The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race by Adrienne Brown (review)

In The Black Skyscraper, Adrienne Brown surveys an entire constellation of racial perception in America grounded in the architectural paradigm of late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Brown's magisterial work focuses on both the vertical and horizontal registers of architectural space, identifying the coded racial perspectives that followed from the advent and construction of the skyscraper in modern American Cities. Remarking on the way steel-frame technology altered the very way bodies and racial signifiers were perceived in the period between 1880 and 1931 (from the construction of the Home Insurance building in Chicago to the Empire State Building in New York), Brown probes deep into the white and black literary imagination for instances of racialized perceptions of the skyscraper. By visiting little known works of weird, speculative, and apocalyptic science fiction, as well as more conventional works of realism such as The Great Gatsby, Henry James's "The Jolly Corner," Nella Larsen's Passing, the romance novels of Faith Baldwin and others, Brown offers a detailed view of the urban skyline from a complex blend of literary theory, critical race studies, architectural theory, and historical analysis.

Responding to the recent spatial turn in the humanities, The Black Skyscraper situates what Brown refers to as the "architectural life of race," tracking a veritable "material history of race," in the surfaces and structures composing urban life in America (6, 17). For Brown, "all architectures are, [End Page e-18] inevitably, racial architectures, producing and maintaining site-specific phenomenologies of race" (3). From this architectural foundation, Brown examines the disorienting and vertiginous first appearances of skyscraper architecture in America, detailing the ways in which these sites both shocked and inspired awe; their size and scale in budding metropolises following the rapid industrialization of America and the production of urban space after the downfall of Jeffersonian agrarianism ushered in a new epoch of racial perception and phenomenologies of race which have largely gone underrep-resented in scholarship (4). According to Brown, "the skyscraper appeared at a particularly inconvenient historical moment for those looking to codify classifications of racial difference," at the end of the reconstruction era and the rise of Jim Crow institutionalization in the south (5). This period of American life was marked by changing codifications of racial identity, which precipitated numerous survival strategies on the part of whiteness in order to endure the changing racial compositions of modern American cities (31).

Brown examines these strategies in the second chapter of her book, commenting on what she refers to "the visual fate of whiteness" in urban life, and the attitudes of white authors commenting on skyscraper architecture in the face of what might have been perceived as a "spectral white diaspora" (57). Brown turns to two obscure works of fiction, George Allan England's "The Last new Yorkers," and Murray Leinster's "The Runaway Skyscraper, which she describes as "frontier skyscraper fiction" (47). Both of these narratives are set in the Metropolitan Life Building in New York, and feature tropes of time traveling and survival in the face of an apocalyptic scenario, commenting the preservation of whiteness during a period of perceived "white insolvency" (40). Chapter 2 closes with an extended critical account of race implicitly informing Henry James's essay The American Scene and his short ghost story "The Jolly Corner." Brown claims that "James re-collects the fractured vantage points dispersed by the skyscraper," which, she argues, "reifies white metropolitan affiliation and counteracts the skyscraper's abstracting optics" (76). Brown digs deep into the rhetorical and perhaps unconscious motivations permeating these narratives, successfully developing a sound account of white paranoia and the somewhat frantic literary responses to skyscraper architecture during this fraught period of racial indeterminacy.

The third—and arguably most successful—chapter of The Black Skyscraper, Brown shifts our attention toward racial perception as a product of embodied phenomenologies of race, such as those found in Nella Larsen's Passing. Brown explores "the rhetoric of seeing in Passing...