"Race"—an aesthetic category based on concepts of human difference that establishes hierarchies of power—has been integral in shaping architectural discourse from its conceptualization in the Enlightenment to the present. There are numerous understudied intersections between racial and architectural theory including Winckelmann’s idealization of Greek bodies and buildings, Adolf Loos’s association of tattooing and ornament with “primitive” peoples, and Le Corbusier’s evocations of the “primal energy” of Black jazz as spur to the rational, radiant European city. This lively dialogue between scholars drawn from across disciplines will explore how the racial has been deployed to organize and conceptualize the spaces of modernity from the building to the city to the nation to the planet.

Adrienne Brown, Assistant Professor - Department of English Language and Literatures, University of Chicago

Mark Crinson, Professor, University of Manchester

Dianne Harris, Dean of College of Humanities, University of Utah

Saidiya Hartman, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University

Response by

Mabel O. Wilson, Professor, Columbia GSAPP

Irene Cheng, Assistant Professor, California College of the Arts

Charles Davis, Assistant Professor, University of North Carolina, Charlotte

Co-Sponsored by the Institute for Research in African-American Studies and The Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture.

Free and open to the public.

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