A spare Quaker settlement and transportation crossroads at its founding, High Point, North Carolina, has grown into one of the state's leading industrial centers. Reflecting the city's growth and influence is an architectural inventory representative of High Point's civic pride and cultural sophistication. Within the city limits lies an architectural treasure-trove, representing nearly every popular style since the city was founded, including designs by nationally recognized architects and planners. The City of High Point is proud to share this remarkable collection, published here for the first time.
Established in 1859, High Point was located at the highest point on the rail line between Charlotte and Goldsboro. The early growth of the city was due to it being a crossroads of the Plank Road and railroad, making it a transportation hub. Known as the furniture capital of the world, High Point has always been a manufacturing center, also specializing in textiles and tobacco. High Point is the only city in North Carolina located within four counties: Davidson, Forsyth, Guilford, and Randolph. Today, the world s largest furnishings market is held each spring and fall, drawing over 70,000 people. High Point showcases the rich manufacturing and community history of this North Carolina Triad city."
A gorgeously illustrated survey of chinoiserie from the 18th century to today Chinoiserie is a term for Western art and design inspired by a largely invented vision of China. Marco Polo's sensational account of his visit to the exotic East in the 13th century sparked a fascination with China that reached a fever pitch in the 18th century and continues to this day. Art historian and artist Aldous Bertram has long been captivated by chinoiserie. Dragons & Pagodas is organized by theme, including porcelain, color and pattern, flora, fauna, and architecture. Each chapter is bursting with images ranging from grand European summer palaces and whimsical pagoda follies to charming details of screens, porcelain figurines, and ornate plasterwork. Complete with Bertram's own chinoiserie-inspired watercolors and collages, Dragons & Pagodas is an irresistible confection and an example of chinoiserie in its own right. -Cloth bound with edge stain
A unique and engaging account of local urban decision-making within the globalizing world High Point, North Carolina, is known as the “Furniture Capital of the World.” Once a manufacturing stronghold, most of its furniture factories have closed over the past forty years, with production shipped off to low-wage countries. Yet as manufacturing left, the city tightened its hold on a biannual global exposition that serves as the world’s furniture fashion runway. At the High Point Market, visitors from more than one hundred nations traverse twelve million square feet of meticulous design. Downtown buildings—once courthouses, movie theaters, post offices, and gas stations—are now chic showroom spaces, even as many sit empty between each exposition. In Showroom City, John Joe Schlichtman applies an ethnographic lens to the global exposition’s relationship with High Point after it defeated rival Chicago in the 1960s and established itself as the world’s dominant furniture center. In recent decades, following trends in global finance, private equity firms were increasingly behind downtown High Point’s real estate transactions, coordinated by buyers far removed from the region. Then, in one massive transaction in 2011, a firm funded by Bain Capital purchased every major showroom building, and the majority of downtown real estate was under one owner. Showroom City is a story of exclusionary growth and unchecked development, of a city flailing to fill the void left by its dwindling factories. But beyond that Schlichtman engages the general lessons behind both High Point’s deindustrialization and its stunning reinvention as a furniture fashion, merchandising, and design node. With great nuance, he delves deeply to reveal how power operates locally and how citizens may affirm, exploit, influence, and resist the takeover of their community.
While tracing the important developments in industrial architecture over a one-hundred-year period, she demonstrates that as the United States became an industrialized nation, the goals pursued in industrial architecture remained straightforward and constant even as the means to achieve them changed.
"This handsome volume features the exquisitely refined and tailored yet inviting and comfortable interiors by the husband-and-wife design duo Jesse Carrier and Mara Miller"--
A sweeping chronicle of Jewish life in the Tar Heel State from colonial times to the present, this beautifully illustrated volume incorporates oral histories, original historical documents, and profiles of fascinating individuals. The first comprehensive social history of its kind, Down Home demonstrates that the story of North Carolina Jews is attuned to the national story of immigrant acculturation but has a southern twist. Keeping in mind the larger southern, American, and Jewish contexts, Leonard Rogoff considers how the North Carolina Jewish experience differs from that of Jews in other southern states. He explores how Jews very often settled in North Carolina's small towns, rather than in its large cities, and he documents the reach and vitality of Jewish North Carolinians' participation in building the New South and the Sunbelt. Many North Carolina Jews were among those at the forefront of a changing South, Rogoff argues, and their experiences challenge stereotypes of a society that was agrarian and Protestant. More than 125 historic and contemporary photographs complement Rogoff's engaging epic, providing a visual panorama of Jewish social, cultural, economic, and religious life in North Carolina. This volume is a treasure to share and to keep. Published in association with the Jewish Heritage Foundation of North Carolina, Down Home is part of a larger documentary project of the same name that will include a film and a traveling museum exhibition, to be launched in June 2010.
