Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present ed. by Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis, and Mabel O. Wilson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present ed. by Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis, and Mabel O. Wilson Elisa Dainese Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present. Edited by Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis, and Mabel O. Wilson. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020. ISBN: 9780822966593 Hardcover: 424 pages In the months since George Floyd's brutal death in police custody, protests against systemic racism have sprung up across the United States and spread rapidly across much of the world. Dissent and demonstrations have prompted extensive discussion on the roles of race and racism in a number of fields, architecture included. Academic institutions and architectural groups have released statements supporting Black Lives Matter protests; instructors have developed and shared syllabi and reading lists on the relation between architecture and racial constructs; and journals, magazines, and websites have published—often for the first time—on the intricacies of architecture and racial injustice. Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis II, and Mabel O. Wilson's edited volume Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present is a timely publication given these investigations and movements. The result of an interdisciplinary research project started in 2015, this collection aims to "revise one of the core narratives of modern architecture—its association with universal emancipation and progress—by uncovering modernism's long entanglement with racial thought."1 To articulate the inherent and often hidden cultural structures of the discipline, challenge the simultaneous omission of racial narratives from architectural history and pedagogy, and provide architectural historians with the necessary critical tools to question current epistemologies and discourses, this edited volume offers eighteen different perspectives that focus on the relationships between modern architecture and racial injustice. Race and Modern Architecture is very successful at unpacking a complex topic by foregrounding different points of view while maintaining a clear overall structure. Each essay is a significant contribution based on sound scholarship, clearly and thematically connected with the others in the volume and its section. Well-written chapters follow a chronological logic based on six themes that focus on the relation between race and the Enlightenment, organicism, nationalism, representation, colonialism, and urbanism. The three editors introduce the volume with a comparative essay that surveys the most significant books on architecture and related disciplines, a task the bibliography at the end of the volume furthers—an addendum that offers another significant contribution to scholarship. As the editors state, the main interest of Race and Modern Architecture lies in European and American architectural theory.2 Indeed, the collection looks at the heart of the architectural canon and the core narratives of Western architecture with the aim of deconstructing their apparent universality and transparency. The goal is to destabilize established hierarchies of power and domination and incorporate previously excluded materials, voices, and building practices in order to highlight a hidden entanglement with race. Despite its interest in the European and American constructions of race, however, the collection also discusses the exchanges of people, knowledge, goods, and capital between Western and non-Western territories. While the book's first section focuses on the United States, other chapters present case studies from Europe, Africa, and Asia. The section on colonialism, for instance, connects Mark Crinson's investigation of colonial "villagization" policies in mid-twentieth century Kenya to Jiat-Hwee Chang's work on architecture and identity formation in postcolonial Malaysia and Singapore. Both essays contend with British [End Page 122] imperial urban planning and policies for the racialization and management of colonial populations. As the chapters focused on colonialism exemplify, increased global narratives allow the editors and contributors to both investigate and connect architecture to a wide variety of topics related to race, such as imperialism, capitalist globalization, and the transatlantic slave trade. For example, within the first section, the authors explore the entangled relationship of slavery and race that stretch beyond North America. The case studies examined in Race and Modern Architecture also question how racial injustice shaped architecture's theoretical tropes, such as the ideas of style and modernity, offering eloquent lessons on the pervasiveness in space and time of racial inequality. Luis E...