ARC 342R / ARC 388R
Instructor: Charles Davis
This course introduces students to the ways that historical conceptions of race and place have impacted the shape of our built environment. It examines the critical influence of race science on the civilizational narratives that were used to determine the meaning and content of 19th century American architecture. It also traces the effects of these racial discourses on domestic interpretations of African, Asian, and Latino building traditions. Students will review the tools that American architects have used to represent the social and cultural values of different racial and ethnic groups, from the Victorian houses of New England towns to the campus planning strategies of Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Over the course of the semester, students will complete writing assignments that challenge them to interpret the many ways that the racial politics of the past continues to shape the structure and character of today’s built environment. Despite moving beyond the tenets of scientific racism, the social construction of racial identity still exerts a palpable influence on new patterns of residential segregation, voting districts, land-use patterns, and material investment in (or disinvestment from) in the public sphere.
STRUCTURE OF THE COURSE: This course is divided into three sequential modules: Defining Race; Defining Place; and Building Case Studies. In the first module, Defining Race, students will survey scholarly writings from the history of science, critical race studies, whiteness studies, and cultural history to identify the most prominent definitions of “race” to emerge from the Enlightenment to the present. We will focus on the scientific origins of race theory in western Europe and the political function of ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’ in defining public culture in western civilization.
In the second module, Defining Place, students will survey scholarly writings in critical geography, cartography, urban studies and architectural theory to identify the most prominent definitions of place to emerge in the late-19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. We will focus on identifying the place-making strategies of minority subjects in the U.S. and employ speculative mapping techniques to analyze the ‘racial landscapes’ that remain latent in our everyday surroundings.
The final module, Building Case Studies, requires students to develop a close reading of historical building projects located in the political contexts that have influenced American thought, from western Europe and North America to Asia, Africa and various colonial and postcolonial territories around the world. Each student will prepare a final paper of a relevant architectural case study of their choosing. Guest lecturers, interviews, and documentaries will be considered as needed to review new or emerging research strategies for analyzing the intersections of race and place through design or other modes of visualizing theories of cultural difference.