Adrienne Brown grew up on the east coast, got a PhD from Princeton, and moved to Chicago four years ago to teach at the University of Chicago, where she’s an assistant professor of English with a focus on 20th-century American and African-American cultural production. Her sold-out talk at the Chicago Humanities Festival on October 25 will draw from her nearly completed book on what might sound like an unlikely topic: the intersection of skyscrapers and race. Brown says she started out with broader intentions, then got sucked in by the richness of what was originally to be a single chapter. A longtime architecture fan, she says she’s hooked on the interplay between literature and the built environment, and will be venturing into the suburbs for her next project.
Before the era of the skyscraper, there was the one-drop-of-blood theory of race. If your great-great-grandfather was black, you were black. It didn’t matter what you looked like—you could have the whitest skin, but under the rules of the law, you were black. That could work in a rural space, where people had knowledge of other people’s ancestry. It works less well in urban environments where there’s a lot of immigration and migration, where there’s no record, and no one can go down and find out who your great-great-grandfather was. If you don’t have access to that kind of information, then the visual body has to stand. So there were these competing definitions of race that are really based on the built environment.
The skyscraper appears in a range of texts as architecture that gets in the way of being able to identify someone’s race. I’ll talk about some of the architectural journals and conferences that included debates about how this new structure should look. Racial discourses of evolution and race science made their way into some of these architectural conversations.
You’ll also talk about fiction writers?
I think that’s giving the phallic too much credit. Verticality can mean a lot of things. But there is something about the sublime, the physiological and psychological response that you have when you’re next to something that’s so much taller. In New York, Trinity Church was historically the tallest building; you could see its spire anywhere. When the skyscrapers overtook Trinity, it was a kind of a ready-made analogy—private capital and secularism replacing the spiritual marker as the touch point of the city.
