Looking at skyscrapers as a symbol of urban life and increasing populations of blacks in cities, this architectural and literary study explores how conceptions of race have affected architectural design and charts the impact of architectural design on conceptions of race, during the period bounded by the first skyscrapers in the 1880s to the completion of the Empire State Building in 1931. The study considers works of popular science fiction and romance fiction of the Jazz Age, as well as works by Harlem Renaissance literary figures including Nella Laren, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and W. E. B. Du Bois. The book contains b&w historical photos and book covers. Annotation ©2017 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
With the development of the first skyscrapers in the 1880s, urban built environments could expand vertically as well as horizontally. Tall buildings emerged in growing cities to house and manage the large and racially diverse populations of migrants and immigrants flocking to their centers following Reconstruction. Beginning with Chicago’s early 10-story towers and concluding with the 1931 erection of the 110-story Empire State Building, Adrienne Brown’s The Black Skyscraper provides a detailed account of how scale and proximity shape our understanding of race.
Over the next half-century, as city skylines grew, American writers imagined the new urban backdrop as an obstacle to racial differentiation. Examining works produced by writers, painters, architects, and laborers who grappled with the early skyscraper’s outsized and disorienting dimensions, Brown explores this architecture’s effects on how race was seen, read, and sensed at the turn of the twentieth century.
In lesser-known works of apocalyptic science fiction, light romance, and Jazz Age melodrama, as well as in more canonical works by W. E. B. Du Bois, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Aaron Douglas, and Nella Larsen, the skyscraper mediates the process of seeing and being seen as a racialized subject. From its distancing apex—reducing bodies to specks—to the shadowy mega-blocks it formed at street level, Brown argues that the skyscraper called attention to the malleable nature of perception. A highly interdisciplinary work, The Black Skyscraper reclaims the influence of race on modern architectural design as well as the less-well-understood effects these designs had on the experience and perception of race.
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