This book explores the malleability of race as a construct, one subject to continuous redefinitions in different times, cultures and places. It embraces discussions about theory, urban and regional debates, architectural design, history and education, exploring the concept of race in all aspects of the discipline.
This book explores the malleability of race as a construct, one subject to continuous redefinitions in different times, cultures and places. While race has been deployed historically to establish hierarchies in a modern-colonial world, it also has acquired the capacity to challenge those hierarchies, enabling critical engagements with epistemic positions that have been excluded from univocal Eurocentric architectural narratives.
The volume expands the discourse on racializing concepts and categories beyond the traditional Africa-North America axis, examining many issues that have been overlooked in the field of architecture. This broader range of topics provides for a more comprehensive understanding of how race is constructed and represented in architectural theory and practice globally.
Written by an international and influential cast of contributors, the structure of the book permits a detailed revision of the most current theoretical debates on race. Each part deals with a specific challenge at a particular scale. Ultimately, the book embraces discussions about theory, urban and regional debates, architectural design at the scale of the building, history and education, exploring the concept of race in all aspects of the discipline. It is essential reading for anyone studying or working in the built environment.
Section 1: Theories of Race and Architecture
1. Environmental
Determinism and Racial Supremacy at the Origins of Corrective Housing in
the British Colonial Context
2. Segregated Intimacies: Reading Race in the
Archives
3. Tropical Whiteness
4. Exilic Spaces: Assimilation and Cultural
Resilience in Post-War White Australia
5. Spaces of re-routing: Strategic
hybrid ethnic space as method Section 2: Racialised Spaces
6. Building
Vecinidad: Municipal Black Citizenship in Spanish Colonial Peru
7. Black on
Black: Maroon spatial experience in Jamaica
8. Double Imaginations: Race and
Cultural Infrastructure in Global Chinatown
9. Triangulating Death: The Place
of the Cemetery in Johannesburgs Racialised Landscape
10. Racialised
Planning: Planning Policies and Ethno-Racial Segregation in Cali, Colombia
11. Race and Sex (work) in the Modern-Colonial Urban Landscape of Cartagena
de Indias, Colombia
12. The Architecture of Racialised Projection: Exploring
the Politics of Israels Built Environment Section 3: Building Race
13.
Constructing Whiteness, Vincenzo Scamozzis Humoral Villas, and LIdea della
Architettura Universale (1615)
14. Architecture and Race in the Competition
for the Palazzo del Littorio in Rome
15. Transatlantic Landscapes of
Enslavement
16. Ordered Spaces: Classicism and the Construction of Racial
Difference in Colonial Singapore
17. Africanization of Architectural Labor in
Late Colonial and Early Independent Ghana
18. Best Places, Best Families":
The Architecture of Model Tenements Designed for Black Tenants in Manhattan,
1900-1915
19. Spatial Practices of Indigenous Peoples: Challenging the
Cultural Adequacy of Social Housing in Chile Section 4: Unwritten Histories
20. Interfaces Between Ethnic Discourse and Architectural Theory in the Late
Soviet Union
21. Everyday Tactics of Whiteness in North Africa: Éliane
Castelnaus Professional Manoeuvres in Postcolonial Morocco
22. Ethel Madison
Bailey Furman: Building African American Community in Richmond, Virginia
23.
Building the Athens of the South: Enslaved Craftspeople in Antebellum
Nashville
24. The Architectural Patronage of Two Enslaved Africans in the
Premodern Deccan: Banda Anbar and Malik Anbar at Daulatabad
25. Building
the Fringes of Empire: Mining Companies, Transnational Experts, Race and
Space in Colonial Africa
26. Involving Cities, Dialogues for White
Responsibility: Learning from Guarani Mbya Long Histories of Ground
Maintenance in São Paulo Section 5: Race in Architectural Education and
Practice
27. Pedagogy for Others: Howard University, and an inclusive
architectural pedagogy in 1970s
28. Teaching Community Planning and Systemic
Racism with Oral History
29. Memorializing Black life and death:
contemplative inquiry in interdisciplinary studies
30. Swing Time: The Black
House in Cologne, Germany, and the Privilege of Telling Stories
Felipe Hernández, Ph.D., is a Colombian-born architect who lives and works in the United Kingdom. He serves as an Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Studies at the University of Cambridge and is a Fellow Architect at Kings College, Cambridge, where he also holds the position of Director of Studies in Architecture. Notably, he was the first Latin American to direct the Centre for Latin American Studies (CLAS) at Cambridge. Currently, he is the Director of the M.Phil. in Architecture and Urban Studies (MAUS). His research explores the intersection between architecture and urbanism under conditions of 'coloniality', seeking relevant approaches to teaching and practicing architecture mainly in the Americas. He has published extensively on postcolonial/decolonial theory, race and Modern Architecture in Latin America.
Itohan Osayimwese is Chair and Associate Professor of the History of Art and Architecture and Urban Studies, and an affiliate faculty member in Africana Studies at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Brown University. Her research analyzes how oppressive political ideologies have instrumentalized architecture, design, and material culture in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Anglo-Caribbean, and Central Europe between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. She is the author of Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Germany (2017), and the editor of German Colonialism in Africa and its Legacies: Architecture, Art, Urbanism, and Visual Culture (2023).
