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White Papers

Black Marks:Architecture, Race, and Culture

Lesley Naa Norle Lokko

-Historical analysis has generally supported the view that the role of the architect is to projecton the ground the images of social institutions, translating the economic or political structureof society into buildings or groups of buildings. Hence architecture was, first and foremost, theadaptation of space to the existing socio-economic structure.-Bernard Tschumi,Architectureand Disjunction

White Papers, Black Marks is a comprehensive investigation into the intersection ofarchitecture, race, and culture. Lokko's publication presents the the following questions to itscontributors:What importance does 'race' have as any kind of category in the study of architecture and theshaping of the built environment? In making, using and studying architecture, does 'race'matter? Should it?

While structuring this investigation as a dynamic mapping of the relationship between raceand architecture, White Paper, Black Marks explores unspoken ways in which "difference"results in the shaping of the built environment. Using vision and logic, contributors expose thepositioning of racial subtexts within the language of architecture and the disconnect in working

and understanding the spatial implications of difference. White Paper, Black Marks exposesthe discreet, yet complex connection between the question of identity [community, race,culture] and architectural questions such as whose desires are sought after and satisfied,whose histories, experiences, and identities are represented versus those of the silenced.The terms of architectural design and study [space, site, form, architect, and user] areheavily investigated as an historical task of adapting space to an existing socioeconomicstructure. White Paper, Black Marks investigates this issue byoperating within classificationsstructured by scale: from the scale of the urban (1:125,000) to the "middle" scale of 1:1,250(exile, "in-between-ness") to 1:1, the scale of detail, the intimate, the personal.

Within this publication we examine barriers not just as they relate to physical concrete(pun intended) mediations of space, but as the projection of identities as they relate to the

viewer and the cast, so to speak. This projection, being the result of over-imposed mediatypes and representations of marginalia, creates a boundary quite opposite of realtimebarriers of infrastructure and other tangible devices.This media further perpetuates apsychological separation of the lived experiences of each, the viewer and the cast. Inexposing the psychological barriers that exist, do we then begin to investigate the other asspectacle and desire.

The authors, working from a wide variety of backgrounds, take up topics ranging fromVictorian attitudes toward racial hierarchy to a reinterpretation of the Argentinean urbanscapethrough tango, from the disintegration along racial lines of the contemporary U.S. city to the

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racially polarized profession of architecture in South Africa. Whether investigating issues ofblack spatial identity or tracing the visual-textual-material threading of race through anarchitectural project or even focusing on Europe in the 1400s or Australia today, their workreclaims a hidden cultural experience built into the walls the frame the spaces we live intoday.

Critique

Should the issue of race be problematized? While the implications of injustice due to therepresentations of identity [true or false] are present in the built environment, should deducingthe issue of space as it relates to race even be problematized? Do spatial solutions exists tosolve the disconnect between race and its spatial implications? In investigating the history ofrace, it was a coined term in classifying other societies during periods of colonization. Iwonder about the criticality that could be added the power of this publication in addressing thehuman agency of shelter, protection, and identity as it relates to space? I would also beinterested in knowing the moment of departure from this primitive agency to the skewing ofspatial representations of other communities. More important, I am interested to discover thepoint at which race took priority over basic human agency of survival. Can this issue ofdisproportionate representations of the other be quantified or qualified further justifying itsinvisible nature?

What can be said about the denial (nurtured alongside the American mythopoesis ofindependence and democracy) which has transformed race into poverty, poverty intocriminalization, through the reoccurring scientific pathologization of race (whether it be thecomparing of skull sizes or graphing physiognomic variations) or through genetic or chemicaldecomposition?

Through White Paper, Black Marks, a call for perceiving boundaries amongst otherbarriers are exposed outside of the physical, tangible realm Often we perceive the distancebetween the representations of communities [of marginalia] and those that perceive them as aquantifiable measurement grounded in metrics of distance and time. Within this publication,authors do examine the psychological distance between representations and perceptionsperpetuated by mediums less engaged with factual lived experiences. Space is not onlymediated between representations and perceptions, but also the way in which it is mediated.This mediation is the result of often non-architectural endeavors in creating a utopia of forthe perceivers. Using the prison as a result of these endeavors, Daniels breaks down the ideaof the prison as a sanction of housing the other. Lexan dividers, chain link fences,handcuffs, barbed wire, attack dogs, penal codes, coffles, slave codes, brands, and cages allserve as mediations within free space. Crime is the vehicle by which the hetero-topic of theother is objectified and spectacularized as this evening's media spectacle. It is also the

justification for twentieth century enslavement of these suspicious others producing theillusion of a more secure utopia for the status quo. Although we know that utopia cannot existsin real space, is this the agency of the human condition in terms of polarizing race witharchitecture; utopia?