Charles Davis. Building Character: The Racial Politics of Modern Architectural Style (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019) Table of Contents Introduction – The Racialization of Architectural Character in the Long Nineteenth Century Part I: The Aryan Character of Alpine Architecture 1. Campfires in the Salon: Viollet-le-Duc and the Modernization of the Aryan Hut 2. Beyond the […]
For the last two years, the students at Cornell University’s School of Art, Architecture and Planning have selected guest speakers to address topics of contemporary interest. These events are held on the wooden floor portion of the L. P. Kwee Studios in the OMA addition of Milstein Hall. I was invited by the Ph.D. students […]
I welcome you to join the architectural history faculty at the University at Buffalo, SUNY and four distinguished guests to discuss the theme “The Whiteness of American Architecture.” It is scheduled for Wednesday, April 3rd in 403 Hayes Hall on UB’s South Campus. You can find more information here and the synopsis is provided below. […]
I want to thank Kim Forster from the Canadian Center for Architecture for inviting me to participate in the Toolkit series on Activism this summer. This series reviewed the writing projects, current research and activist activities of Andreas Rumpfhuber, Pelin Tan, Torsten Lange, Tatjana Schneider and myself, covering various geographies and constituencies around the globe. […]
I would like to thank Summer Sutton for inviting me to speak about my research to Ph.D. students at Yale University. Sutton is a founding member of Indigenous Scholars of Architecture, Planning and Design (ISAPD) at Yale University’s School of Architecture and has consulted on graphic design projects for museums and public institutions involved with […]
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 […]
The following essay was published in the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) Journal, a venue for analyzing contemporary art from an interdisciplinary perspective. I would like to thank Lisa Uddin (Whitman College) and Michael Gillespe (CUNY) for editing the series of posts on blackness. The original essay can be […]
The following essay appears in volume 42 (Winter/Spring) issue of Log, a special issue that was entitled “Disorienting Phenomenology.” The full title of my essay is “Blackness in Practice: Toward an Architectural Phenomenology of Blackness.” I would like to thank the editors for permitting me to post this essay on my academic blog. Table […]
This essay is a longer version of one that will be published in the next issue of Harvard Design Magazine. I would like to thank the magazine for allowing me to publish this longer version on the blog. The moral and intellectual complexities of safe spaces and physical violence in today’s campus protests may seem […]
I am happy to announce that an article I wrote, entitled “Louis Sullivan and the Physiognomic Translation of American Character” has recently been published in the Journal for the Society of Architectural Historians (See March 2017 issue). This article is a fragment of chapter three of my forthcoming book manuscript, Building Character: The Racial Politics […]
Race & Architecture 