I have been making my way through Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer’s Henry Hobson Richardson and His Work (1888) in the last couple of days. Her biography provides details about his Southern Plantation heritage, his ties with New Orleans Creole culture and his ambivalent attitude toward the Civil War. These details are interesting to me because I have yet […]
Note: The following essay will be published in the proceedings for the 2014 ACSA annual conference. I want to thank ACSA for giving me permission to repost it here on my blog. The horizon that lies before us is one that science cannot approach alone. It is the horizon that represents the ethical, moral and spiritual dimension […]
Introduction “June Jordan was an architect,” or so declares the black feminist writer and blogger Alexis Pauline Gumbs.[1] This declaration involves some political risk on Gumbs’ part, as Jordan is more popularly known as a writer, playwright, and poet. Several rhetorical questions immediately come to mind when one considers the veracity of her claim. Questions such as, […]
An exhibit that I collaborated on had a soft opening this past Monday (the 14th). The show, entitled “Primitive Parametric: Biology as Architectural Catalyst” investigates the formal and cultural meaning of biological metaphors in design from the nineteenth century to the present. The subject of this show grew from my own interests in the cultural […]
This blog entry is a reproduction of a paper I delivered at the annual SeSAH conference in Athens, Georgia in 2012. INTRODUCTION Over the last two decades, revisionist historians have reassessed Sullivan’s architectural output through his claims as an author, poet, and essayist.[1] A noteworthy example of this is Lauren Weingarden’s Louis H. Sullivan and […]
Note: The following essay was published in the proceedings for the 2012 ACSA International conference. I want to thank ACSA for giving me permission to repost it here on my blog. INTRODUCTION It might seem that very little is controversial about multiculturalism anymore. The notion that institutions of higher education should promote diversity and condemn […]
In this blog entry, I will argue that the design principles of vernacular architecture cannot be reduced to static typological interpretation of physical forms. One must also account for the role of syncretism in the historical development of vernacular forms. According to John Michael Vlach, the historian most responsible for discovering the African roots of […]
Race & Architecture 