The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race. Adrienne Brown

Abstract

How did the skyscraper influence the way race was perceived? What is architecture’s relation to feelings of race? These are the central questions animating Adrienne Brown’s The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race. The book examines how race is framed in early to mid-twentieth-century accounts of embodied and affective perceptions of race within skyscrapers. While the novel and short story are the primary sites of Brown’s investigation, she also offers close readings of other texts and aesthetic mediums, such as Le Corbusier’s When the Cathedrals Were White (1947) and the artwork of Aaron Douglas. Throughout her careful literary exegesis, she skillfully weaves in discussions of architectural theory, cultural history, and racial discourse at the turn of the twentieth century. In each chapter, Brown spotlights a different way skyscrapers disrupted racial perception and racial feeling, from occluding racial identification from its vertical viewpoints to representing the yet-to-be modes of affiliation within Blackness.