eBook - ePub
Building Character
The Racial Politics of Modern Architectural Style
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
Building Character
The Racial Politics of Modern Architectural Style
About this book
Winner, 2021 CAAA Charles Rufus Morey Book Award | Winner, 2021 On the Brinck Book Award | Shortlist, 2020 MSA First Book Prize
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.
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.
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Yes, you can access Building Character by Charles L. Davis,Charles L. Davis II in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Architecture & Architecture General. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Topic
ArchitectureSubtopic
Architecture GeneralTable of contents
- Cover Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The Racialization of Architectural Character in the Long Nineteenth Century
- Part I. The Aryan Character of Alpine Architecture
- Part II. The Whiteness of American Architecture
- Conclusion: Race, Nature, and Nation in Postwar American Architecture
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index