Charles L. Davis - Böcker

In the 19th-century paradigm of architectural organicism, the notion that buildings possessed character provided architects with a lens for relating the buildings they designed to the populations they served. Advances in scientific race theory enabled designers to think of 'race' and 'style' as manifestations of natural law: just as biological processes seemed to inherently regulate the racial characters that made humans a perfect fit for their geographical contexts, architectural characters became a rational product of design.Parallels between racial and architectural characters provided a rationalist model of design that fashioned some of the most influential national building styles of the past, from the pioneering concepts of French structural rationalism and German tectonic theory to the nationalist associations of the Chicago Style, the Prairie Style, and the International Style. In Building Character, Charles Davis traces the racial charge of the architectural writings of five modern theorists face=Calibri>– Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Gottfried Semper, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and William Lescaze face=Calibri>– to highlight the social, political, and historical significance of the spatial, structural, and ornamental elements of modern architectural styles.

A critical reassessment of nineteenth‑century American architecture that uncovers how race, settler colonialism, and contested national identities shaped the built environment and its historiography.Rewriting American Architecture offers a revisionist riposte to the canonical story of nineteenth-century American architecture. Drawing on new archival research and revisionist historiography, the essays in this volume reveal how American architecture was shaped not by inevitable progress toward a unified national culture but by the turbulent realities of race, labor, settler colonialism, and territorial expansion. Rather than treating architecture as an apolitical aesthetic expression, the contributors expose it as an active arena in which the meanings of nationhood were constructed, contested, and often violently enforced. From Indigenous spatial practices and Black institutional building to transnational exchanges and the racial politics embedded in professionalization, this collection reframes the built environment as central to the competing cultural, political, and geographic claims that defined the United States during this period.