10 That Changed America

Episode Guide

10 Buildings That Changed America Explore 10 trend-setting works of that have shaped and inspired the American landscape. These aren’t just historic structures by famous architects – they’re buildings with global influence that have dramatically changed the way people live, work, and play. Hosted by Geoffrey Baer, the program features striking videography, rare archival images, distinctive animation, and interviews with some of the most insightful historians and architects (including and ). This is a journey that will take viewers inside these groundbreaking works of art and engineering. It is also a journey back in time, to discover the shocking, funny, and even sad stories of how these buildings came to be. And ultimately, it is a journey inside the imaginations of ten daring architects who set out to change the way we live, work, worship, learn, shop, and play.

Buildings profiled include Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall in , a Prairie-style home by , Henry Ford’s first Model T factory, Dulles International Airport, and the Trinity Church in designed by H.H. Richardson.

10 Homes That Changed America He was a successful lawyer, a violinist, the father of American archaeology, author of the Declaration of Independence, President of the United States, and a self-taught architect, who helped established his new nation’s sense of style. ’s designs for the and the University of Virginia became models for statehouses and college campuses across the country. But it was his own home – inspired by classical temples, and elevated on an idyllic hilltop in Virginia – that Jefferson called his “essay in architecture.” was more than just an architectural statement; it was also a political one. While Jefferson’s peers looked to England for inspiration, he rejected the influence of our colonizers, and instead embraced the forms of ancient Greece and Rome.

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10 Homes that Changed America is a show about ten such architecturally adventuresome dwellings, which provided Americans with more than just a “roof over their heads” – these homes elevated living to an art form. The homes include a pre-Columbian “apartment building” that has been inhabited continuously for 1,000 years, a sustainable prefabricated home designed by a pioneering woman architect, and a public housing project in Washington, D.C. that has offered a doorway to the middle class for thousands of African-Americans. We’ll meet the talented architects who brought these buildings to life, along with their often-eccentric clients, and the lucky individuals who live in these historic homes today. This show will not only be a primer in domestic architecture, it will also offer us a lesson in the history of American domestic life, as the evolving design of these homes over time reveals our changing relationship with nature, technology, and each other.

10 Parks That Changed America Most looked at the River in the 1930’s and saw a polluted, muddy stream running through a half-abandoned downtown that was crippled by the Great Depression. But architect Robert Harvey Hugman envisioned something completely different: the “Venice of Texas” – a canal-like waterway that would be traversed by pleasure boats and lined with miles of meandering walkways and stone bridges. It would take more than fifty years, nearly a billion dollars, and a series of ugly political battles, but today Hugman’s dream has become a reality. The San Antonio River Walk includes 2,000 acres of urban parkland dotted with native grasses and trees, and fronted by hundreds of cafes and hotels, which draws more than nine million tourists a year.

10 Parks that Changed America is the story of ten visionaries like Robert Harvey Hugman, who took open canvases of God-forsaken land, and transformed them into serene spaces that offer city dwellers a respite from the hustle and bustle of urban life. This is truly an American story: while European cities were traditionally defined by their royal palaces and private hunting grounds, our cities were often built around these democratic, public spaces. From the elegant squares of Savannah, Georgia, to a park built over a freeway in Seattle, to the more recent in New York, each story introduces us to the heroes who brought these parks to life, and the villains who preferred to exploit the land for private enterprise. Over the course of the hour, we’ll discover the evolution of our nation’s city parks, and we’ll learn the history of landscape architecture – an American-born art in which human beings try their best to mimic nature.

10 Towns That Changed America George Pullman had already built a business empire selling luxury railroad cars, but he wasn’t content to stop there—he wanted to build an entire city. As his Pullman Palace Car company grew in the 1880’s and land prices in rose, Pullman hired architect Solon Spencer Beman to design a 4,000 acre town from scratch just south of the city. Soon Pullman had moved his enormous production facilities and relocated his 8,000 employees and their families to his

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newly-named Pullman, Illinois. Visitors streamed in from across the country to see Pullman’s “all-brick city,” where the tycoon kept a close eye on his workers’ off-hours activities by prohibiting alcohol and immoral behavior. But despite the moralistic veneer, Pullman ran his town like a business, charging steep rents on every house and shop, including the church. A violent strike would follow, which would nearly destroy the company...and the town.

George Pullman wasn’t the first—or the last—American to design an entire town: , Pennsylvania, Levittown, New York, and Seaside, Florida are just a few of the planned communities featured in 10 Towns That Changed America. Historically, most cities, towns, and suburbs have evolved organically over time—their design resulting from the disparate actions of individuals. But these ten experimental towns were designed (or redesigned) from the ground up, by visionary architects, corporations, and citizens, who sought to change the lives of residents using architecture, design, and urban planning. Some of these visionaries were driven by an ideology, others were trying to serve their own financial interests, but all had one thing in common: they believed in the power of our built environment to change the way we live.

10 Monuments That Changed America It was often just a great man on a horse—in Europe they celebrated centuries of history by building monuments that were rarely imaginative, and never democratic. But here in America we came up with creative, populist approaches to commemorating our past. In this episode we’ll explore the stories behind ten wholly-original American monuments, and the historical moments that inspired them. We’ll visit little-known locations like the Robert Gould Shaw and Massachusetts 54th Regiment Memorial, a sculptural masterpiece dedicated to one of the first African-American units to serve in the Civil War; and we’ll explore the surprising stories behind American favorites like the Statue of Liberty, which was devised as a propaganda piece by French republican politicians. It’s an episode full of epic battles over how to remember our past: from Maya Lin’s fight to design the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial, to the ongoing controversies over confederate monuments across the South. We’ll discover pivotal moments in the evolution of American monuments when daring artists found new ways to honor our history.

10 Streets That Changed America This episode begins and ends on Broadway in New York. We’ll trace the street’s 400-year evolution: from Native American trail, to Dutch trading route, to the home of America’s first public transit service, to an electrically-lighted theater district known as the “Great White Way”. At the end of program we’ll see how Broadway has become the poster child for the “complete streets” movement, in which automobiles take a back seat to more sustainable forms of transit. Elsewhere in this episode we’ll ride from Boston to New York on a dirt “highway”, which was created for the nation’s first mail carriers. In New Orleans we’ll take America’s oldest streetcar line out to some of the nation’s first suburbs, and in Detroit we’ll drive a Model T along America’s first mile of concrete-paved road. We’ll explore a car-friendly street created by a 1920’s entrepreneur who predicted that Los Angeles would be dominated by the automobile; and

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take a horse and carriage on a Brooklyn parkway that was built on the proposition that streets should be scenic. It’s an episode about how streets have connected the nation, divided communities, and changed the way Americans live, work, and shop.

10 Modern Marvels That Changed America It’s a show about arrogant builders who’ve scoffed at the laws of nature. They’ve defied the naysayers—and sometimes even gravity—by undertaking these amazing feats of engineering. Each story in this episode includes a fun physics lesson and a tale of human folly. We begin at the , a 363-mile long man-made waterway that was built in the 19th century by thousands of laborers using primitive hand tools. Then we’ll show how professional engineers connected our growing nation by building magnificent bridges, intricate rail networks, and a continent-wide system of freeways. And we’ll discover the extreme measures that engineers have taken to deliver water from distant rivers to our kitchen sinks. It’s easy to take these modern marvels for granted. After all, we usually access our roads, bridges, and drinking water effortlessly. But behind many of our daily conveniences is a clever engineer, and a remarkable story.

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