ACSA DIVERSITY ACHIEVEMENT AWARD - From Settler Colonies to Black Utopias: The Dialectics of American Architecture in Black and White

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 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 ARCHITECTURES

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).