Journal of History and Culture Journal of History and Culture

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j o u r n a l o f h i s t o r y a n d c u l t u r e of race inform the production of space and architecture and the fashion in which that act of production can and does reinscribe relations of power, hierarchies of race and positions of privilege. This in turn, compels us to consider how and why unions and divisions founded upon racial ideologies have profoundly shaped our built landscape, past and present, city and suburb. Such a consideration raises a host of questions. As we move through the urban landscape, how do our perceptions of space change when the everyday is complicated via historical knowledge? Do we regard the Capitol of the United States differently upon learning that its construction depended on slave labor? Do we think any differently about walking through Five Points in Atlanta after learning that in 1906 it served as a gathering place for white mobs that attacked and killed black residents? Is the geography of our everyday lives more or less integrated than that of our parents? How has architecture, as a discipline and practice, challenged or elided these divisions? How do these divisions—(such as the signs above), technocratic and aloof, or excused as the work of an invisible hand (in the public discourse of capitalist democracy)—shape and inform architecture’s role as a conveyor of social power? How have architects—as a social group, as a labor market, and as arbiters of distinction—embraced or resisted integration in the 20 th century? Although architecture is clearly very much involved in the space-making practices that are intertwined with the cultural, political, and economic vectors of race logic in the US, the discipline has responded hesitantly to the call for self-reflexive consideration of its implicated state. Likewise this self-reflexivity is absent from both the content of much of architectural education. The demographic diversity of student populations at architecture schools across the nation lags significantly behind other professional graduate fields of study. That absence of diversity is even greater among the faculty charged with training the next generation of architects and designers. All of these factors hinder, but need not prevent, critical inquiry into the relationship between race, space, and architecture in the United States. Teaching the Intervention: Power and the Built Landscape Such a critical inquiry requires a commitment on the part of both faculty and students to multiple modes of analysis of the discipline and practice of architecture: historical, theoretical, aesthetic, political, economic, and cultural. In an effort to spur such a process of critical inquiry, in 2006, I developed a course for architecture students at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, where I teach. Located in a city that in many respects epitomizes both the “New South” and the significant (albeit heavily contested) political enfranchisement of black 28
Figure 1 3rd Avenue Tunnel prior to intervention Source: Cassi Niemann and Laura Welborn Figure 3 Map of Legal and Illegal Routes Through the Tunnel Source: Cassi Niemann and Laura Welborn 29 Figure 2 No Loitering signs in the tunnel Source: Cassi Niemann and Laura Welborn
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Journal of History and Culture Journal of History and Culture

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