Blackness in Practice: Toward An Architectural Phenomenology Of Blackness

Author(s): Charles L. Davis II

Source: Log, No. 42, Disorienting Phenomenology (Winter/Spring 2018), pp. 43-54
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 Blackness in
Charles L. Davis II

Practice: Toward
An Architectural
Phenomenology
Of Blackness

While historians have primarily focused on the tectonics and for-

mal attributes of domestic structures of slaves, and the vernacular
structures of black Americans have only recently gained attention,
the spatial praxis of these environments holds clearer evidence of
the cultural transference from Africa to America .
- Mario Gooden, Dark Space

During the mid-1990s, a small but dedicated cadre of African

American architectural critics deployed the strategies of post-
structuralist theory to locate the epistemological sources of
blackness embedded within modern architectural debates. This

branch of postmodern cultural theory - perhaps most visible

in the essays published in the academic journal Append-X -
exposed the whiteness of the architectural autonomy debates
and challenged the branding strategies of 1960s Afro-centric
architecture for a broader range of design techniques. Despite
these gains, however, this movement did not fully resolve the
question of what material forms a distinctly African American
architecture might take in the postwar period. Contemporary
theories of architectural phenomenology offered some hope
in the form of critical regionalism, but the unique social and
cultural position of African Americans inherently challenged
many of the critical assumptions that theorists such as Kenneth
Frampton, Alexander Tzonis, and Liane Lefaivre used in their
work. One major limitation is the cultural erasure caused
by institutional slavery, which obscures the African tectonic
traditions that accompanied slaves to the United States. This
disruption of historical memory raises a number of questions
regarding the black architect's participation in critical region-
alism. What types of vernacular building practices can African

43

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1. Lewis R. Gordon, "African-American
Existential Philosophy," in A Companion to
African-American Philosophy , ed. Tommy
L. Lott and John P. Pittman (Maiden:
Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2006), 31-47.
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Americans levy today in light of the historical disruption of
their memory of the past? And what moral implications exist
for a black critical regionalist that unconsciously perpetuates
the Western civilizational values that directly caused the his-
torical enslavement of black peoples with his or her work?
The existential character of an avant-garde paradigm of
African American architecture solicits a closer examination of
the role that the concept of blackness must play in reforming
critical regionalism. As the philosopher Lewis Gordon notes,
nearly every aspect of the black experience has been histori-
cally defined by a struggle to demonstrate the inherent worth
of black life within a hegemonic culture of anti-blackness.1 It
stands to reason that the formulation of an avant-garde para-
digm of African American architecture will be no different.
Using contemporary racial critiques of phenomenology as
a guide, I argue that it has become possible to revise the gen-
eral themes of critical regionalism to formulate an architetural
phenomenology of blackness that explicitly concretizes the
existential conditions that have defined the African American
experience. This targeted form of architectural phenomenology
replaces the black subject's perceived lack of historical memory
in critical regionalist terms with a record of the expressive and
material cultures that have been generated since slavery to cope
with the marginalization of black life. A racial critique of criti-
cal regionalism must begin with an acknowledgment of the
conflicted civilizational status of African Americans in polemi-
cal modern architectural debates: they are permanently stuck
between the primitive and modern categories reserved for
subjects living in the modern world. Revising the vernacular
requirements of critical regionalism also demands the produc-
tion of a phenomenological interpretation of racial embodiment
that challenges a universal conception of Being with a careful
study of the spatial habituation of racial differences in the built
environment. Finally, an architectural phenomenology of black-
ness necessitates the development of new strategies of spatial
analysis, site study, and material practices that critique and sub-
vert the representational signs of universal culture that sustain
the dissemination of Eurocentric norms in the US and around
the world. While it is impossible to outline every permutation of
this critical revision of critical regionalism, this essay explores a
range of approaches for putting blackness into practice.
The Limits of Critical Regionalism
Critical regionalism was formulated in the 1980s as postmod-
ern critics began to recognize the aesthetically homogenizing
44 Log 42

2. See Kenneth Frampton, "On Reading
Heidegger," in Theorizing a Ne' v Agenda for
Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural
Theory , 1965-199 5, ed. Kate Nesbitt (New
York: Princeton Architectural Press,
1996), 442-46; and "The Status of Man
and the Status of His Objects: A Reading
of The Human Condition in Architecture
Theory Since 1968 , ed. K. Michael Hays
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 162-77.
3. Kenneth Frampton, "Towards a Critical
Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture
of Resistance," in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays
on Postmodern Culture , ed. Hal Foster (Port
Townsend: Bay Press, 1981), 16-10.
4. Ibid., 22 (citing van Eyck).
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effects of globalization, with Frampton helping to shape this
intellectual framework through nearly a decade of research
into phenomenology. Essays such as "On Reading Heidegger"
and "The Status of Man and the Status of His Objects: A
Reading of The Human Condition " reveal Frampton's phenom-
enological orientation toward architecture as a poetic expres-
sion of mankinds existential condition. His work transforms
Gottfried Sempers ethnographic and historicist interpretation
of tectonics into a vehicle for materially expressing the secu-
lar progression of human civilization.2 Frampton's 198? essay
"Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture
of Resistance" became paradigmatic of his prescriptive
approach to "secularizing," or abstracting, the material prac-
tices of "world culture" in an effort to better align them with
the prevailing material conditions of late capitalism, or what
he termed "universal civilization."* This approach was initially
praised for enabling a synthetic integration of the material
cultures of developing countries with the aesthetic traditions
of high-modern architecture. The influence of Heidegger's
phenomenology, and especially his material emphasis on the
poetics of Being, can be seen in Frampton's focus on the use of
building materials in highlighting the climatic conditions of
local light and landscapes that condition the formation of ver-
nacular building traditions. In theory, this emphasis maintains
the social and cultural traditions of the past in the wake of a
commodifying global economic culture.
Despite the redemptive tone of Frampton's regionalist
principles, he continues some of the chauvinisms found
in turn-of-the-century modern architectural theory. For
example, he continues to rely on the reductive binary division
between primitive and modern peoples that modern architec-
tural theorists canonized in the writings of the 1910s and '20s.
Furthermore, he intuits a conceptual parallel between Paul
Ricoeur's separation of world culture and universal civilization
and the primitive -modern binary outlined by Dutch architect
Aldo van Eyck, among others. Directly following his enumera-
tion of Ricoeur's theory, he cites van Eyck, who in 1902 wrote,
"Western civilization habitually identifies itself with civiliza-
tion as such on the pontifical assumption that what is not like
it is a deviation, less advanced, primitive, or, at best, exotically
interesting at a safe distance."4 This binary model of cultural
genius does not offer a clear sense of where African Americans
should be situated within critical regionalism. Because African
Americans were not key players in the international archi-
tectural avant-garde operating during the 1910s and '20s, it is
45 Log 42

5. Le Corbusier praised the modernity of
American jazz music in his book When the
Cathedrals Were White (London: Routledge,
19+8), but he considered "Negroes"
themselves to be permanently subject to
the predilections of their primitive cultural
status. See Mabel Wilson, "Black Bodies/
White Cities: Le Corbusier in Harlem,"
ANY '6 (1996): 35-19; and Darell Wayne
Fields, Architecture in Black: Theory, Space
and Appearance (London: The Athlone
Press, 2000), 5-7.
6. Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis,
"The Suppression and Rethinking of
Regionalism and Tropicalism after 19+5,"
in Tropical Architecture: Critical Regionalism
in the Age of Globalization , ed. Alexander
Tzonis, Liane Lafaivre, and Bruno Stagno
(London: Wiley- Academy, 2001), 14 - 58.
7. Cornel West, "Philosophy and the Afro-
American Experience," in A Companion to
African-American Philosophy , 8-32.
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difficult to characterize them as modern in any notable archi-
tectural sense.5 Yet these black subjects were also robbed by
institutional slavery of any direct knowledge of the cultural
heritage resources that Frampton requires for envisioning a
synthetic regionalist style of modern architecture in the present.
The binary structure of Frampton's model of architec-
tural culture is crucial to his aesthetic technique of secu-
larizing the mythical content of vernacular cultures. This
strategy has come under fire for permanently consigning
primitive cultures to be subordinated to modern cultures by
instrumentalizing their perceived organic content to rein-
vigorate the enfeebled rational traditions of European moder-
nity. Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre have opposed
Frampton's theory from a postcolonial perspective, rejecting
his implicit support of a European or Euro-American led
avant-garde for subaltern global architectural practices.6 They
have revised critical regionalism by considering the subaltern
subject as the lead author of architectural design in developing
countries, thus privileging the mythical content of vernacular
cultures for establishing new forms of architectural modern-
isms around the world. This shift away from secular Western
values resulted in the diversification of modern architecture's
civilizational imperatives, which is evident in the expanding
historiography of modernism in Latin America, the tropical-
ism of postcolonial Indian and African architecture, and other
revisionist traditions of modern architecture.
The Whiteness of Architectural Phenomenology
The postwar traditions of African American philosophy and
black existential philosophy have outlined the philosophical
implications of blackness on African American life, paving the
way for contemporary research into the phenomenology of
whiteness as a hegemonic force in American culture. In 1978,
Cornel West outlined the principles of an African American
philosophy using the writings of several philosophers to make
his case, including Heidegger's phenomenological examina-
tion of Dasein, or being-in-the-world.7 Heidegger is an exem-
plar of West's argument for several reasons. First, he insists
that philosophers must move past the positivist assumptions of
the analytic tradition to challenge its autonomy from every-
day experience. In addition, Heidegger's refinement of philo-
sophical hermeneutics challenges the notion that one can have
a fixed understanding of history, or a final truth that tran-
scends individual interpretation. Instead, Heidegger began
to recognize the influence of historical factors on individual
46 Log 42
 self-formation in the process of interpretation. Yet West cri-
tiques Heidegger for not going far enough: his three-fold cate-
gorization of the historical conditioning of the self - through
the forces of fate, destiny, and heritage - ignore certain criti-
cal factors affecting the lives of African Americans: "Yet, as
the young Marcuse noted, these categories ignore crucial his-
torical forces e.g. social position within the mode of produc-
tion, racist and sexist constraints, that significantly shape and
mold the kind of choices available to people
overlooks these vital historical forces because he v

tory in personal terms, as mere 'stretchedness' (E

extending through time. This conception of histor
the social and political relations between people; i
8. Ibid., 9. their communal life, past and present."8
9. Ibid., 24-27.
10. Gordon, "African-American Existential
According to West, Heidegger's extraordinary
Philosophy," 33.
the existential isolation of man in the universe led

endorse an extreme type of individualism that r

subject to withdraw from his community in orde
and establish an authentic orientation for the self.
is true of the existentialist tradition within African

culture, especially literature, which is associated

literary figures of Sutton Griggs, Charles Chesnu
Wright, James Baldwin, Gayl Jones, and Toni Mo
makes an appeal to continue beyond this existent
toward a humanist Afro-American philosophy th
bines existential self-reflection with positive polit
These broader social values continue to provide cl
wayfinding that delimit individual choice in sign
This lesson is very important for an architectura
enology of blackness because it challenges its pro
begin with a critique of the effects of blackness, b
move beyond this position to pragmatically invest
architectural programs that will enhance the live
of African Americans.

Lewis Gordon's study of African American exi

philosophy is founded upon a clear distinction be
ideology of race as blackness and the lived experi
racialized groups. In his essay "African-American
Philosophy," he separates the lived experiences of
diaspora, which constitute the basis of culture, fr
which, as a conceptual term of Enlightenment aes
is for him an abstract category of knowledge used
purposes of representation.10 Gordon's perspectiv
itly challenged by recent scholarship on the phen
of whiteness that examines the embodied habits we inherit

47 Log 42

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11. Linda Martín Alcoff, The Future of
Whiteness (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015),
74. Emphasis mine.
12. Ibid.
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in social groups, which provides an epistemological basis for
understanding racial differences in the world; as a social con-
struct, race is therefore grounded in the lived experiences of
social groups, not in a positivist epistemology of knowledge.
Two of the most cogent theories of the phenomenology of
racial embodiment include Linda Martin Alcoff 's The Future
of Whiteness (2015) and Sara Ahmed's "A Phenomenology of
Whiteness" (2007). Alcoff' s and Ahmed's research suggests
that race is only understandable because of its effects on one's
experiences in the world. Their work provides an alternative
explanation for Heidegger's ability to experience a greater
sense of isolation from the world than his peers: his experi-
ence was only possible because he enjoyed the elevated social
position of white elites who had unfettered access to all forms
of space - even territories that were segregated for or inhab-
ited by women and people of color.
In The Future of Whiteness , Alcoff attempts to recalibrate
the types of collective lifeworlds or horizons by which indi-
viduals form independent notions of themselves and learn
to orient themselves ontologically in the world. Instead of
placing a person's racial or ethnic heritage in the background
of their experiences in order to examine a philosophically
pure notion of phenomena - as is common in Heideggerian
approaches - Alcoff explores the preconscious influence of the
racial codes we inherit from our affiliations with social groups
in the form of ritualized patterns of spatial embodiment. She
defines whiteness as a particular form of social identity that is
predicated on three interrelated phenomena:
When we talk about identities of any sort, we may be talking about
three related but distinct kinds of things. ... We can regard these as
three distinctive aspects of a social identity: ( 1 ) its empirical status,
or the ways in which an identity can be objectively located, measured,
and traced out historically in time and space; (2) its imaginary sta-
tus, or the ways in which it constitutes a shared social imaginary that
organizes and prescribes normative or acceptable lifestyles, both for
the in-group as well as for outsiders ; and (/) its subject-formation,
or the constitution of individual subjects with particular ways
of experiencing and perceiving as well as interacting with the
social and natural environment.11
While the "empirical" and "imaginary" dimensions of white-
ness initially seem to be purely ideological and therefore
extraneous to individual experiences, the temporal mainte-
nance of these systems over time and the ways in which they
frame individual subject-formations demonstrate the precog-
nitive effects of these factors "beyond individual control."12
48 Log 42

V>. Ibid., 84-85.
14. This line of argument is evident in the
writings of Alberto Pérez -Gómez, Juhani
Pallasmaa, and Dalibor Veselý. See, for
example, Dalibor Veselý, Architecture in the
Age of Divided Representation: The Question
of Creativity in the Shadow of Production
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 281-116.
15. Frampton, "Towards a Critical
Regionalism," 24-10.
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The physical and ontological effects of race are most clear
in Alcoff's description of the experience of living "inside of
white identities" as the result of accruing a set of "uncon-
scious and seductive habits" that transform white subjects
into vessels for racialized habits that do not require a con-
scious recognition of the historical origins of these practices
in order to shape our experience.1*
AlcofPs philosophical outline of the embodied states of
whiteness enables us to explicitly critique architectural phe-
nomenologisťs epistemological assumptions that a universal,
immediate, and transparent appreciation of the atmospheric
conditions of climate or the thick materiality of a building
project is made possible by the philosopher's internalization
of the rigorous techniques of phenomenological observation.
Alcoff's proposition is especially that the bodily practices
of racial embodiment are inherited, and thus precognitive,
which places the perceptual implications of these inherited
codes squarely within the heart of phenomenology, and by
extension architectural phenomenology. If one examines
such claims of universalism through the lens of the embod-
ied racial codes we inherit, then it is possible to account for
the phenomenological architect's unfettered access to his or
her surroundings as a latent symptom of the racial privileges
of whiteness that remain embodied in ritualized notions of
space. This interpretation is an explicit indictment of the
Eurocentric character of architectural phenomenology and
reveals the civilizational motives associated with architec-
tural theorists' conception of the Greek and Roman con-
cepts of techne as universally applicable.14 The long-term
legacies of racial embodiment become especially clear when
elite European and Euro-American designers and theo-
rists describe their inhabitation (in the Heideggerian sense)
of spaces traditionally created by and reserved for women
and people of color. An example of this can be found in
Frampton's critical assumption that the material elements
of "world culture" are immediately accessible to him and
other Euro-American designers by the visual analysis and
formal abstraction of material conditions.15 Yet these same
vernacular forms need to be secularized by all architectural
designers - both in-group and out-group members - in
order to ensure that their symbols operate properly on the
global stage. That is to say, world cultures are commodified
in order to lubricate the process of global cultural exchange.
Only those subjects who can replicate the racial embodiment
practices of historical elites - regardless of their conscious
49 Log 42

16. Alcoff does not go so far as to interpret
the political commitments of Heidegger's
phenomenological theory, but her approach
does seem to establish a philosophical
rationale for the political motivations of
European philosophers. If her racial cri-
tique of space identifies a deeper symptom
of the historical privileges of elite white
subjects, it might offer the grounds for
establishing a fuller critique of Heidegger's
Nazism.
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commitments to the ideology of whiteness or white suprem-
acy - can truly experience the unfettered and idealized psy-
chological access to the space described in the theoretical
writings of architectural phenomenology.
Putting Blackness into Practice
In order to develop an architectural phenomenology of black-
ness, we must reject postmodern claims of a universal con-
ception of phenomenal experience. Recent racial critiques of
phenomenology enable us to recognize such claims as a cat-
egorical error that mistakes the spatial conditions specific to
a phenomenology of whiteness for a normative condition of
being-in-the-world. Alcoff's account of racial embodiment
implicitly reveals the latent political commitments of archi-
tectural phenomenology embodied in a proponent's commit-
ment to "the things themselves," which refers to the things
that are undetectable in architectural discourses because of
a disciplinary insistence on alienating these objects of study
from their social and political contexts.16 The enduring pat-
terns of racial segregation evident in the American landscape,
the double consciousness that results from an internalization
of white social norms, and other lingering symptoms of the
racial embodiment of modern architectural spaces all demon-
strate the materiality of race in contemporary life.
It only takes the contemplation of some discreet physical
situations to give us a visceral sense of the architectural impli-
cations of the racial embodiment of space. For example, the
architect and urban designer immediately recognize the rela-
tional and temporal character of racial embodiment when
they contemplate the ways that historical patterns of racial
segregation continue to fragment the urban, suburban, and
rural landscapes they inherit. We might also imagine a set
of quotidian reactions by white and black subjects visiting
the beautifully preserved landscape of Thomas Jefferson's
plantation Monticello. If the empty hallways of the house
and its restored interiors initially enable both types of visi-
tors to engage in a disinterested appreciation of the Roman
architectural motifs revealed by the light piercing through
the sunburst windows of the Entrance Hall, or to intuit the
spatial logic of Jefferson's Palladian integration of the servant
quarters below grade to match the level of the surround-
ing grounds, the racial character of this spatial segrega-
tion becomes evident once a costumed slave emerges from
the servants' corridor as the daily tour guide. Yet one may
ask, what is the source of this racial charge? Is there a latent
50 Log 42

Archaeological excavation of
Monticello's East Kitchen Yard.
Overhead view of excavations, circa
1995, with the mansion in the back-
of
ground. Photo: Digital Archaeological
Archive of Comparative Slavery.
17. See Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip
Johnson, The International Style (New York:
W.W. Norton & Company, 1912).
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cause lingering beneath each visitor's sense of shame or
anger that was present, but somehow removed, when there
was no human referent in view? The reason is not the result
of any visitor's immediate connection to slavery: all of the
people who owned slaves are now dead, so no white visitors
to Monticello are likely to have their own retinue of slaves at
home. Nor will any of the black visitors to Monticello be able
to say that they are forced to serve as slaves on an existing
plantation. No, this feeling is instead the result of the strik-
ing similarities that exist between the privileged white spaces
and servile black spaces of yesterday and today - a feeling of
déjà vu that seems eerily familiar to the racial embodiments
of the past. In this sense, one does not need a detailed histori-
cal description of the pains and injustices of slavery in order
to empathize with the plight of the slave; the spatial practices
that were embodied by the practices of antebellum slavery
still persist. They are embodied in the contemporary patterns
racial segregation, microaggressions, coded political lan-
guage, mass incarceration, and other customs that continue
this legacy. Implicit in this indictment is the recognition that
someone, somewhere, many years from now, will eventually
judge us just as harshly as we do Jefferson for his hypocritical
attitudes toward the slave labor that made his lifestyle of lei-
sure possible. It is our daily collusion with racialized systems
of embodiment that elicits our current sense of shame, our
anger, or perhaps both emotions at the same time.
The writings of black existential philosophers such as
Frantz Fanon are essential tools for opening up new direc-
tions for African American contemporary architectural
practice, as these scholars have prepared us to recognize the
binary structures of Enlightenment aesthetics that have cat-
egorically stereotyped white and black subjectivities - coin-
cidentally, during the very generation when the Museum
of Modern Art first polemicized the International Style as
a universal
mode of design.17 Black existential philosophers
have also prepared us to identify the new organic relation-
ships that African Americans have established between the
black body and material culture in the West by formalizing
the ontological realities of the African American experience.
When one looks at the forms of expressive and material cul-
ture most associated with black Americans raised up from
slavery - namely, their food, clothing, grooming, language,
music, dance, and even sport - many of them are ontologi-
cally related to the manipulation of the black body in space.
Recent literatures on the phenomenology of whiteness help
51 Log 42
 us to better articulate the embodied forms of racial differ-

ences that are inherited through the body and its movement
in the built environment, in the forms of racialized modes
of inhabitation, and the rituals of difference that are reen-
acted in our segregated landscape. This process of recogni-
tion, in both the juridical terms established by critical race
theory and the philosophical terms outlined by black existen-
tialist philosophers, recovers the racialized subjects partici-
pation in modernity through the historical struggle to assert
their inherent Dasein, or Being, and their related potential
for autonomy, self-possession, and political agency. It is only
by recovering and historicizing blackness that we can provide
black subjects with the cultural resources necessary to engage
in significant architectural design.
In an architectural sense, a renewed focus on black bodies
and the spatial protocols they create displaces the representa-
tional function of the tectonic details of architectural history,
thus enabling this process to start anew in the present. In the
Greco-Roman model of techne that Frampton popularized in
the 1980s and '90s, and which was also the basis of the ethno-
graphic model of architectural style innovated by Semper
in the 19th century, tectonic details functioned primarily to
preserve the historical memory of vernacular practices in the
present. It was through the revival and revision of these orna-
mental forms that architectural evolution persisted through
cultural history. However, Semper's theory of style fails to
account for the fact that tectonic reinvention has been sus-

tained throughout the history of Western civilization by par-

allel processes of cultural preservation and cultural erasure;
this fact becomes plainly evident when one considers the his-
tory of the African American experience. Initially, this pro-
cess of erasure only targeted the cultural idioms that directly
competed with the Greco-Roman model of Western civiliza-
tion, but by the late 20th century it had expanded to claim
even those historical forms that were deemed central tools

for disseminating Western ideas in colonial times. In an ironic

twist, Frampton was forced to learn the lessons of erasure
that African Americans have known since the founding of the
United States; his lament over the progressive loss of the art-
ist-architect^ ability to create culture is further evidence of
the glaring omission of the critical role of blackness in post-
modern architecture theory. To extend Frampton's region-
alist theory in a new direction, African American architects
must replace the critical function of tectonic detailing in
critical regionalism with a renewed emphasis on the spatial

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Noah Purifoy, White/Colored, 2000.
Photo courtesy Noah Purifoy
Foundation ©2018.

protocols behind the practical arts and material culture that

African Americans have generated in the wake of slavery.
18. Boundless examples of this type of
theory can be found in the short-lived
journal Append-X, published by the
These lessons, however, have never been applied to a strictly
Harvard
Graduate School of Design in the 1990s.
Milton Curry, Nathaniel Belcher, Kevin
Dark
Fuller, and Darell Fields regularly published
essays on this topic in the journal's three
issues. See also Harry Francis Mallgrave
and David Goodman, An Introduction to
Architectural Theory: 1968 to the Present
(Maiden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).
19. See Mario Gooden, Dark Space:
Architecture, Representation, Black Identity
(New York: Columbia Books on Architecture
and the City, 2016). Gooden's spatial theory
of architectural design does not explicitly
incorporate architectural phenomenology.
Architectural critics hrst began to recognize the genius of
African American material culture by engaging with post-
structuralist modes of literary criticism in the early 1990s.18
phenomenological account of black ontology. Mario Gooden's
Space comes closest to inaugurating a purely spatial con-
sideration of the African American experience that does not
generate designs by commodifying the exotic ornamental
motifs of black art as an aesthetic treatment of a building's
facade or as a formal parti.19 One of the most important dis-
cursive functions of elevating the spatial protocols of blackness
is the elision of the Western architect's reliance on visual
racial codes, from the colonial politics that subtended 19th-
century tectonic discourses to the racialized forms of labor
that are used to construct the built environment. In addition,
producing a spatial analysis of racial embodiment transforms
the analytical value of junkspace - the banal urban spaces Rem
Koolhaas attributes to the marketing strategies of commercial
building developers - into some of the best material contexts
for indexing the black experience in the United States. Recent
studies of the spatial complexity of informal spaces, including
black neighborhoods in America, reveal an incredible diversity
of programming within these seemingly mundane and out-
dated districts of the city. While both Koolhaas and Frampton
were satisfied with critiquing the structural rules that gener-
ated the banal character of global cities, a more principled
focus on the racial politics regulating who inherits these spaces
once they are deemed outdated and obsolete might bring new
life to black urban space.

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Noah Purifoy, Gallows, 2003. Photo
courtesy Noah Purifoy Foundation
©2018.
20. 1 thank Lisa Uddin for sharing her
work on Noah Purifoy's artistic practice of
recycling garbage in communities of color.than
Charles L. Davis II is assistant profes-
sor of architectural history and criti-
cism at the University at Buffalo. His
current book project is titled Building
Character: The Racial Politics of Modern
Architectural Style.
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At the moment, the racial dynamics of inhabiting junk-
space have been completely ignored by most postmodern
theorists. My intervention here is to make the racial dynamics
of Koolhaas's junkspace and Frampton's critical regionalism
visible by creating a physical trace for the spatial protocols
black residents introduce to these spaces. Even in the poor-
est and most racially segregated districts of the city, the most
obsolete and neglected urban spaces contribute to the capi-
talization of space: a slumlord can amass as much wealth
by increasing rents and avoiding capital improvements as a
developer can by constructing a parking lot or changing land-
use law to establish a higher and better use for long- vacant
land. The creative act of cataloguing the spatial segregation
of urban spaces enlists the architect in a critical project of
revealing the social and economic mechanisms that continue
to exploit black life. Like the conceptual artist Noah Purifoy's
aestheticization of the literal junk of modern industrialism,
or Teddy Cruz's and Alejandro Aravena's conceptualizations
of the informal processes of Hispanic urbanization abroad, an
architectural phenomenology of blackness materializes the
countercultural spatial practices of junkspace without white-
washing the material conditions of black survival.20 Rather
insisting on the monumentalization of black aesthetic
practices, as critical regionalism requires, we should instead
expose the undersides of global capitalism in order to re-
present the latent potentials of black space to the world. Such
a material practice directly challenges Frampton's implicit
elevation of an Enlightenment conception of beauty as the
endpoint of monumental architecture, as well as his dire esti-
mation of the reflective capacity for life that is possible within
such spaces. Since much of black life has always had to "make
do" with what was left over by industrial modernism, a black
existential orientation toward architectural practice might
resuscitate the strategic value of populations so often over-
looked by postmodern theorists who struggle to maintain
the Pan-European character of Western architecture in an
increasingly global society.
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