Beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, and essentially ending with the erection of the Empire State Building, circa 1931, the plots of literary novels and short stories, architectural treatises, and magazine covers retell the aesthetic history of skyscrapers, endeavoring, as Brown argues, to “recover influence not only on the shape of the city but also on the racial sensorium of its residents and readers.”īeginning with two “weird,” or fantastic, stories, the anxiety white metropolitans felt during this period is evoked with fictional works that examine the relationship between the American frontier and skyscrapers. Adrienne Brown, a professor who specializes in American and African American cultural production at the University of Chicago, takes her readers on a journey that recounts seeing racial characteristics in the early period of American skyscraper construction. Yet it is “seeing” that is the most compelling when analyzing the relationship between architecture and race, especially, for example, when reexamined in literary works such as F.
Johns Hopkins University Press, 277 pages, 2017.Ī definition of perception as used in the above subtitle might be, “an awareness of the environment through physical sensation.” One becomes aware of something through all five senses. The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Raceīy Adrienne Brown.
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