(I want to thank Routledge for permitting me to republish the Foreword to Early Modern Architecture and Whiteness: Power by Design (Routledge, 2025) on my academic blog. You can find both a hardcopy and ebook’s of this text both here and here. Many thanks to teh book’s editors, Dijana Omeragić Apostolski and Aaron White, for […]
‘The Black Home as Public Art’ examines different traditions in the Black canon of architecture at UT Austin this fall [This page is reposted from Bustler, a subsidiary of Archinect. Thanks for Josh Niland for reporting on this exhibit in August.] By Josh Niland – Friday, Aug 30, 2024 This fall at the UT Austin School of […]
(This essay was published in Weiss/Manfredi’s monograph Drifting Symmetries (Park Books, 2024), 272. I want to thank the architects and the publishers for giving me permission to repost it on my personal website.) Standard architectural histories of postwar Harlem are usually illustrated by the vast range of buildings produced by top-down urban renewal policies or […]
The following essay was published in the September issue of The Architectural Review for their “Reputations” series. You can read its edited version here on the magazine’s website. I would like to thank the editors for permitting me to publish the longer version of this essay on my personal blog. bell hooks taught us to […]
I recently participated in an interview at the Claridge House hotel in Chicago to discuss the contents of my new book Building Character with David Huber, the producer and host of the podcast Interstitial. Interstitial is “a show about space and the consequences of our designs.” It is the first series offered by the online […]
The following “Field Note” was co-written with Irene Cheng (CCA) and Mabel Wilson (Columbia University) in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. This essay discusses the content of the publishing workshop for our forthcoming volume on Race and Modern Architecture with the University of Pittsburgh Press, as well as the broader need within […]
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, […]
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 […]
I recently had a lovely conversation with Caroline McMillan Portillo of the Charlotte Observer about the historical roots of the reuse of railways cars in contemporary architecture. Portillo was especially interested in the architectural firm that had completed work for the Democratic National Convention last year. We spoke about the historical integration of wartime materials and assembly processes […]
Race & Architecture 