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The black skyscraper : architecture and the perception of race / Adrienne Brown

Author
Brown, Adrienne R., 1983-
Published
Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017.
Physical Description
1 online resource (xi, 262 pages) : illustrations
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Contents
Introduction- race in three dimensions -- Architecture and the visual fate of whiteness -- The miscegenated skyscraper and passing metropolitans -- The black skyscraper -- Feeling white in the darkening city -- Epilogue: from skyscrapers to suburbs.
Summary
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 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. 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 dust jacket.
Subject(s)
ISBN
9781421423845 (electronic bk.)
1421423847 (electronic bk.)
1421423847 (electronic)
9781421423838
1421423839
Bibliography Note
Includes bibliographical references and index.
View MARC record | catkey: 43144325