Brown, Adrienne R. (Author)
Johns Hopkins University Press
Physical Details: 262
Language: English
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. (Publisher)
...MoreReview Aidoo (January 2019) Review of "The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race". Technology and Culture (pp. 324-326).
Similar Citations
Book
Kevin D. Murphy;
Lisa Reilly;
(2017)
Skyscraper Gothic: Medieval Style and Modernist Buildings
(/isis/citation/CBB328574603/)
Article
Leslie, Thomas;
(2008)
“As Large as the Situation of the Columns Would Allow”: Building Cladding and Plate Glass in the Chicago Skyscraper, 1885--1905
(/isis/citation/CBB000950499/)
Book
Amy D. Finstein;
(2020)
Modern mobility aloft : Elevated highways, architecture, and urban change in pre-interstate America
(/isis/citation/CBB845299669/)
Book
Fred Ash;
(2018)
Chicago Union Station
(/isis/citation/CBB824939399/)
Book
Gyure, Dale Allen;
(2011)
The Chicago Schoolhouse: High School Architecture and Educational Reform, 1856--2006
(/isis/citation/CBB001212455/)
Book
Ginger Nolan;
(2020)
Savage Mind to Savage Machine: Racial Science and Twentieth-Century Design
(/isis/citation/CBB105851350/)
Book
Fenske, Gail;
(2008)
The Skyscraper and the City: The Woolworth Building and the Making of Modern New York
(/isis/citation/CBB000954269/)
Article
Wilk, Daniel Levinson;
(August 2018)
A Brief Episode in the History of Dusting
(/isis/citation/CBB063718805/)
Book
Young, David;
(2005)
The Iron Horse and the Windy City: How Railroads Shaped Chicago
(/isis/citation/CBB000620018/)
Book
Rogers, Molly;
David W. Blight;
(2021)
Delia's Tears: Race, Science, and Photography in Nineteenth-Century America
(/isis/citation/CBB133907115/)
Book
Brian Solomon;
Michael W. Blaszak;
John Gruber;
Chris Guss;
(2014)
Chicago: America's Railroad Capital: The Illustrated History, 1836 to Today
(/isis/citation/CBB194179422/)
Book
Harold L. Platt;
(2018)
Sinking Chicago: Climate Change and the Remaking of a Flood-Prone Environment
(/isis/citation/CBB941060458/)
Article
McEathron, Scott R.;
(2005/2006)
A. H. Andrews & Co.: Ein früher Globenmacher in Chicago
(/isis/citation/CBB001024620/)
Book
Washington, Sylvia Hood;
(2005)
Packing Them In: An Archaeology of Environmental Racism in Chicago, 1865--1954.
(/isis/citation/CBB000700470/)
Book
Blaszczyk, Regina Lee;
(2009)
American Consumer Society, 1865--2005: From Hearth to HDTV
(/isis/citation/CBB001201132/)
Book
McBride, David;
(2002)
Missions for Science: U. S. Technology and Medicine in America's African World
(/isis/citation/CBB000301936/)
Article
Richard Veit;
(1999)
Moving Beyond the Factory Gates: The Industrial Archaeology of New Jersey's Terra Cotta Industry
(/isis/citation/CBB783324186/)
Book
David Naylor;
(2012)
Railroad Stations: The Buildings that Linked the Nation
(/isis/citation/CBB329217209/)
Book
Treu, Martin;
(2012)
Signs, Streets, and Storefronts: A History of Architecture and Graphics along America's Commercial Corridors
(/isis/citation/CBB001213383/)
Book
George E. Thomas;
(2018)
Frank Furness: Architecture in the Age of the Great Machines
(/isis/citation/CBB664016347/)
Be the first to comment!