ARC 342R, ARC 388R, ARI 388R, ARI 368S, LAR 380Q, LAR 312R
TTH 9:30AM-11:00AM, WMB 6.126
Open to all SOA Majors and Minors, UG English, and Film Students
Instructor: Charles Davis II
This course considers the contributions of African-American artists from the perspective of the historiography of architectural utopianism. While most black writers and filmmakers were not trained as architects or interior designers, they took a strategic interest in the language and concepts of architectural modernism in order to critique the negative effects of urban renewal on the spatial and economic development of black neighborhoods. Their literary depictions of modernist spaces should be understood within this historical context if we are to appreciate their architectural relevance; experimental references to modernist principles of space rhetorically provided African American artists and their readers with an agency they did not have in everyday life. Even though these architectural speculations remain largely rhetorical in nature, they operate on the same plane as the utopian modernisms of Archigram, Buckminster Fuller, and the Metabolists insofar as they liberated the architectural imagination.
