Just after the 2016 Presidential election was called and Donald Trump became the President-elect, the CEO of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) wrote a letter to congratulate the new administration and secure business contracts for the more than 89,000 members of this organization. Metropolis magazine was one of the first sources to cite the […]
1. The Echo Art Fair has become an annual event for showcasing the latest trends of curators and artists connected to Buffalo, New York. This year’s show took place in an old Albert Khan factory located on the East Side of the city, which is now home to many African American residents. Khan, a […]
Beth Tauke, Korydon Smith and Charles Davis. Diversity and Design: Understanding Hidden Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2015) Table of Contents Foreword: Closing the Gap between the Design and the Recipients of Design Introduction Part I: Race and Ethnicity 1. No Longer Just a Dream: Commemorating the African American Experience on the National Mall 2. Diverse […]
Abstract: This essay explores the rhetorical integrations of race and style in Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter’s urban design text Collage City (1979). Despite being penned in one of the contentious periods of political activity in American history, Rowe and Koetter insist that American democracy cannot be displaced by contemporary forms of social revolution. Having already experienced their revolution in 1776, […]
By Charles Davis | This essay examines the rhetorical function of invisibility in Ralph Ellison’s postwar novel Invisible Man. The author claims that invisibility serves as an allegory for the act of uncovering the political motivations of urban spaces. The main protagonist’s curse of invisibility and his eventual retreat to the sewers –the literal ‘underground’ of the city–is interpreted as a prompt for unveiling […]
1. The first instance of recording police abuse that I can recall (at least vividly) is the beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles. Though the footage was grainy, and I was still in high school, it was a visceral reminder of the monopoly on state-sponsered violence that police officers employed against the black body. It also […]
Each year, the Friend of Architecture at Morgan (FoAM) host a panel on one issue related to the architectural profession. This year the theme was ‘History and the Profession’. I was asked to serve as a panelist with an architect and a preservationist. It ended up being a really interesting conversation, primarily because we all […]
I am please to announce the reposting of my thoughts on June Jordan on another website. The Aggregate collective, an experimental forum for architectural historians had recently curated a call for papers on the recent Black Lives Matter protests. This effort was headed up by Professors Jonathan Massey (California College of the Arts) and Meredith […]
Charles Davis, “Capitalist Maps” (c.2001) SURFACE EFFECTS Professor: Shayne O’Neil, SUNY Buffalo (c.2001) Studio Brief: The Surface Effects studio is neither an urban or a landscape investigation. It is about mapping, reprogramming, and activating derelict urban surfaces or topographies. The site is metropolitan in scale and regional in context. A nexus of infrastructural networks – […]
I have been revisiting some of the designs I completed while working in architectural firms in the last year or so. The idea is to look back and assess the common themes of my work, update some of the more relevant themes, and at rare times to retroactively reverse some of my more utopian positions. […]
Race & Architecture 