The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.10 (792 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 1421423839 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 280 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2013-06-12 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Harris, University of Utah, author of Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America)"Especially impressive is Brown’s careful attention to the aesthetic questions, including a clear account of how the skyscraper entered a collective imagination and contributed to a changing sensorium. In showing how the many literary and visual works she has assembled for this studynon-fiction and fiction, documentary and imaginativeat once register and shape that collective imagination, Br
In lesser-known works of apocalyptic science fiction, light romance, and Jazz Age melodrama, as well as in more canonical works by W. B. Du Bois, F. Beginning with Chicago’s early 10-story towers and concluding with the 1931 erection of the 110-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. 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.. Scott Fitzgerald, Aaron Douglas, and Nella Larsen, the skyscraper mediates the process of seeing and being seen as a racialized subject. 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. Examining works produced by writers, painters, architects, and laborers who grappled with the early skyscraper’s outsized and disorienting dimensions, Brown explores this arch
Adrienne Brown is an assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is the coeditor of Race and Real Estate.