ARTH 306
Building Power: Race and American Architecture Spring 2024
Division I Difference, Power, and Equity
Cross-listed AMST 306 / AAS 306

This course explores the many ways race is constructed through American architecture. We will survey different methodologies for linking architecture and race, including uncovering the history of buildings in the nation’s capital, analyzing public housing and “domestic war,” and theorizing how racial difference and racialized power — including white supremacy — are implicated within modern architectural theory. Our readings will be drawn from Asian American, Latinx, and Black studies, as well as architectural history, art history, and urban studies. Together we will attempt to answer several questions about racialized architecture, such as why Asianness has often been associated with domestic interiors, how Blackness is coded in particular built forms, such as skyscrapers, and how architects and planners deploy the visual language of the Latinx barrio to mitigate anti-immigrant fear. We will also explore how BIPOC artists, architects, writers, and scholars engage architecture as a standpoint of critique, pushing back against the racialization of architecture and offer alternative or new ways of thinking about structures and space. While foregrounding race, the course will necessarily require intersectional thinking in relation (but not limited) to class, gender, citizenship, and ability.