From Settler Colonies to Black Utopias: the Dialectics of American Architecture in Black and White
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University at Buffalo, SUNY | School of Architecture and Planning ACSA DIVERSITY ACHIEVEMENT AWARD From Settler Colonies to Black Utopias: The Dialectics of American Architecture in Black and White Statement: The attached dossier outlines the range of activities the candidate (Charles L. Davis II) engaged during the 2019-20 academic year to promote racial equity and social justice within the discipline of architecture. These activities include publishing two academic books on race and architecture, hosting a symposium on the whiteness of American architectural history, serving on the advisory board of the Society of Architectural Historians to foster an affiliate group for people of color, and teaching new courses on race and architecture within a professional architecture program. Davis’ academic research is propelled by the dialectic established between the critique of whiteness in the disciplinary norms of Euroamerican architecture and a recovery of blackness in the historical contributions of people of color to modern architecture culture. In a general sense, Davis explores the former in academically peer-reviewed studies and the latter in experimental design courses and architectural criticism. Davis specializes in the historical integrations of race and style theory established within the paradigm of architectural organicism, or the philosophy of making that purported to translate the generative laws of nature into a rational process of design. During the nineteenth century, the notion that buildings possessed character provided architects with a lens for relating the buildings they designed to the populations they served. Davis argues that the exclusively white racial character of many canonical “American architecture” movements constitutes a material form of white cultural nationalism that rhetorically policed the boundaries of the American body politic. Davis’ interpretation challenges us to critique the racisms of our past in order to recover the alternative modern subjectivities that were established by people of color. While it begins by revisiting the urban black utopias that artists and architects invented in postwar Harlem, it provides a model for a wide variety of future projects. Books, Conferences and Public Programs on Race and Architecture In the nineteenth-century paradigm of architectural organicism, the notion that buildings possessed character provided architects with a lens for relating the buildings they designed to the populations they served. Advances in scientific race theory enabled designers to think of “race” and “style” as manifestations of natural law: just as biological processes seemed to inherently regulate the racial characters that made humans a perfect fit for their geographical contexts, architectural characters became a rational product of design. Parallels between racial and architectural characters provided a rationalist model of design that fashioned some of the most influential national building styles of the past, from the pioneering concepts of French structural rationalism and German tectonic theory to the nationalist associations of the Chicago Style, the Prairie Style, and the International Style. In Building Character, Davis traces the racial charge of the architectural writings of five modern theorists—Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Gottfried Semper, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and William Lescaze—to highlight the social, political, and historical significance of the spatial, structural, and ornamental elements of modern architectural styles. By investigating how race shapes historical meaning and cultural associations of architectural forms, and discourses, Davis makes an outstanding contribution to current debates in architectural history and theory. This book is a groundbreaking effort, an incomparable study. -- Mabel O. Wilson, Columbia University In this much-needed book. Charles Davis situates discourses of race and nationalism within the context of architectural history and historiography, bringing visibility to race and its impacts on architectural style and building typology. Building Character is an innovative and compelling exploration of the race concept as a fundamental issue within the study of modern architecture. -- Milton S. F. Curry, University of Southern California Awards Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, College Art Association (Short List) Modernist Studies Association First Book Prize (Short List) Grants Graham Foundation, Publication Grant ($10,000) Canadian Center for Architecture, Library Grant ($3,000) 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. This book will enlighten many. By exposing how modern architectural discourse and thought have been influenced quite heavily by racism, this critical and important scholarship sheds new light on the built environment. Race and Modern Architecture ultimately reveals how architecture and design have been silent partners in oppression in the United States and around the globe. -- Lee Bey, author of Southern Exposure: The Overlooked Architecture of Chicago's South Side Race and Modern Architecture challenges the suppression of race in canonical histories of modern architecture, revealing the discipline’s foundation on hierarchies of racial difference, its absorption of racial thought, and the racial origins of modernism’s narrative of universalism and progress. These incisive essays resonate beyond architectural history and reflect on the inextricable intertwining of race and modernism. -- Patricia Morton, University of California, Riverside [Race and Modern Architecture] represents a significant contribution that will aid scholars, educators, practitioners and students in better understanding the role of race in Western architecture and provide a much-needed corrective to the silence surrounding race in architectural education… For practitioners, this carefully edited history may fill in gaps in historical knowledge and illuminate racial injustices playing out in contemporary cities. Anyone interested in beginning these difficult conversations will find this book invaluable. -- Canadian Architect Grants Graham Foundation, Publication Grant ($10,000) “The Whiteness of American Architecture” was a one-day symposium in architectural history organized by the School of Architecture and Planning at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. This symposium is an outgrowth of the Race + Modern Architecture Project, an interdisciplinary workshop on the racial discourses of western architectural history from the Enlightenment to the present. Purpose and Theme: This symposium outlined a critical history of the white cultural nationalisms that proliferated under the rubric of "American Architecture" during the long nineteenth century. This theme was explored chronologically from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century and regionally from representative avant-garde movements on the East Coast to the regionalist architectural styles of the Midwest and West Coast. Such movements included the neoclassical revivals of the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, the Chicago School of Architecture and the Prairie Style, the East Bay Style on the West Coast, the Arts & Crafts movement across the continent, and various interwar movements that claimed to find unique historical origins for an autochthonous American style of building. The five architectural historians in attendance were charged with providing preliminary answers to the central question of these proceedings: What definitions of American character have historically influenced the most celebrated national architectural movements of the long nineteenth century, and how has this influence been manifested in the labor relations, ideological commitments and material dimensions of innovative architectural forms? In the past, architectural historians have optimistically, and perhaps anachronistically, interpreted American architectural movements through the lens of an inclusive American liberalism that embraces people of all colors, nationalities and religious creeds. Yet such an understanding fails to examine these national movements from the lens of white settler colonialism and the exclusive cultural nationalist ideologies that were often intimated by their appropriation for various political purposes. How and when did American Architecture exclude certain groups of people by internalizing