In the fall of 2015, Irene Cheng (California College of the Arts), Mabel Wilson (Columbia University GSAPP) and Charles Davis (SUNY Buffalo) organized an interdisciplinary research group, the Race and Modern Architecture Project (R+MAP), to begin investigating the ways that race has been integral in shaping modern architectural discourse from the Enlightenment to the present. To begin our study, we assembled a bibliography of primary and secondary readings on general race theory, the history of slavery and colonialism in the West, primary texts in architecture that exemplified those themes, and publications from contemporary scholars pioneering new readings and interpretations. This initial bibliography provided a common foundation and set of references for the work of the research group. After a call for papers, we convened a symposium in the spring of 2016 at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation that opened with the round- table “Critical Dialogues on Race and Modern Architecture” before turning to a series of paper presentations. These presentations served as the foundations for the chapters of the book Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020). This publication hopes to bring much needed visibility and momentum to the study of race in architecture, as well as provide architectural historians and allied scholars with the critical tools necessary to articulate the latent cultural underpinnings of our discipline.
In the spring of 2019, Charles Davis (SUNY Buffalo), Joanna Merwood-Salisbury (University of Wellington) and Kathryn Holliday (UT Arlington) organized a one-day symposium at the School of Architecture and Planning at SUNY Buffalo entitled “The Whiteness of American Architecture” that expanded upon the themes introduced by the Race + Modern Architecture Project (R+MAP). These organizers are currently working on a co-edited volume that reassesses the racial discourses embedded in the historiography of nineteenth-century American architecture. This volume will construct a revisionist narrative of American architecture that subverts the segregated landscape of the field that currently separates predominantly white canonical histories of the avant-garde from broader vernacular histories of the built environment that include people of color. Chapter topics that reveal the racial charge of the social, political, and economic underpinnings of the nineteenth-century canon of American architecture, as well as recover understudied or ignored material cultures that present alternative interpretations of architecture as an expression of local, regional and national identity will be considered for this project. This work should be informed by contemporary theoretical frameworks of analysis, from Whiteness Studies to settler colonial theory to demonstrate a range of techniques for reassessing the critical assumptions of the discipline.
The Settler Colonial City Project is a research collective focused on the collaborative production of knowledge about cities on Turtle Island/North America as spaces of ongoing settler colonialism, Indigenous survivance, and struggles for decolonization. It was co-founded by Andrew Herscher (University of Michigan) and Ana María León (University of Michigan) and debuted at the Chicago architecture Biennial in 2019. An important characteristic of this group is its purposeful collaboration with Indigenous groups, which builds a bridge between academic and activist knowledge production. This group explores the material implications of the concept of “settler colonialism,” which has recently emerged as a name for a distinctive form of colonialism that develops in places where settlers permanently reside and assert sovereignty. While the settler colonial dimensions of American cities have been centered in contemporary urban activism, these dimensions have been, at best, only tentatively explored in contemporary architectural and urban studies. Investigating the settler colonial history and contemporaneity of cities on Turtle Island/North America (and similar examples beyond), they aim to foreground Indigenous knowledge of and politics around land, life, and collective futures, as well as settler colonialism as an unmarked structure for the distribution of land, possibilities of life, and imagination of those futures.