University at Buffalo, SUNY | School of 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 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 or otherwise normalizing the white nativist ideologies of American democracy? What elements of these designs tacitly reified the political values, social mores, and cultural practices of a white middle- and upper-middle class clientele at the expense of other ways of inhabiting space or representing cultural differences? As Dana Cuff, Robert Gutman, Mary Woods, and Joan Ockman have noted in their studies of the architectural profession, the elevation of the “gentleman architect” depended on the cultivation of a stratified categorization of labor and social status that legally and ideologically separated intellectual and manual work by placing the licensed architect at the apex of what can now be called a Social Darwinist evolutionary hierarchy of talent. In this process, black, brown and Chinese labor was erased from historical memory as the vision of the architect presided above all other concerns. In addition, the concerns of wealthy white clients were privileged above the servant classes that often made their lives of leisure possible in the first place. These omissions are more than a simple lapse in the historical record—they are evidence of the racial bias inherent in the critical methodologies and historical archives that have long supported historiographical exposition. Recent events in American politics should now compel architectural historians to question the inclusive assumptions of long accepted critical readings of the liberal foundations of nationalist architectural movements in the past and present. The renewed sense of white nativism and the rise of white nationalist groups that have emerged in the wake of the election of Donald Trump in 2016 are only the most obvious symptoms of a more fundamental debate: Who is really an ‘American’ today and what traits do they have that are commonly agreed upon within this democratic republic? In order to answer such questions, we need to look more closely at the troubling racial discourses operating within the deeper history of our national building traditions. Only a forthright critique of the latent whiteness of American Architecture will enable architectural historians to combat the ideological appropriation of these building traditions for nefarious means. What makes American Architecture so susceptible to being identified with an exclusively white nativist outlook of American culture, and how can one explicitly pluralize this foundation to more substantively incorporate more of the body politic that has come to define the nation? This symposium offered some first steps to answering this question.

Sponsors: The following philanthropic and academic institutions provided monetary support for speaker honoraria, travel fees and/or lodging costs to make this event a reality. We wish to thank them for their direct contributions or in kind support.

Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture - Columbia University Darwin D. Martin House Complex - Buffalo, NY School of Architecture - Victoria University of Wellington UB Humanities Institute - University at Buffalo, SUNY School of Architecture and Planning - University at Buffalo, SUNY

PROGRAM

12:00pm Introduction of the Symposium Theme

OPENING KEYNOTE LECTURE

12:15pm Building Race and Nation: Slavery and Antebellum American Civic Architecture Mabel O. Wilson – Professor of Architecture, Columbia GSAPP

PAPER PRESENTATIONS

1:30pm Envy of the Rich: Labor, Race, and Architecture in Leopold Eidlitz’s New York Kathryn Holliday – Associate Professor of Art History, University of Texas at Arlington

2:15pm Frank Lloyd Wright, White Labor and the Art and Craft of the Machine Joanna Merwood-Salisbury – Associate Dean and Professor of Architecture, Victoria University of Wellington

3:00pm An Aesthetic Imperialism: Locating the Transnational Contexts of Bernard Maybeck’s East Bay Style Charles L. Davis II – Assistant Professor of Architectural History and Criticism, SUNY Buffalo

CLOSING KEYNOTE LECTURE

5:00pm Where Was Jim Crow? Living in Wright’s America Dianne Harris – Senior Program Officer, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

(This talk took place in the Elenor and Wilson Greatbatch Pavilion at the Darwin D. Martin House Complex)

The Race + Architectural History Group was established by the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) in 2019 to promote research activities that analyze the racial discourses of architectural historiography, past and present.

Following the scholarly trajectory of interdisciplinary fields such as colonial studies, postcolonial studies, critical race theory, and whiteness studies, our activities promote a race-conscious architectural history that analyzes the constitutive role of race thinking in the social construction and representation of cultural differences abroad.

As an affiliation group within SAH, we strive to develop an inclusive academic culture that will help us to promote the dissemination of pioneering research produced by both new entrants and senior scholars in the field.

We support our mission by planning thematic roundtables at SAH’s annual meeting, organizing semi-annual publication workshops at SAH and elsewhere, and by providing scholarly literature surveys, bibliographies and sample syllabi to raise the level of awareness of the state of research in the field.

We embrace intellectual and institutional partnerships with professional organizations pursuing scholarship in related fields from disciplines such as art history, American studies, race and ethnicity studies, gender and sexuality studies, Diaspora studies, and modernist studies.

We welcome you to become a member, to run for elective office, or to contribute in other ways to our scholarly conversations at SAH’s annual meeting and beyond.

Course Offerings on Race and Architecture

Playing Against Type: The Adaptive Re-use of Buffalo’s East Side Design Studio | Spring 2019 | University at Buffalo, SUNY

Course Description: This studio critiques the reductive character of type thinking in western architecture by producing a culturally-inflected mode of adaptive reuse that materially indexes the complexities of black life in the city of Buffalo. It uses the European inspired developer housing stock on the city’s East Side as a physical site for indexing the latent material customs of black life that have yet to be recorded in architecture culture. The norms of architectural typology first emerged in the late 18th century at the French Ecole as a methodology for cataloguing the formal variations of European architectural precedents. The racial charge of this practice becomes evident when one traces its disciplinary history from architecture back to biology and racial anthropology. Within this context, the typological diagram of a building structurally emulates the aesthetic function of the phrenological outline by essentializing the cultural potentials of so-called “primitive” peoples against the standards and norms of European civilization. In order to move beyond this limited conception of black material culture, students will study the spatial customs and expressive cultures of African American life that have yet to be indexed in architectural form. The content of these social histories, taken from readings in cultural studies, will provide the critical basis for modifying the Euro-American housing typologies that developers created for Buffalo’s East Side. How would these models have changed if black Americans had the freedom and capital to modify them to reflect their own cultural norms? What areas of the home might have changed and what new spaces might be introduced that were not essential for white Americans during this same time period? This corrective approach to architectural typology radicalizes the practice of adaptive reuse to recover the latent potential of black life that is sadly still hidden today.

Preliminary Collage Studies

Collage study of the mixed-use of the parlor (as a funeral space) in black homes of the 1950s and 60s. Historical studies yielded a nuanced interpretation of the multiple hats worn by the funeral director, from mortician and beautician to community bondsman and Civil Rights activist. (Student: Nicholas Eichelberger)

Collage study of the hidden racial traumas of black domesticity as it was experienced during the Civil Rights period. Not only were middle-class residents expected to assimilate white domestic norms, even as they were considered an abject people who were incapable of such culture as black subjects, but police violence and white backlash were daily realities for those striving to make it within American middle-class spaces. (Student: William Sokol)

Collage study of the “braiding” of agricultural space in the home that connects the growth of Caribbean and Jamaican herbs in the backyard to the drying stations situated around the house (shown above) and the eventual use in food preparation in the kitchen. The multi-functional use of porch, backyard and kitchen spaces normalized and passed down the culinary traditions of black family life. (Student: Aleiya Als)

Collage study of the implicit judgments held against working black single mothers, who are often implicitly compared to the standards invented for white stay-at-home mothers in a nuclear family. The space use of the “latchkey child” were examined in the kitchen and living room spaces in order to establish a set of architectural forms that would better accommodate and support black cultural norms. (Student: Aleiya Als)

Selection of Final Designs

Renovated Buffalo Double typology: Inspired by the braiding cultures of black women, this project provides an incubator space that gradually transforms the rental space of a two-family home into a small business that combines child care spaces with a local salon. This new model of domesticity formalizes the invisible labor of black women, which is routinely ignored in the American economy. The modest structure created for the neighboring vacant lot is a proposed bike shelter that serves as a temporary station for mobile barbers already operating in the area. Each barber has the option to rent out a space to conduct business on site when they are in between home vists to other customers. (Students: Jenna Herbert and Mira Shami)

The design employs a timber grid shell as a tectonic expression of the braiding practices taking place within. The grid shell recycles the structural members of the existing balloon frame to open up the two-story northern façade and roof of the building, forming a folded plane that regulates sunlight and views into the space. Finished glazed and opaque panels are then integrated into the overall field condition of the façade, which references back to the integrated structural performance of the existing balloon frame, but expresses the new communal edges between re-used building and new bike shed with a consistent formal language.

Top: Cross-section of design with program areas

Bottom: Axonometric of new/old structural assembly

Next Page: Assembly diagrams of the bike shed.

Renovated Four-Square Typology: The misalignments between African and European influences in African American culture appears very clearly in their music. This project seeks to achieve the same dissonance in their neighborhood architecture, between the pre-existing European housing typologies spread all over the U.S. and what can be called a “Black space.” The objective of this project is to locate and claim this dissonance through the study and renovation of the American Four-square typology by creating new experimentation space for Black culture to be expressed and revealed. The project reinforces the idea of a double entendre (or hidden meaning): from the outside, a dissonance appears with the addition of a third floor that looks like it slid from the existing house to push the roof and extend its interior space; from the inside, this condition established a new experimental space in the front of the house—a space that can be used to invent a new synthesis of white and black culture. (Student: Madeleine Niepceron)

Race and Place in the Built Environment Seminar and Discussion Section | Fall 2020 | University at Buffalo, SUNY

COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course challenges students to identify and analyze the hidden influences of racial discourses on the built environment. Despite official attempts to move past biological racisms, race and place continue to map onto each other in the United States and abroad. Racial stereotypes continue to influence the home buying patterns that create segregated enclaves, from inner-city neighborhoods to gated suburban communities. Racial domestic enclaves have, in turn, influenced the creation of gerrymandered voting districts that make it difficult to support the equal distribution of public amenities such as well-funded district schools, newly paved public roads, and other forms of civic infrastructure. The over-policing of minority districts has resulted in the untimely deaths of young black men at the hands of white police officers in the United States, which has caused new waves of protest to end police brutality. Parallel efforts have been made to reduce the numbers of people of color in prison for non-violent crimes; a situation that negatively affects their ability to reintegrate into society after serving their sentence. Recent news stories have also recorded the efforts of white supremacy groups to preserve Confederate memorials in the American South, including Charlottesville, Virginia—the city where Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia. And while biologists have rejected the scientific validity of racial categories consistently since the 1940s, medical doctors continue to use them to track the effects of diseases such as high cholesterol, heart disease and diabetes on high-risk demographic populations. Future architects, planners, and city decision makers will inherit these racialized conditions—both at home and around the world—which makes it important for students of the built environment to learn about the hidden causes of such charged contexts. COURSE SCHEDULE: Please note that this schedule is subject to change.

Monday, August 28 INTRODUCTION TO CLASS Review of Instructor and Student Expectations

GENERAL CONCEPTS

Wednesday, August 30 BEYOND BIOLOGY: CONTEMPORARY CONCEPTS OF RACE Peggy McIntosh, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” Podcast: Still Processing – “Who Owns Stories of Blackness?”

Monday, September 4 LABOR DAY – No class

Wednesday, September 6 BEYOND SPACE: CONTEMPORARY CONCEPTS OF PLACE Denis Wood, “Maps Work by Serving Interests,” The Power of Maps (4-28)

Talk Back: White Privilege HOMEWORK #1 – DEADLINE (9/8)

PLACE I: THE COLLEGE CAMPUS

Monday, September 11 TUSKEGEE INSTITUTE, 1865-77 Kendrick Ian Grandison. “Negotiating Space: The Black College Campus as a Cultural Record of Postbellum America,” Sites of Memory: Perspectives on Architecture and Race (55-96)

Wednesday, September 13 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, 1960-69 Stefan M. Bradley. “Why I Hate You: Community Resentment of Columbia,” Harlem vs. Columbia University: Black Student Power in the late 1960s (20-38)

Monday, September 18 CORNELL UNIVERSITY, 1969 Donald Alexander Downs. “Overview of the Crisis,” Cornell ’69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University (1- 24)

Create a map of a Racial Landscape at UB HOMEWORK #2 – DEADLINE (9/22)

PLACE II: SITES OF MEMORY

Wednesday, September 20 RACIAL POLITICS OF THE WASHINGTON MALL Charles Davis, “No Longer Just a Dream: Two African American Commemorative Sites on the National Mall” (1-20)

Monday, September 25 CONSERVING THE CONFEDERATE AND CIVIL RIGHTS PAST Cameron Freeman Napier. The First White House of the Confederacy, Montgomery, Alabama (1-23) Lisa Findley. "Building Presence: The Southern Poverty Law Center," Building Change: Architecture, Politics and Cultural Agency (161-191)

Wednesday, September 27 CONSERVING CONFEDERATE MONUMENTS IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH Kara Vogt, “UVA’s Troubling Past,” The Atlantic Magazine The Joy Cardin Show, “Analyzing the Purpose & Future of Confederate Monuments,” August 23, 2017

Talk Back: Mitch Landrieu’s “Speech on the Removal of Confederate Monuments in New Orleans” HOMEWORK #3 – DEADLINE (9/29)

PLACE III: POSTWAR INNER-CITY

Monday, October 2 Professor Away at Guest Lecture – No class Watch “The Pruitt Igoe Myth” documentary on your own – complete handout

Wednesday, October 4 SOCIAL HOUSING & RACIAL SEGREGATION Katharine Bristol, “The Pruitt Igoe Myth” (163-171)

Monday, October 9 WHEN PUBLIC HOUSING WAS WHITE Charles Davis, When Public Housing Was White: William Lescaze, Social Housing, and the Americanization of the International Style

Wednesday, October 11 RACE RIOTS & INNER-CITY VIOLENCE Watch “Do the Right Thing” (1991) on your own – complete handout W. J. T. Mitchell. “Violence of Public Art: Do the Right Thing,” Critical Inquiry 16:4 (Summer 1990): 880-899

The Cultural Politics of Public Housing HOMEWORK #4 – DEADLINE (10/13)

PLACE IV: POSTWAR SUBURBS

Monday, October 16 SUBURBANIZAITON & WHITE FLIGHT David Kushner. “Battle Lines,” Levittown: two families, one tycoon and the fight for Civil Rights in America’s legendary suburb (134-144)

Wednesday, October 18 SUBURBAN SWIMMING POOLS Jeff Wiltse. “More Sensitive than Schools: the struggle to desegregate municipal swimming pools,” Contested Waters: a social history of swimming pools in America (154-180)

Visual Analysis of Postwar Advertisements HOMEWORK #5 – DEADLINE (10/20)

PLACE V: VERNACULAR

Monday, October 23 SHOTGUN HOUSE John Michael Vlach. “The Shotgun House: an African-American Legacy,” Pioneer America, vol.8, no.1 (January 1976), pp.47-56

Wednesday, October 25 HISTORICAL & CONTEMPORARY CHINATOWN (1880-1910; 1990-PRESENT) Anthony Lee. “The Place of Chinatown,” Picturing Chinatown: Art and Orientalism in San Francisco (9-59)

Monday, October 30 EL BARRIO James Rojas. “The Cultural Landscape of a Latino Community,” Landscape and Race in the United States (177-187)

The Authorship of Vernacular Culture HOMEWORK #6 – DEADLINE (11/3)

PLACE VI: COLONIAL & POSTCOLONIAL TERRITORIES

Wednesday, November 1 FRENCH MOROCCO, 1900-30 Stacy E. Holden, “The Legacy of French Colonialism: Preservation in Morocco’s Fez Medina,” APT Bulletin, vol.39, no.4 (2008), pp.5-11

Monday, November 6 INTERNATIONAL COLONIAL EXPOSITION, 1931 Patricia Morton, “National and Colonial: the Musée des Colonies at the Paris Exhibition, Paris, 1931,” The Art Bulletin, vol.80, no.2 (June 1988), pp.357-77

Wednesday, November 8 POST-BRITISH INDIA – DOSHI, PARIKH, CORREA James Steele, Balkrishna Doshi. Rethinking Modernism for the Developing World (60-71; 84-97)

Monday, November 13 TWO EXPLORATIONS OF LAGOS, NIGERIA Rem Koolhaas, “Lagos,” Mutations: Harvard Project on the City (650-685) David Adjaye, "Learning from Lagos: a dialogue on the Poetics of Informal Habitation," Making Public Buildings (208- 235)

Wednesday, November 15 MAKOKO FLOATING SCHOOL – LAGOS, NIGERIA Jonathan Glancey, “Learning from Lagos: Floating School, Makoko, Nigeria, Kunlé Adeyemi,” The Architectural Review

The Politics of Colonial Representation HOMEWORK #7 – DEADLINE (11/17)

PLACE VII: PRISONS & OTHER CONTAINMENT SPACES

Monday, November 20 JAPANESE INTERNMENT CAMPS War Relocation Work Camps: a circular of information for enlistees and their families (1-16)

Wednesday, November 22 FALL RECESS – No class

Monday, November 27 AMERICAN INDIAN RESIDENTIAL SCHOOL & AIM AT ALCATRAZ Dean Kotlowski. “Alcatraz, Wounded Knee and Beyond” (355-370) Michael C. Coleman. “The School as Weapon of State” (38-65)

Wednesday, November 29 PRISONS & POLICING IN THE UNITED STATES Michelle Alexander, “The New Jim Crow” lecture – watch on your own and complete worksheet The Schaumburg Center, “American Policing: The War on Black Bodies” panel – watch in class

Design a New Topic for Class Discussion HOMEWORK #8 – DEADLINE (12/1)

Monday, December 4-8 CLASS PRESENTATIONS OF FINAL ASSIGNMENT

Modernist Spaces of African American Literature and Film Research Seminar | Spring 2019 | University at Buffalo, SUNY

COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course considers the contributions of African-American artists from the perspective of the historiography of architectural utopianism. While most black writers and filmmakers were not trained as architects or interior designers, they took a strategic interest in the language and concepts of architectural modernism in order to critique the negative effects of urban renewal on the spatial and economic development of black neighborhoods. Their literary depictions of modernist spaces should be understood within this historical context if we are to appreciate their architectural relevance; experimental references to modernist principles of space rhetorically provided African American artists and their readers with an agency they did not have in everyday life. Even though these architectural speculations remain largely rhetorical in nature, they operate on the same plane as the utopian modernisms of Archigram, Buckminster Fuller, and the Metabolists insofar as they liberated the architectural imagination.

This course will enable students to locate and identify the architectural principles of black protest literatures of the postwar period to establish a historiography of what I am calling the ‘alternative modernisms’ of the period. These literatures were created by postwar artists such as June Jordan, Amiri Baraka, Paule Marshall and Nella Larsen. Following the example of the conceptual artist Jeff Wall’s physical creation and installation of the imaginary underground space depicted in Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1947), students are encouraged to find ways of materializing the rhetorical manipulations of architectural space recorded in African-American literature and film.

The first half of this course consists of reading literary texts, viewing films, and attending or listening to guest lectures that familiarize students with the formal and spatial themes of postwar African American literature and film. In the second half, students will materialize the modernist principles of one of the case studies discussed in the course. Everyone is encouraged to use writing, diagrams, and models to visualize the modernist principles that influenced African-American writing and film. At the end of the semester, faculty in the English, Film, and Architecture departments will be invited to review the work to contribute to an interdisciplinary reevaluation of these postwar sources.

Intellectual Framing: This course considered the material studies of utopian architects and the word-images of protest literatures to be operating on a similar rhetorical plane. Reframing both fields as an interdisciplinary study of space enabled students to think of them as a common set of cultural producers.

Methodology: This course encouraged students to locate the material principles of architectural design embedded within postwar novels and to translate these ideas into architectural representations (e.g. models, drawings, animations, etc.). This act placed the work of black artists in a new disciplinary context; one that better aligned with the strategies and appearances of architecture.

Sample Deliverables: In 2013, I collaborated with an RA to create a model set of deliverables that successfully transformed the architectural principles of June Jordan’s His Own Where (1971) into a set of architectural models and drawings. I present this set each year to inspire student work. Last year, students prepared a set of visual collages in response to the limitations caused by the pandemic (and our switch to remote teaching).