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

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Raceby Adrienne Brown Fallon Samuels Aidoo (bio) The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race. By Adrienne Brown. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. Pp. 280. Hardcover $42.95. The Black Skyscraper, a critical reflection on sociotechnical changes to American racial consciousness and identity, reveals that an overdue literary turn in the history of technology may have arrived. Readers of David Nye's Electrifying Americaand Emily Thompson's Soundscapes of Modernitymay find, in Adrienne Brown's The Black Skyscraper, an unfamiliar framework for intellectual and cultural history of industrial urbanism—critical race theory—envelops a familiar body of evidence: the memoirs and novels of metropolitan elites and strivers. However, The Black Skyscraperilluminates archival and analytical paths rarely taken by historians of technological determinism and enthusiasm since Bruce Sinclair and Carroll Pursell assembled Technology and the African-American Experience: Needs and Opportunities for Studyand A Hammer in Their Hands: A Documentary History of Technology and the African-American Experiencein 2006. Likewise, The Black Skyscraperis not just a road map to overlooked observers, producers, and critics of technological change but also a treasure map leading to those who invested, financially and intellectually, in racial perspectives of architectural invention. Building on critical race theories of corporate architecture and urban histories of racial formation, The Black Skyscraperunravels the double consciousness of white and black writers who imagined towering offices and apartments would radically recast whiteness and blackness in metropolitan America. The early skyscraper's height, steepness, reflexivity, shadows, [End Page 324]and transparency, Brown argues, compelled both black liberationists and white nationalists to assess the pyscho-spatial power of this technological form and its materiality. Some joined Ann Douglass as she and others reveled in this technology of anonymization, abstraction and aggregation, while others imagined the imperceptibility of racialized bodies and spaces could only lead to the disappearance of white suburban commuters or their "racial suicide" (pp. 162–66). The Black Skyscrapercontains revelatory analyses of technological determinism and enthusiasm in literary traditions as distinct as the black liberation theories of Richard Wright and the (white) New Woman fiction of Faith Baldwin. Altogether, Brown's selection of American literature showcases how the literary construction of life amid and around skyscrapers extended America's Reconstruction into the midtwentieth century. The Black Skyscraperdeftly realigns the "uppity" fictions of modernity's white elite with the uplifting non-fiction writings of both black men and white women striving for a place in the "free market" of corporate industrial expansion. Brown devotes equal attention to these distinct bodies of literature and bodily experiences after outlining how the vertical city transformed "the ability to perceive race and to feel raced"—a "practice heavily reliant on the believed accessibility of racial evidence on and around the body" (p. 2). Opening the book's examination of black insecurity, Passingfollows a fair-skinned African-American woman as she deceptively and apprehensively crosses America's color lines and glass ceilings—both the suburban/urban frontier and streetscape/rooftop of a midtown skyscraper. The Great Gatsby, an exposition of shape-shifting, code-switching and the illusion of belonging in metropolitan America, closes out the book's exploration of white fragility. Such intricate yet insightful analyses of corporeality and consciousness make metropolitan elites and strivers across the color spectrum material to the social construction of the skyscraper "as a technology of perception and sensation" (p. 17). Brown's engrossing literary analyses of "vertical city" makers and materiality leave little room in The Black Skyscraperfor reflection on racial perceptions of non-fiction skyscrapers. If racial perception is not a singular or instantaneous act but rather a "complex series of procedures involving judgment, reading, rationalization and conjecture" (p. 23), as Brown explains at the outset, then the racial perception of skyscrapers extends beyond the lens of literature and literati. Brown introduces, toward the end of the book, the written and graphic work of Le Corbusier and Lee Galloway, noting how other engineers, architects, organizational psychologists, and managers invited their professions and metropolitan professionals to identify skyscraper builders as white saviors of darkening cities and white managers...