Race and Place
This course introduces students to the ways that historical conceptions of race and place have impacted the shape of our built environment. It examines the critical influence of race science on the civilizational narratives that were used to determine the meaning and content of 19th century American architecture. It also traces the effects of these racial discourses on domestic interpretations of African, Asian, and Latino building traditions. Students will review the tools that American architects have used to represent the social and cultural values of different racial and ethnic groups, from the Victorian houses of New England towns to the campus planning strategies of Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Over the course of the semester, students will complete writing assignments that challenge them to interpret the many ways that the racial politics of the past continues to shape the structure and character of today’s built environment. Despite moving beyond the tenets of scientific racism, the social construction of racial identity still exerts a palpable influence on new patterns of residential segregation, voting districts, land-use patterns, and material investment in (or disinvestment from) in the public sphere.
STRUCTURE OF THE COURSE: This course is divided into three sequential modules: Defining Race; Defining Place; and Building Case Studies.
In the first module, Defining Race, students will survey scholarly writings from the history of science, critical race studies, whiteness studies, and cultural history to identify the most prominent definitions of “race” to emerge from the Enlightenment to the present. We will focus on the scientific origins of race theory in western Europe and the political function of ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’ in defining public culture in western civilization.
In the second module, Defining Place, students will survey scholarly writings in critical geography, cartography, urban studies and architectural theory to identify the most prominent definitions of place to emerge in the late-19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. We will focus on identifying the place-making strategies of minority subjects in the U.S. and employ speculative mapping techniques to analyze the ‘racial landscapes’ that remain latent in our everyday surroundings.
The final module, Building Case Studies, requires students to develop a close reading of historical building projects located in the political contexts that have influenced American thought, from western Europe and North America to Asia, Africa and various colonial and postcolonial territories around the world. Each student will prepare a final paper of a relevant architectural case study of their choosing. Guest lecturers, interviews, and documentaries will be considered as needed to review new or emerging research strategies for analyzing the intersections of race and place through design or other modes of visualizing theories of cultural difference.
COURSE OBJECTIVES AND LEARNING OBJECTIVES: Students will learn to critically engage with primary readings in critical race studies to identify and critique the hidden influences of racial discourses on the built environment. After completing this Diversity Learning Requirement, students will be able to:
Describe the challenges inherent in promoting diversity in American society.
Think critically, and with an open mind, about controversial contemporary and historical issues that stem from the codification of racial differences within American society and its architectural institutions.
Understand how categories of racial differences created disciplinary and professional inequities in architecture, intersected with one another over time, and have functioned differently in national, transatlantic and transnational contexts.
Understand the socially constructed nature of the categories of diversity covered in this course, the institutional inequalities they create, the intersections between them, and the social values and design practices needed for a more equitable society.
Understand how historical legacies of colonialism and slavery have shaped contemporary domestic, transnational and colonial realities; how migration, immigration, and differential access to citizenship effect different populations; and how definitions of diversity differ among nation states.
Introduction to Class
Overview of Course and Learning Outcomes
Preliminary Writing Exercise - What is White Privilege?
Tim Wise, “The Pathology of White Privilege”
Peggy Macintosh, “The Invisible Knapsack”
MODULE 1 - DEFINING RACE
The Concept of Whiteness in America
Whiteness: The Meaning of a Racial, Social and Legal Construct (watch before class)
Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property” (1709; 1715-1729)
Robin DiAngelo, “Racism After the Civil Rights Movement,” White Fragility (39-50)
Shannon Sullivan, Good White People: the Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-Racism (1-22)
The Concept of Blackness in America
The Image of the Black in Western Art (watch before class)
W.E.B. DuBois, “The Conservation of Races” (815-826)
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Framing Blackness: Sambo Art and the Visual Rhetoric of White Supremacy,” Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (125-157)
Stockley Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, “Black Power: Its Need and Substance,” Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (34-57)
“Slavery’s Explosive Growth, In Charts,” USA Today
Moving Beyond the Black-White Divide in America
Are Asians the New Blacks? Affirmative Action, Antiblackness, and the Sociometry of Race (watch before class)
Claire Jean Kim, “Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans,” Politics & Society, vol.27, no.1 (March 1999): 105-138
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “’New Racism,’ Color-Blind Racism, and the Future of Whiteness in America,” White Out: the Continuing Significance of Racism (271-285)
MODULE 2 - DEFINING PLACE (and PLACEMAKING)
PLACEMAKING AND ARCHITECTURE I
Architecture in the City
Lynda Schneekloth and Robert Shibley, “Implacing Architecture into the Practice of Placemaking” (130-140)
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (3-28)
David Gouverneur, Planning And Design for Future Informal Settlements (1-40)
PLACEMAKING AND ARCHITECTURE II
Space and Embodiment
Sara Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness” (149-168)
Mario Gooden, Dark Space (10-19)
Scott Ruff, “Signifyin’: African-American Language to Landscape” (66-69)
MODULE 3 - BUILDING CASE STUDIES (Subject to change every year)
THE WHITENESS OF VICTORIAN DOMESTIC SPACE
GUEST LECTURER: Athanasiou Geolas, Ph.D. candidate – Cornell University
THE COLLEGE CAMPUS
Cornell University, 1969
Donald Alexander Downs. “Overview of the Crisis,” Cornell ’69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University (1-24)
Charles Davis, “An Appeal to Protest,” Harvard Design Magazine (176-182)
Columbia University, 1969
Stefan Bradley, Harlem vs. Columbia University: Black Student Power in the Late 1960s (1-19)
William Richards, “Columbia University in the City of New York,” Revolt and Reform in Architecture’s Academy: Urban Renewal, Race, and the Rise of design in the Public Interest (41-75)
Sharon Sutton, When Ivory Towers Were Black (1-15)
PRESERVING SITES OF THE CONFEDERATE AND CIVIL RIGHTS PAST
Robert E. Lee Statue, Charlottesville, Virginia (1924)
Kara Vogt, “UVA’s Troubling Past,” The Atlantic Magazine
The Joy Cardin Show, “Analyzing the Purpose & Future of Confederate Monuments,” August 23, 2017
The Southern Poverty Law Center (2001)
Lisa Findley. "Building Presence: The Southern Poverty Law Center," Building Change: Architecture, Politics and Cultural Agency (161-191)
POSTWAR URBAN RIOTS
Watch Do the Right Thing (1989) (watch online and complete UB Learns assignment)
W. J. T. Mitchell. “Violence of Public Art: Do the Right Thing,” Critical Inquiry 16:4 (Summer 1990): 880-899
POSTWAR INNER-CITY AND SUBURBIA
Pruitt-Igoe housing complex, St. Louis, Missouri (1954)
Katharine Bristol, “The Pruitt Igoe Myth” (163-171)
Jennifer Lee. “The Ghetto Merchant Yesterday and Today,” Civility in the City (20-47)
Levittown, Pennsylvania
NPR, “Levittown: A Racial Battleground in the Suburbs”
Dianna Harris, Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America (1-26)
PRISON SPACES IN THE UNITED STATES
Japanese Internment Camps
War Relocation Work Camps: a circular of information for enlistees and their families (1-16)
Lynne Horiuchi, “Architectural Ethics at War: Farm Security Administration Designers and Their Japanese American Colleagues” (xx-xx)
Carceral Spaces in the United States
Michelle Alexander, “The New Jim Crow” lecture – watch before class and complete worksheet
Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (84-105)
Watch Eva Du Vernay’s 13th (2016) in class
RACE AND EUROPEAN MODERN ARCHITECTURE
Adolf Loos, Josephine Baker house (unbuilt)
Fares el-Dahdah and Stephen Atkinson, “The Josephine Baker House” (72-87)
Le Corbusier, Plan Obus for Algiers (unbuilt)
Zeynep Celik Alexander, “Le Corbusier, Orientalism, Colonialism,” Assemblage (58-77)
Jean Nouvel, Musee du Quai Branly (2006)
James Clifford, Quai Branly in Process (3-23)