Race and Modern Architecture

For practitioners, this carefully edited history may fill in gaps in historical knowledge and illuminate racial injustices playing out in contemporary cities. Anyone interested in beginning these difficult conversations will find this book invaluable.

In looking at the history of architecture as a history of racialized cultures, seemingly everywhere, this volume makes a major contribution to the literature.

It is difficult to recall an academic anthology so appropriately timed and so desperately needed as this volume. . . . Race and Modern Architecture promises to be a widely consulted text, a useful resource for architectural scholars and practitioners looking for a concise introduction to racial frameworks for reading the built environment as well as for scholars of other disciplines engaged in the theoretical and methodological debates.

Race and Modern Architecture is a pioneering contribution and will guide scholars, educators, and students for years in better interpreting and illuminating the hidden histories of race in Western architecture. Carefully filling a lacuna in historical knowledge and methodology, this edited history will help to build complex and long-due conversations.

The volume . . . could hardly have come at a more appropriate time, as discussions of systemic racism in the United States spread from the classroom to the streets, from the streets to the halls of government. . . . the essays are equally strong, based upon significant archival and on-the-ground scholarship, with vigorous, fresh arguments.

Race and Modern Architecture challenges the suppression of race in canonical histories of modern architecture, revealing the discipline’s foundation on hierarchies of racial difference, its absorption of racial thought, and the racial origins of modernism’s narrative of universalism and progress. These incisive essays resonate beyond architectural history and reflect on the inextricable intertwining of race and modernism.

This book will enlighten many. By exposing how modern architectural discourse and thought have been influenced quite heavily by racism, this critical and important scholarship sheds new light on the built environment. Race and Modern Architecture ultimately reveals how architecture and design have been silent partners in oppression in the United States and around the globe.