to be an even larger story as well. As cities became nodes in a regional, national, and global economy, the business of construction became an important motor of economic, political, and social development. While they held drastically different views on the course of urban growth, machine politicians, reformers, and radicals alike were all committed to city building on an epic scale.
 
Drawing on resources that include city archives and the records of architecture firms, construction companies, and labor unions, Building the Metropolis tells the story of New York in a way that’s epic, lively, and utterly original.

In Concrete Dreams Nicholas D’Avella examines the changing social and economic lives of buildings in the context of a construction boom following Argentina's political and economic crisis of 2001. D’Avella tells the stories of small-scale investors who turned to real estate as an alternative to a financial system they no longer trusted, of architects who struggled to maintain artistic values and political commitments in the face of the ongoing commodification of their work, and of residents-turned-activists who worked to protect their neighborhoods and city from being overtaken by new development. Such forms of everyday engagement with buildings, he argues, produce divergent forms of value that persist in tension with hegemonic forms of value. In the dreams attached to built environments and the material forms in which those dreams are articulated—from charts and graphs to architectural drawings, urban planning codes, and tango lyrics—D’Avella finds a blueprint for building livable futures in which people can survive alongside and even push back against the hegemony of capitalism.

A study of the forces that shaped Jakarta into the city it is today.

Indonesian writer Seno Gumira Ajidarma has called Jakarta a city of a thousand dimensions. A megacity of 30 million under threat from rising sea levels and temperatures, Jakarta and its resilient residents improvise and thrive. This book teases out some of the dimensions that have given shape to contemporary Jakarta, including the city’s expanded flexibility in accommodating capital and labor, and the consistent lack of planning that can be understood as a result of both politics and the poetics of governing in the region. Jakarta is essential reading for those seeking to understand one of Asia's most dynamic cities.

How building codes shaped material, social, and environmental landscapes in American cities.

Almost every American city contains neighborhoods dominated by wood frame construction—light, cheap, combustible, and requiring the lowest upfront investment of labor and material in the building industry. Known as a Type V (five) construction in the terminology of building codes, these buildings became ubiquitous in the American urban landscape thanks to the abundance of timber, housing affordability aspirations, and the adoption of a uniform code.

In The Type V City, Jeana Ripple examines the social and spatial history of building codes and material patterns in five cities—New York, Tampa, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Seattle—to reframe the stories of America’s building priorities, methods, negotiations, and assumptions. By examining the development of building materials and codes alongside the environmental, social, economic, and political context of each city’s development, Ripple reveals previously overlooked connections between the power structures underpinning regulatory evolution and the impacts that lay just beyond the frame of city builders’ priorities. Handsomely illustrated and informed by both archival research and insights enabled by contemporary data analysis, The Type V City critiques the homogenous construction practices underlying US urbanization and raises pointed questions for future generations of data-driven city planners and architects.

The construction trades once provided unionized craftsmen a route to the middle class and a sense of pride and dignity often denied other blue-collar workers. Today, union members still earn wages and benefits that compare favorably to those of college graduates. But as union strength has declined over the last fifty years, a growing non-union sector offers lower compensation and more hazardous conditions, undermining the earlier tradition of upward mobility. Revitalization of the industry depends on unions shedding past racial and gender discriminatory practices, embracing organizing, diversity, and the new immigrant workforce, and preparing for technological changes.

Mark Erlich blends long-view history with his personal experience inside the building trades to explain one of our economy’s least understood sectors. Erlich’s multifaceted account includes the dynamics of the industry, the backdrop of union policies, and powerful stories of everyday life inside the trades. He offers a much-needed overview of construction’s past and present while exploring roads to the future.