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Building Character The Racial Politics of Modern Architectural Style
Author
Title
Building Character [electronic resource] : The Racial Politics of Modern Architectural Style / Charles L. Davis II.
ISBN
0822986639
9780822986638
082294555X
9780822945550
Published
Baltimore, Maryland : Project Muse, 2019 (Baltimore, Md. : Project MUSE, 2015)
Pittsburgh, Pa. : University of Pittsburgh Press, [2019] (Baltimore, Md. : Project MUSE, 2015)
Physical Description
1 online resource (1 PDF (xi, 275 pages)) : illustrations (some color).
Local Notes
Access is available to the Yale community.
Notes
Issued as part of book collections on Project MUSE.
Description based on print version record.
Access and use
Access restricted by licensing agreement.
Summary
In the nineteenth-century paradigm of architectural organicism, the notion that buildings possessed character provided architects with a lens for relating the buildings they designed to the populations they served. Advances in scientific race theory enabled designers to think of "race" and "style" as manifestations of natural law: just as biological processes seemed to inherently regulate the racial characters that made humans a perfect fit for their geographical contexts, architectural characters became a rational product of design. Parallels between racial and architectural characters provided a rationalist model of design that fashioned some of the most influential national building styles of the past, from the pioneering concepts of French structural rationalism and German tectonic theory to the nationalist associations of the Chicago Style, the Prairie Style, and the International Style. In Building Character, Charles Davis traces the racial charge of the architectural writings of five modern theorists--Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Gottfried Semper, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and William Lescaze--to highlight the social, political, and historical significance of the spatial, structural, and ornamental elements of modern architectural styles.
Variant and related titles
Project MUSE - 2019 Complete.
Project MUSE - 2019 Global Cultural Studies.
Other formats
Print version:
Format
Books / Online
Language
English
Added to Catalog
February 18, 2020
Series
Culture, politics, and the built environment
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 255-264) and index.
Contents
Introduction : the racialization of architectural character in the long nineteenth century
part I. The Aryan character of Alpine architecture
Campfires in the salon : Viollet-le-Duc and the modernization of the Aryan hut
Beyond the primitive hut : Gottfried Semper and the material embodiment of Germanic character
part II . The whiteness of American architecture
The search for an American architecture : Louis Sullivan and the physiognomic translation of American character
When public housing was white : William Lescaze and the Americanization of the International Style
Conclusion : race, nature, and nation in postwar American architecture.
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