Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present

Culture, Politics, and the Built Environment

by Irene Cheng (editor), Charles L Davis II (Editor), Mabel O Wilson (Editor)

Although race—a concept of human difference that establishes hierarchies of power and domination—has played a critical role in the development of modern architectural discourse and practice since the Enlightenment, its influence on the discipline remains largely underexplored. This volume offers a welcome and long-awaited intervention for the field by shining a spotlight on constructions of race and their impact on architecture and theory in Europe and North America and across various global contexts since the eighteenth century. Challenging us to write race back into architectural history, contributors confront how racial thinking has intimately shaped some of the key concepts of modern architecture and culture over time, including freedom, revolution, character, national and indigenous style, progress, hybridity, climate, representation, and radicalism. By analyzing how architecture has intersected with histories of slavery, colonialism, and inequality—from eighteenth-century neoclassical governmental buildings to present-day housing projects for immigrants— Race and Modern Architecture challenges, complicates, and revises the standard association of modern architecture with a universal project of emancipation and progress.

Genres: Architecture, Nonfiction, History, Race, Design

424 pages, Hardcover

Published May 26, 2020

Reviews

[aerialxav]

Chapter on Virginia state capitol

[Mitchell · Rating 5 out of 5]

1 Notes on the Virginia Capitol
Nation, Race, and Slavery in Jefferson’s America
Mabel O. Wilson

3 Drawing the Color Line
Silence and Civilization from Jefferson to Mumford
Reinhold Martin

7 Structural Racialism in Modern Architectural Theory Irene Cheng

Race and Miscegenation in Early Twentieth-Century Mexican
Architecture
Luis E. Carranza

11 Erecting the Skyscraper, Erasing Race

16 Black and Blight
Andrew Herscher

17 And Thus Not Glowing Brightly
Noah Purifoy’s Junk Modernism
Lisa Uddin

18 Open Architecture, Rightlessness, and Citizens-to-Come
Esra Akcan