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The Black Skyscraper - Architecture and the Perception of Race (Paperback)
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The Black Skyscraper - Architecture and the Perception of Race (Paperback)
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How did writers and artists view the intersection of architecture
and race in the modernist era? Winner of the MSA First Book Prize
of the Modernist Studies Association 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
102-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, the
skyscraper called attention, Brown argues, 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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