New York: identità, mutazioni, percezioni

In New York, the intertwining of architecture and identity, based on the business sense and on the image, has always been indissoluble. Since the seventies of the nineteenth century, the so-called “city of the anarchies” prepares a believable mis en scene of the nation’s spirit with the spectacular growth of its buildings. Referring to the number of new constructions between 1870 and 1905, the maga- zine «American Architect» publishes impressive numbers, an av- erage of 2,694 per year (with a minimum peak in 1873 of 1,311 and a maximum of 4,894 in 1899). The paper analyzes how, in the space of a century, the perceptions of urban identity have changed, and re-reads the cultural meanings of the image of certain buildings or “iconic” places, interpreting them in the light of their ability of pro- ducing change, even when – once destroyed – only memory remains.