Race &

In this episode, we discuss historian Vincent Scully’s legacy in constructing a narrative of American architecture. A year ago, the introduction to art history course at Yale, previously taught by Scully, was removed from the curriculum. By looking deeper into his accounts of American architecture through a settler colonial lens, namely at the Stick and Shingle Styles, we begin to uncover new ways of reading and understanding history.

Show Notes available at:

https://www.sahraah.com/race-podcast

Responding to the modern development of unchecked placeless suburban sprawl, and the disinvestment of inner city centers, a group of architects, led by couple Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Andres Duany, launched a movement with the intention of a radical paradigm shift in the way we conceive urbanism and urban planning. Termed New Urbanism, accompanied by the Charter for New Urbanism released in 1999, this movement advocated for the restoration of existing urban centers and towns within coherent metropolitan regions, the reconfiguration of sprawling suburbs into communities of real neighborhoods and diverse districts, the conservation of natural environments and the preservation of our built legacy. Although sounding well-intentioned, the goal of New Urbanism is a retreat and renewal of planned communities of the early 1900’s. We argue that by retreating to this form of “traditional” community design, new urbanists brought back romanticized notions of the earliest American colonies and by doing so reinforced settler colonial narratives of land acquisition and white placemaking.

Show Notes Available at

https://www.sahraah.com/race-podcast

Levittown is often thought of as a paragon of mass-housing efficiency and as an influential model of how to execute suburban sprawl. It is also a primary spatiotemporal incidence -- and general representation -- of a settler colonial disposition toward occupying land in the United States. We propose that by focusing on the parallel nature of written policies that codified segregation, discrimination, and other white supremicist values, and the instantiation of these systems and beliefs “on the ground,” in the form of pastoral, quaint imagery and objects on a typical suburban street, it is possible to see how Levittown -- and suburbia at large -- used traditional settler visual cues to both soften the insidious nature of the discriminatory policies underlying its organization, as well as to signal to prospective and current homeowners that this form of community was an extension -- a direct descendant -- of the centuries-old practice of white folk settling in the country(side). Levittown is known among planners, designers, and architects for its role in ushering in a new mode of living that is highly dependent on the petrol economy, and it is also, more or less, already recognized as being a prime example of racist housing policies. In this podcast, we seek to more explicitly show how images embody and convey meaning, and to assert, via the example of Levittown, that innocuous, even decorative objects and architectural constructs and expressions, may symbolize far more sinister machinations.

Show Notes available at:

https://www.sahraah.com/race-podcast

This podcast revisits the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, acclaimed American architect, at three scales: first, at a national scale, with his vision for a Usonia, then the urban scale,  with the theoretical Broadacre City, and finally at the building level, with a close eye on the Jacobs House, the first in his Usonian series. Princeton University architecture graduate students Julia Medina and Taka Tachibe examine these aspects of Wright’s career and ideology with a critical eye toward the aspects of settler colonialism and cultural appropriation in the work.

Show Notes available at:

https://www.sahraah.com/race-podcast

When Sidney Fiske Kimball’s book American Architecture was published in 1928, a peer reviewer at the time praised its vision by remarking that Kimball “recognizes both the body and soul of architecture.” This utterance was not simply high praise. Moreso, it was a reassertion of the central claim in Kimball’s book: that American architecture had a body and soul; that it had, in short, a distinct and definable identity. This podcast investigates how this idea of a distinct American identity was formed in connection with architecture, and architectural history, through Kimball’s book American Architecture. What does it mean to recognize a ‘body and soul of architecture’ in the nation building context of the 1920s? And what legacy has it left for us today? In our discussion of Sidney Fiske Kimball’s book American Architecture we bring forward examples from the text to understand how Kimball’s identification of “American Architecture” was constructed through the confluence of race, capitalism, labor, and settler colonialism. We argue that Kimball’s book uses these concerns to construct an origin story and historical myth for architecture that promotes white ways of being through the doctrine of progress.

Show Notes available at:

https://www.sahraah.com/race-podcast

Today we explore the Seneca Village- one of Manhattan's first predominantly Black neighborhoods….. Started in 1825, Seneca Village was settled by freed African-Americans when parcels of land in the area were subdivided and sold off. Over the next few years, it would grow to become a thriving, heterogeneous community of over 220 residents, 50 homes, 3 churches. However, starting in the 1850s, the residents of Seneca Village and the territory of what would become Central Park were faced with eminent domain actions by the city of New York. The erasure of Seneca Village and surrounding neighborhoods gave way to Olmsted’s reassertion of the space as a “natural” terrain. The dominant narrative of Central Park’s transformation from an untamed tabula rasa wilderness to the tamed, domesticated urban park is an unacknowledged story of settler colonialism.

Show Notes available at:

https://www.sahraah.com/race-podcast

This is “ A House on the Hill”, a podcast about deconstructing settler colonial narratives in architectural history. My name is Piao Liu and my name is Elena M’Bouroukounda and today we invite you to join our conversation about the 19th century American Biltmore Estate. In this episode, we will examine the critical relationship between Appalachia, the Biltmore estate, and French Renaissance architecture by considering the role of folk identity in the construction of settler colonial narratives.

Show Notes Available at:

https://www.sahraah.com/race-podcast

In 1842, Andrew Jackson Downing wrote Cottage Residences; or a series of designs for rural cottages and cottage-villas and their gardens and grounds adapted to North America. By paying equal attention to what is made explicit and to what is intentionally omitted, this podcast will situate the book in a context of intersecting forces of settler colonialism, imperialism, and post-colonialism. Using the subtitle of the book as an outline, we will briefly delve into: the function of pattern books in mid 19th century America; the implications and framing of the “cottage”; the role of landscape and nature in property-ownership; and the use of the Anglo-Saxon identity as a legitimizing narrative for American architecture.

Show Notes Available at:

https://www.sahraah.com/race-podcast

In this episode, join Brian Goldstein, Assistant Professor of Architectural History at Swarthmore College, Maura Lucking, PhD Candidate at UCLA, and Amber Wiley, Assistant Professor of Art History at Rutgers University for a discussion surrounding the process of recovering Black history through the traces left in the built environment and how this affects the way we understand and frame the architectural canon. This episode is a recording of a colloquium entitled Rewriting American Architecture: Recovering Black Narratives of Space hosted by Charles L Davis II, Assistant Professor of Architectural History and Criticism at SUNY Buffalo.

In this episode, Race & Architectural History Co-Chair and UCLA PhD Candidate Maura Lucking speaks to Delinda Collier, Associate Professor of Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Ginger Nolan, Assistant Professor of Architecture at USC, about each of their new book projects. The themes of their work discussed include the intertwined histories of race and primitivism in art and architectural history, media and technology studies, and histories of modernism in Africa.

For shownotes and a reading list based on this episode please visit SAHRAAH.com

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