After the fire and earthquake of 1906, the reconstruction of San Francisco initiated a profusion of neo-Gothic churches, public buildings and residential architecture. This paper examines the development from the novel perspective of medievalism—the study of the Middle Ages as an imaginative construct in western society after their actual demise. It offers a selection of the best known neo-Gothic artifacts in the city, describes the technological innovations which distinguish them from the medievalist architecture of the nineteenth century, and shows the motivation for their creation. The significance of the California Arts and Crafts movement is explained, and profiles are offered of the two leading medievalist architects of the period, Bernard Maybeck and Julia Morgan. A final episode in the City’s encounter with medievalism is cited in the ill-fated attempt to create a museum for medieval arts, designed by Julia Morgan and commissioned by the Board of Supervisors in response to William Randoph Hearst’s donation of an intact monastery building imported from Spain.

Although Spanish-Colonial Revival architecture and place-names dominates Southern California’s landscape, one also finds examples of simulated Middle Eastern bazaars, references to Ancient Egypt, and the use of iconography from non-European Old World. While the region’s landscape is arguably a product of bricolage and postmodern sensibilities, this article looks at the history of ‘Orientalism’ in Southern California’s built environment. In particular, I am looking at the precedents for this seemingly contradictory use of the ‘Oriental’ in the region. The ‘Oriental’ as a sinfully seductive means of creating spectacle in the built environment is both glorified and demonized in popular discourse. For example, the ‘Oriental’ is celebrated in shopping malls, but demonized culturally and politically. However, it is in this contradiction that we can see how history and ideology has shaped the vernacular landscape. As such, this article will look at early twentieth century examples of the ‘Oriental’ in Spanish-Colonial Revival as a foundation to understand contradictions in the built environment, culture, and racial hierarchies.

Architectural history books play a significant role in conveying the culture, norms, and values of the architectural discipline to newcomers. In recent years, numerous publications have spotlighted the importance of women and African Americans as critics, creators, and consumers of the built environment. Yet, to what extent is this recent discourse on gender and racial issues included in architectural history texts? And how gender or racially inclusive are they? Are twenty-first-century architectural educators presenting newly uncovered architectural histories from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? Building upon prior research, this article seeks to address these issues by examining history texts currently assigned at fourteen leading architectural schools accredited by the National Architectural Accrediting Board. In textbooks with multiple editions, we compared relevant information in both earlier and later versions. Our analysis of these history texts revealed that contributions of women remain only marginally represented in the grand narrative of architecture. And for the most part, African Americans are omitted altogether. We challenge authors to reassess the next generation of architectural history texts and suggest ways to do so.

In the early twentieth century, Spanish-Colonial Revival became embedded in the local culture of Southern California. However, this architectural style did not simply appear, rather it was materialized by architects, builders, realtors, and manufacturers of construction materials who built for and sold to homeowners. This process was not simply about using “history“ and “heritage.“ Rather, these social actors had to legitimize the ubiquitous use of red-tile roofing and cement stucco to establish new aesthetic norms and conventions for the vernacular landscape. As such, this article will look at the relationship between the political economy of building and aesthetics in the shaping of the vernacular landscape.

In this essay, I use the “The Metropolis in Latin America, 1830–1930” exhibition at the Getty Center to think through how and why criollos, Latin Americans who are solely or mostly of Spanish descent, adopted the aesthetics and techniques of Mesoamerican construction methods. I then introduce the Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Broad Museum in downtown Los Angeles to explore the resonances between Euro-American postmodernism and colonial urban planning, especially with regard to the clean lines and rational geometry of the Royal Ordinances through which the Spanish king wielded his authority in the faraway New World. In this way, I propose a revisionist history of modernism which suggest that Indigeneity played an important role in these developments as a source which was at once appropriated and disavowed. Far from being a specifically Latin American phenomenon, I argue that colonial architecture was strongly taken up in Anglo America, particularly in the Southwest (which of course only became part of the US as a result of the Mexican Cession). I argue that aspiring modernists turned to these traditions in their search for a uniquely “American” style to distinguish itself from its European inheritances, resulting in a predilection for movements such the Mission and Pueblo Revivals. I conclude with some reflections as to the potential implications of this argument as to what an anti-colonial architecture might entail, with a focus on museum display practices and what these imply about how they envision their purpose and relationships with their publics.

Peter B. Wight’s monumental National Academy of Design building in New York City is one of most prominent examples of Gothic Revival architecture built in the United States during the nineteenth century. While the context of the building’s construction against the backdrop of the social and political upheaval of the Civil War has been acknowledged in architectural history, the centrality of that national crisis to its design has not been. This essay discusses the relationship between the adoption of the Gothic Revival style for the National Academy of Design and the broader aims of its patrons and its architect as members of the northern antislavery coalition. Without explicit reference to race, Wight, a disciple of Ruskin, relied on the symbolism of the Gothic Revival (both its aesthetic form and its explicit reference to craft production) to convey complementary ideals of creative and social freedom. As this essay explores, the building embodied a concept of “free labor” that had particular connotations in the context of mid-nineteenth-century America, one that helped shape ideas about the racial landscape of the nation after the war. About Race and Modern Architecture Although race—a concept of human difference that establishes hierarchies of power and domination—has played a critical role in the development of modern architectural discourse and practice since the Enlightenment, its influence on the discipline remains largely underexplored. This volume offers a welcome and long-awaited intervention for the field by shining a spotlight on constructions of race and their impact on architecture and theory in Europe and North America and across various global contexts since the eighteenth century. Challenging us to write race back into architectural history, contributors confront how racial thinking has intimately shaped some of the key concepts of modern architecture and culture over time, including freedom, revolution, character, national and indigenous style, progress, hybridity, climate, representation, and radicalism. By analyzing how architecture has intersected with histories of slavery, colonialism, and inequality—from eighteenth-century neoclassical governmental buildings to present-day housing projects for immigrants—Race and Modern Architecture challenges, complicates, and revises the standard association of modern architecture with a universal project of emancipation and progress. https://upittpress.org/books/9780822946052/ ISBN 9780822946052