In this episode Charles L. Davis II (UT Austin) speaks with Dianne Harris (University of Washington) about the trajectory of her research throughout her career, from the explicit and implicit ways Frank Lloyd Wright addressed questions of race in his work to the broader implications of Whiteness in the American suburbs.

In this episode Charles L. Davis II (UT Austin) speaks with Rebecca Tinio McKenna (University of Notre Dame) and David Brody (Parsons School of Design) on their books which investigate the ways architecture helped to reinforce American cultural influence over the Philippines. 

Our guest series "Building Solidarities," organized by Dr. Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi and students in the course "Colonial Practices," was originally staged as a series of discussions at Barnard College and Columbia University Institute of Comparative Literature and Society in the fall of 2020. The series was conceived as a form of mutual pedagogy between the campus and the public, through dialogues on urgent questions about constructed environments, urban life, and ecologies. This episode...

Our guest series "Building Solidarities," organized by Dr. Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi and students in the course "Colonial Practices," was originally staged as a series of discussions at Barnard College and Columbia University Institute of Comparative Literature and Society in the fall of 2020. The series was conceived as a form of mutual pedagogy between the campus and the public, through dialogues on urgent questions about constructed environments, urban life, and ecologies. This episode...

Our guest series "Building Solidarities," organized by Dr. Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi and students in the course "Colonial Practices," was originally staged as a series of discussions at Barnard College and Columbia University Institute of Comparative Literature and Society in the fall of 2020. The series was conceived as a form of mutual pedagogy between the campus and the public, through dialogues on urgent questions about constructed environments, urban life, and ecologies. This episode...

Our guest series "Building Solidarities," organized by Dr. Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi and students in the course "Colonial Practices," was originally staged as a series of discussions at Barnard College and Columbia University Institute of Comparative Literature and Society in the fall of 2020. The series was conceived as a form of mutual pedagogy between the campus and the public, through dialogues on urgent questions about constructed environments, urban life, and ecologies. This episode...

Show notes available at: https://www.sahraah.com/race-podcast

In this episode, we take a trip to Wakanda, the fictional country in Marvel’s Black Panther, and explore and analyze the speculative architecture through a dual-lens of Afrofuturism and settler colonialism. What can we learn about architecture from Wakanda? And how can Black Panther learn from the critiques of the series' first installment? Show Notes available at: https://www.sahraah.com/race-podcast

Porches, their origin in the United States as a space constructed by and for the Black body, has become a key architectural space fundamental to Black culture as a space for exchange, storytelling and comfort. The porch, as a typology, often linked to the shotgun house, through its image making, produces a symbol for Black Identity in the United States. It therefore subverts the settler colonialist strategies and regimes of exclusion and the history of producing spaces around whiteness. By...

Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy, published in 1987-1989 and republished in 2000 as Lilith’s Brood, follows the generational struggle of humanity against the alien race called the Oankali. Through an analysis of the events of the book, this podcast will situate the trilogy as a precursor to Afrofuturism within a context of settler colonialism. Through our conversation we will briefly delve into: how settler-colonialism has historically approached indigeneity; feminist models of resistance;...

In this podcast, we examine Little Tokyo in Los Angeles in the 1940s during and after Japanese American internment, its brief transformation into a prominent center of black life called Bronzeville, and the role of whiteness in the formation and subjugation of non-white spaces. By examining general understandings of “ethnic landscapes” alongside the history of racialized spaces like ‘ghettoes,’ we seek to uncover overlooked histories latent within them that reveal racial dynamics still...

Public transportation systems operating within American cities are highly racialized. By tying together first-hand accounts, news stories, and a range of data from studies in different disciplines, with an emphasis on conditions in Los Angeles, we aim to show how the country’s systems of capital and infrastructure are deeply entwined and organized to make people of color feel invisible and unwelcome as they navigate through space. At both macro and micro levels, these networks reinforce...

In our previous episode, our investigation on Seneca Village led us to consider the erasure of black urban spaces and settlements. In this episode, we question how this narrative intersects with current ecologies of displacement and transformations of the populus in the City of Detroit, Michigan? We investigate these topics through a more informal interview about Evan’s own personal narratives and experiences with urban greening in Detroit, along with discussions surrounding current trends of...

This is “All Roads Lead to Chinatown”, a podcast about deconstructing settler colonial narratives in architectural history. My name is Piao Liu and my name is Elena M’Bouroukounda and we are both from The School of Architecture in Princeton University. This podcast will analyze the reconstruction of San Francisco Chinatown through two architecture cases after the earthquake in 1906, exploring how the very image of Chinatown was realized, produced, and experienced in the beginning of the 20th...

In this episode, we discuss historian Vincent Scully’s legacy in constructing a narrative of American architecture. A year ago, the introduction to art history course at Yale, previously taught by Scully, was removed from the curriculum. By looking deeper into his accounts of American architecture through a settler colonial lens, namely at the Stick and Shingle Styles, we begin to uncover new ways of reading and understanding history. Show Notes available...

Responding to the modern development of unchecked placeless suburban sprawl, and the disinvestment of inner city centers, a group of architects, led by couple Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Andres Duany, launched a movement with the intention of a radical paradigm shift in the way we conceive urbanism and urban planning. Termed New Urbanism, accompanied by the Charter for New Urbanism released in 1999, this movement advocated for the restoration of existing urban centers and towns within...

Levittown is often thought of as a paragon of mass-housing efficiency and as an influential model of how to execute suburban sprawl. It is also a primary spatiotemporal incidence -- and general representation -- of a settler colonial disposition toward occupying land in the United States. We propose that by focusing on the parallel nature of written policies that codified segregation, discrimination, and other white supremicist values, and the instantiation of these systems and beliefs “on...

This podcast revisits the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, acclaimed American architect, at three scales: first, at a national scale, with his vision for a Usonia, then the urban scale,  with the theoretical Broadacre City, and finally at the building level, with a close eye on the Jacobs House, the first in his Usonian series. Princeton University architecture graduate students Julia Medina and Taka Tachibe examine these aspects of Wright’s career and ideology with a critical eye toward the aspects...

When Sidney Fiske Kimball’s book American Architecture was published in 1928, a peer reviewer at the time praised its vision by remarking that Kimball “recognizes both the body and soul of architecture.” This utterance was not simply high praise. Moreso, it was a reassertion of the central claim in Kimball’s book: that American architecture had a body and soul; that it had, in short, a distinct and definable identity. This podcast investigates how this idea of a distinct American identity was...

Today we explore the Seneca Village- one of Manhattan's first predominantly Black neighborhoods….. Started in 1825, Seneca Village was settled by freed African-Americans when parcels of land in the area were subdivided and sold off. Over the next few years, it would grow to become a thriving, heterogeneous community of over 220 residents, 50 homes, 3 churches. However, starting in the 1850s, the residents of Seneca Village and the territory of what would become Central Park were faced with...

This is “ A House on the Hill”, a podcast about deconstructing settler colonial narratives in architectural history. My name is Piao Liu and my name is Elena M’Bouroukounda and today we invite you to join our conversation about the 19th century American Biltmore Estate. In this episode, we will examine the critical relationship between Appalachia, the Biltmore estate, and French Renaissance architecture by considering the role of folk identity in the construction of settler colonial...

In 1842, Andrew Jackson Downing wrote Cottage Residences; or a series of designs for rural cottages and cottage-villas and their gardens and grounds adapted to North America. By paying equal attention to what is made explicit and to what is intentionally omitted, this podcast will situate the book in a context of intersecting forces of settler colonialism, imperialism, and post-colonialism. Using the subtitle of the book as an outline, we will briefly delve into: the function of pattern books...

In this episode, join Brian Goldstein, Assistant Professor of Architectural History at Swarthmore College, Maura Lucking, PhD Candidate at UCLA, and Amber Wiley, Assistant Professor of Art History at Rutgers University for a discussion surrounding the process of recovering Black history through the traces left in the built environment and how this affects the way we understand and frame the architectural canon. This episode is a recording of a colloquium entitled Rewriting American...

In this episode, Race & Architectural History Co-Chair and UCLA PhD Candidate Maura Lucking speaks to Delinda Collier, Associate Professor of Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Ginger Nolan, Assistant Professor of Architecture at USC, about each of their new book projects. The themes of their work discussed include the intertwined histories of race and primitivism in art and architectural history, media and technology studies, and histories of modernism in...