2026 Abbott Lowell Cummings Award

Alexander Wood’s Building the Metropolis: Architecture, Construction, and Labor in New York City, 1888–1935 (University of Chicago Press, 2025) is a richly researched, beautifully written, and deeply humane account of the development and fabrication—the literal building and construction—of the world’s greatest twentieth-century city, in the half-century that it assumed its modern form, still evident a century later.

One of the most scrutinized places in the world, the literature on New York’s buildings and landscapes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century abounds with studies of its mansions and apartment houses, tenements and slums, railroad stations and theaters, skyscrapers and working waterfronts, subways and bridges, parks and parkways. Wood brilliantly widens his focus to the entirety of the city (opening with an early panoramic photo) while narrowing it to attend to the materiality, labor, financing, and politics that produced it (illustrated with photos of people at work building the city). In doing so, he renders even the most familiar building types, such as tall office buildings, novel, by framing them not as singular examples of architectural ingenuity, engineering prowess, or corporate power, but as generic spaces generated by myriad actors attempting to address the problem of high demand for commercial space in the globe’s financial and manufacturing center. In the arena of housing, by far the most common land-use in any city, Building the Metropolis discusses Manhattan’s brownstones, hotels, and apartments, but also the tenements, elevator flats, and one– and two-family houses that accommodated millions of new residents in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens, including in scores of complete subdivisions in the 1920s.

In two of the most unexpected chapters, Wood turns to the subterranean and to demolition. To build ever taller buildings with ever more elaborate mechanical systems, and to keep the ever more congested city connected, the building of the metropolis required turning Manhattan into the country’s largest mine, with more dynamite used than in the largest actual mines in the U.S. West and millions of tons of rock, earth, and debris painstakingly excavated and removed by a workforce of thousands. To build the city up, especially in already settled sections of Manhattan, a huge new industry evolved, “house wreckers,” whose firms bought buildings then made money selling brick, sash, floorboards, glazing, and more, and became last-stop guardians, in their many warehouses, of the city’s architectural patrimony, even for elements too out of fashion to sell to decorators, antique dealers, and Bohemian-minded homeowners.

With great care and attention to the human experience of construction, including labor, visual chaos, and noise; the manufacture and circulation of building materials, most of which were produced within fifty miles of City Hall; new construction techniques and technologies; city politics of building; labor unions; and the texture and everyday life of myriad ordinary buildings and neighborhoods—plus an appendix of building permit data—Building the Metropolis offers a highly original, often breathtaking perch from which to view the production of the built environment, high and low, that sets a new standard for the empirical analysis and interpretation of place.

Committee: Matthew Gordon Lasner, Chair, Anna Andrzejewski, Cynthia Falk