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

How did the skyscraper influence the way race was perceived? What is architecture's relation to feelings of race? These are the central questions animating Adrienne Brown's The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race. The book examines how race is framed in early to mid-twentieth-century accounts of embodied and affective perceptions of race within skyscrapers. While the novel and short story are the primary sites of Brown's investigation, she also offers close readings of other texts and aesthetic mediums, such as Le Corbusier's When the Cathedrals Were White (1947) and the artwork of Aaron Douglas. Throughout her careful literary exegesis, she skillfully weaves in discussions of architectural theory, cultural history, and racial discourse at the turn of the twentieth century. In each chapter, Brown spotlights a different way skyscrapers disrupted racial perception and racial feeling, from occluding racial identification from its vertical viewpoints to representing the yet-to-be modes of affiliation within Blackness.

The Black Skyscraper contributes to studies of race and architecture that argue that the built environment is constituted by race, such as Brown's coedited volume Race and Real Estate (2016) and William A. Gleason's Sites Unseen: Architecture, Race, and American Literature (2011). In The Black Skyscraper, Brown theorizes that the built environment not only reflects the racial conceptions of its time but also, inversely, that architecture shapes our conceptions of race. Like Dianne Harris's Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America (2013), which examines popular representations of postwar housing and their role in shaping white identity, Brown's work offers close readings of skyscraper narratives, spanning from low-brow pulp to well-known modernist literature, to understand how skyscrapers affected racial perception and also to show how narrative was used to reconstruct race in the aftermath of race's destabilization by the skyscraper.

Architecture's relationship to race can be traced in three major moves throughout the book: first, instances when white anxieties are influenced or represented by skyscrapers, specifically the fears that whiteness is no longer legible or is disappearing; second, moments when race is resolidified through skyscraper fiction; and third, times when black racial affiliation is reimagined through skyscrapers. The white racial anxieties that develop with the emergence of the skyscraper are mapped through novels, weird tales, architectural and eugenicist discourses, and travel narratives, such as Henry James's The American Scene (1907). In chapters 2 and 3, Brown identifies a sense of an imperiled capacity to perceive race, referencing the terror that whiteness will no longer be legible due to the scale of skyscrapers and the fear that skyscrapers are miscegenating agents, obscuring the capacity to apprehend race.

In relation to white anxieties, in chapters 2 and 5, Brown also analyzes ways that white authors George Allan and Murray Leinster repositioned the skyscraper as white resource, so that the skyscraper preserves or ceases to obstruct racial perception. She further delineates how white authors Mary Borden, Le Corbusier, and Faith Baldwin turned to a primitively depicted Blackness to understand how to cope with this new urban landscape. Even Harlem Renaissance author Nella Larsen's novel Passing (1929), examined in chapter 3, while emphasizing the "fallacies of racial perception" (116), still marks race as something to be sensed "in excess of the physical body" (118). Despite race's destabilization, Brown shows that each author reasserts the validity of race.

In Brown's analysis, architecture is not only the cause of racial anxieties, but racial anxieties, especially those of miscegenation, structure the reception of and arguments about early skyscraper form. Mapping the analogies drawn between bodies and built space in chapter 3, Brown shows how terms such as "mongrelization, hybridity, and amalgamation" (82) were employed to argue for or against a distinctly American style for the skyscraper. Within these arguments, Brown reveals the connection between anxieties over "skyscrapers harboring false façades" and the emerging worry "that skin, too, might...