The black skyscraper: architecture and the perception of race

Ethnic and Racial Studies ISSN: 0141-9870 (Print) 1466-4356 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rers20 The black skyscraper: architecture and the perception of race Carolina Aguilera To cite this article: Carolina Aguilera (2019): The black skyscraper: architecture and the perception of race, Ethnic and Racial Studies, DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2019.1617427 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2019.1617427 Published online: 20 May 2019. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 14 View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rers20 ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES BOOK REVIEW The black skyscraper: architecture and the perception of race, by Adrienne Brown, Baltimore, John Hopkins Press, 2017, xi + 262 pp., $42.95 (hardback), ISBN 9781421423838 Brown’s work on how space takes part in the configuration of racial relations in the United States is very insightful, provocative and creative. Since the so-called spatial turn in the social sciences there is growing literature informing how space becomes involved in the production of society. However, most literature rampantly assumes that space reproduces racial hierarchies. On the contrary, based on images created by novelists and architects at the turn of the nineteenth century, Brown seeks to demonstrate that space (in this case early skyscrapers) not only is affected or affects the way race is perceived, but also participates in forming –or impeding- the actual perception of race. The book analyses novels from a wide range of genres, published during the first decades of the twentieth century in United States when the first skyscrapers were built and began to populate Chicago and New York. It was the same time that US white society needed to strengthen racial hierarchies due to the challenges posed by the rapid changes occurring in the North at the end of the Reconstruction period, along with the institutionalization of Jim Crow in the South, as well as with local and international mass migration of non-white immigrants. Brown argues that the emergence of skyscrapers in two main cities, Chicago and New York, intersected with the anxieties faced by white Americans since these new architectural structures were, at least in the representations analyzed, able to blur racial perception and self-perception, eventually opening imagined-utopic spaces where race disappears as a marker in social encounters. As she states tall buildings appear in these materials as radical reformers of sensory and affective experience, drastically altering the scale of the city, creating new vantage points within it, and facilitating denser crowds at street level. (…) At stake in these changes to how bodies appeared was the continued viability of perceiving race, a practice heavily reliant on the believed accessibility of racial evidence on and around the body. (2) Brown adds an understanding from the cultural studies field, not relying on empirical data but rather on an analysis of representations in cultural productions, giving way to criticism when taking a realistic stance. However, her analysis is convincing beyond that academic field, due to its argumentative depth. It defies rigid conceptualizations of the relationship between race and space, and contributes with new epistemologies towards researching race relations. The book opens with various visions that point at the assumed ways racial evidence on bodies were transparent and accessible, that were being challenged by the rapid changes experienced in northern United States cities. For example, a photographic work stressing the still transparency of racial relations offered by 2 BOOK REVIEW tenement buildings, in opposition to an image of Chicago taken from a skyscraper where “the evidence of race is harder to locate either on the body or through its immediate environment” (15). Chapter two, Architecture and the Visual Fate of Whiteness, centres the analysis in four written texts, two popular pulp fictions at the time and two realist novels: George Allan England`s The Last New Yorker (1912), Murray Leister’s The Runaway Skyscraper (1919), a William Dean Howells’ editorial, and Henry James’ The American Scene’. The science fiction texts present a white-supremacist utopia by depicting white people who are able to survive within a skyscraper, the only remaining building surrounded by a savage landscape populated by black subjects. On the contrast, the realist texts - in line with their penchant for intimate scales - confirm their dislike for these tall buildings. This is an assessment where race is also embedded, either because its distancing scale places “pressure on the possibility of locating and recognizing an implicitly white ‘American Type’ distinguishable from racial others” (60), or because the skyscraper destroys “the intimacy inherent to the scales of … racial perception”, in contrast to the scales of private houses (60). The third chapter, Miscegenated Skyscrapers and Passing Metropolitans, brings together two complementary arguments on how skyscrapers might be regarded as sites of miscenigation. First, it reconstructs the discussion among architects about the style skyscrapers’ facade should have; a debate where miscenigation was a concept used to put forward arguments for architectural purity, however using contradictory arguments. Early arguments were in favour of following classic European styles and avoiding the search for a foundational native style because it would necessarily be based on mixtures given the characteristics of the American population. However, and in opposition, those options were later criticized by modernist architects for falling into an architectural miscegenation of European styles. Secondly, in this chapter Brown looks at Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), a novel that portrayed the ability of miscenigated women to pass as white women thanks to the new urban environment and architectural settings established by skyscrapers. Based on a real-life court case, the Rhinelander trial (1925), Brown argues that at those times it was hard to settle race only on body traces, a fact that was used by urban dwellers to pass as white in the changing metropolis. The fourth chapter, homonymous to the book, presents a revised version of Brown’s already published article of the same name, where she brings forward an analysis of the work of the modernist and black intellectuals W.E.B. Du Bois, Wallace Thurman, and Rudolph Fischer, and the painter Aaron Douglas. Those authors’ work present an ambivalent account of skyscrapers as sites where race might disappear from sight in social relations. As she states, skyscrapers emerge here “as projections of yet-unrealized modes of affiliation premised on the elastic skin and ‘inky’ indeterminacies within blackness itself” (155). The fifth chapter, Feeling white in the Darkening City problematizes how white people are experiencing the changing American city. First, the Jazz Age narratives like Flamingo by Mary Borden and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the memories of the architect Le Corbusier, When the Cathedral were White present ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 3 white people beginning to feel uncomfortable in the city, in contrast to life in vibrant black spaces. Second, office girls novels by Faith Baldwin reveal the tribulations faced by white office-working women in skyscrapers, who were seduced by this out-of-the-home life, but at the same time felt pressed to fulfil their traditional reproductive care-giving roles at home. As office-women tended to have fewer children, Skyscrapers here may have had a negative impact on the birth rates of white people. The Epilogue points out that, although Brown’s analysis may promote an optimistic view on how spatial organization might end racial discrimination, racism had proven to be stronger, as the evidence of the suburbanization exhibited some decades later during the process showed; a process through which white people city dwellers organized new exclusionary spaces. Carolina Aguilera Institute of Social Sciences ICSO / Center for Cohesion and Social Conflict – COES, University of Diego Portales carolina.aguilera@mail.udp.cl © 2019 Carolina Aguilera https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2019.1617427