"New York in Postcards is not conventional scholarship, or even a conventional kind of illustrated history, it offers something that these types of books cannot. It is at once an architectural history of New York, and a history of ways of seeing New York.”
[Paul Goldberger, Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic for The New Yorker, in his essay in this book]

This book presents a unique collection of postcards of New York City. With more than 900 vintage cards spanning a whole century, it attests to the city’s urban development and shows its most beautiful buildings and landmarks in the larger context of architectural and social history.

The Andreas Adam Collection

The collection as a whole comprises the 4,000 postcards of New York on which this book is based, some 1,500 postcards of other American cities—Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, cityscapes, skyscrapers, and hotels etc.—and some 900 books and periodicals (mostly about New York, but a few about Chicago and other American cities), some of which are extremely rare. To these can be added around a hundred other rare exhibits, such as engravings, photographs, posters etc.—most of which are of New York. The compass of the collection is such that it covers the history of the American skyscraper from its beginnings up to ca. 1980 as well as the history of New York’s urban development—and to a lesser extent that of Chicago—from its origins in the early seventeenth century onwards. The collection has already gone on show in museums and has invariably met with a very positive media resonance.

The value of the collection resides not only in the very large number of exhibits, but also in their thematic organization. Thanks to this systematic approach, it also provides a record of how printing techniques and the representation of urban development in the media have changed over the decades.

Andreas Adam, born 1945, graduated in architecture from the Swiss Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) in 1971. After practicing for two years in London, he founded his own firm of architects in Zurich in 1976 and since then has worked on a wide range of projects both in Switzerland and abroad. In addition to his building projects and photographic works, he has published extensively and has curated exhibitions and audiovisual presentations on urban history and image perception. He is also an active painter and draftsman.

Paul Goldberger is the architecture critic for The New Yorker, where since 1997 he has written the magazine’s celebrated „Sky Line“ column. He also holds the Joseph Urban Chair in Design and Architecture at The New School in Manhattan. He began his career at the New York Times, where in 1984 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism. He is the author of several books, most recently: Why Architecture Matters, and Building Up and Tearing Down: Reflections on the Age of Architecture.

Thomas Kramer is managing director of the Swiss publishing house Scheidegger & Spiess. He was arts and culture editor for Weltwoche and Tages-Anzeiger and has published several books on film history and architecture. In 2007, he co-edited Eduard Spelterini: Photographs of a Pioneer Balloonist together with Hilar Stadler.

Kent Lydecker, art historian and museum professional, has held senior leadership posts at the National Gallery of Art (Washington), the Art Institute of Chicago, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York). He lectures and writes on the history of art, architecture, and culture, from the Renaissance to the present. He holds a doctorate in Art History from The Johns Hopkins University, where he teaches in the Museum Studies Program.