AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE MODELS

American architecture has never been modest in its ambitions. In little more than a century it produced the skyscraper, the glass house, the drive-in, the stadium, the roadside diner and the interstate — a built environment unlike anything Europe had seen, shaped by different land, different money and a different relationship with the idea of starting from scratch.

Our American collection reflects that breadth across more than twenty-five models, from New York and Chicago to Miami, Los Angeles, Boston, Washington and beyond. The Flatiron Building and the Empire State represent the first great age of the Manhattan skyline; 550 Madison Avenue and the Lescaze House bracket the century that followed, from International Style to Postmodern provocation. The Farnsworth House in Illinois and Philip Johnson's Glass House in Connecticut are objects apart: glass and steel pavilions stripped to their structural essence, made as models that reward the same close attention the buildings themselves demand.

Elsewhere in the collection you'll find the Cincinnati Union Terminal's spectacular Art Deco dome, the Hollywood Bowl's shell amphitheatre, Fenway Park, the Capitol Records Building in Los Angeles, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial and Postcard Row in San Francisco. And the cityscape maps of New York, Chicago and Washington DC offer a different way in entirely — the density and the grid of three great American cities,