Meet Assistant Professor Bryan Norwood
Join us in welcoming our newest full-time faculty member Assistant Professor Bryan Norwood to the UT School of Architecture! Norwood comes to the school from the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning where he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows. Previously, he was the Charles E. Peterson Senior Fellow at the Athenaeum of Philadelphia from 2016-17. Norwood received a BA in philosophy and a B.Arch from Mississippi State University, an MA in philosophy from Boston University, and an AM and Ph.D. in the history and theory of architecture from Harvard University.
Norwood's research focuses on architecture and building practices in the United States and the Atlantic World in the long 19th century. This semester, he's teaching the second half of the architectural history survey, World Architecture: Industrial Revolution to the Present. We recently caught up with Norwood to learn more about him, his research, what he's looking forward to most about teaching here at UT Austin.
Much of your research focuses on architecture's role in shaping memory in the American South, situating architecture in relationship to race, class, and historical consciousness. Tell us a bit about how you came to focus on this topic.
Most of my work deals in some way or another with how memory and thought about history—what we might call “historical consciousness”—shape and are shaped by the built environment. The dissertation I defended in 2018 and the first book project that builds on it, which I am working on now, focus on the way historical consciousness affected the formation of the architectural profession in cities along the Atlantic Coast of the U.S. in the early nineteenth century. In this work, I pay particular attention to the ways religion, racecraft, and political identity informed early architects’ vision of their profession’s power and purpose. I’m engaged in this work because I think we have yet to untangle the myriad of ways a kind of religiously informed white nationalism sits at the roots of the US architectural profession. We have to come to terms with these forces and understand how they continue to work in order to create more equitable and liberatory architectural practices.
While my first project focuses largely on the East Coast, in my second, as is so often is the case, I have been drawn back towards my own origins. I was born and raised in Mississippi, and in this project, I’m using the roughly 70-year history of the built environment in the Deep South between Reconstruction and the New Deal to think about how the Antebellum South continues to affect the world that followed. This means thinking about how plantations turned into museums, penitentiaries, and industrial sites like oil refineries in the Mississippi River Valley; how built environments that organized racialized slavery transformed into ones that organized Jim Crow segregation; and how a region that was in fact defined by its transnational economic and material connections in the antebellum period continued to be globally connected in the changing forms of the so-called “New South.” In all, this is a project about how memory and industrialization can go hand in hand, how nostalgia and modernity are co-constitutive.
While not a part of the Deep South, Texas (and Austin) has its own complicated relationship to race, both historically and today. What has been your experience of Texas thus far? How do you think moving here will shape your research moving forward?
The first book I am working on focuses on architects in cities along the Atlantic Coast of the U.S. in the early nineteenth century. Thinking about how concurrent events in Texas unfolded broadens and complicates that story, not only in relation to the fabricated divisions between architecture and vernacular building, but also in the conceptions of nation and race at work on the East Coast. So, in one sense, I’m particularly looking forward to drawing on archival resources and expertise in Austin and across the state to think about how ideas about architecture and practices of construction traveled in the early nineteenth century along transregional and transnational paths.
In relationship to my second project, I’m interested in the ways Southeastern Texas is, in fact, entwined with what we might call the Deep South. The transformation of the plantation system and the slave economy over the first half of the nineteenth century and the expansion of resource extraction and processing after the Civil War created connections and continuities across the entire Gulf Coast. As recent historical work has turned some attention to, there are a myriad of built environmental, political, and cultural patterns that reach from the southeast to the southwest that need to be further explored. I’m particularly excited about the prospect of working on these kinds of questions from UT Austin.
What about the UT School of Architecture, and the architectural history program, made you want to come to teach here?
I’m looking forward to contributing to an architecture school with a variety of different degree tracks and with substantial undergraduate and graduate populations. With the Race and Gender in the Built Environment initiative and the dean’s focus on a structural approach to equality and innovation in architecture, an approach in which challenging and critiquing the historical canon of architecture is of central importance, UTSOA is a leader in charting where architectural education should be going. With a number of colleagues in the architectural history program working on related topics and using an array of theoretical and methodological approaches, I’m particularly excited about the forms of collaboration on historical research possible here at UT.
What are some of the things you're most excited about as you start this new academic year here?
This academic year, like the past, brings a lot of uncertainty and concern. But what I am excited about is the way I’ve structured the architectural history survey II course. Instead of thinking of the history of architecture from 1750 to the present as a roughly temporally linear sequence, we will plot four different narratives through the modern history of architecture, focusing in turn on resources, labor, land, and money. The fundamental goal is to emphasize that historical thinking about architecture is not the work of constructing a singular narrative or solution or even problem, but rather a recursive process in which the present and past are entangled in ever-changing ways.
What's something that students and colleagues should know about you?
My academic career has taken me from the U.S. South to the Northeast to the Midwest and now to Texas. My academic background is in architecture, philosophy, and architectural history, so I’m up for many different discussions. In my philosophical and theoretical work, I spent a number of years thinking about phenomenology, the product of which was a guest-edited issue of the architectural theory journal Log entitled “Disorienting Phenomenology.”
Besides your work, what's something you're passionate about, or what do you do for fun?
I have a toddler and a partner that I love spending time with. I like to drum, bike and run, and make and consume good food and drinks. I also enjoy doing home renovation and repair work more than the average person.