Synopses & Reviews
Based on analysis of historical, philosophical, and semiotic texts, Architecture in Black presents a systematic examination of the theoretical relationship between architecture and blackness. Now updated, this original study draws on a wider range of case studies, highlighting the racial techniques that can legitimize modern historicity, philosophy and architectural theory.
Arguing that architecture, as an aesthetic practice, and blackness, as a linguistic practice, operate within the same semiotic paradigm, Darell Fields employs a technique whereby works are related through the repetition and revision of their semiotic structures. Fields reconstructs the genealogy of a black racial subject, represented by the simultaneous reading of a range of canonical texts from Hegel to Saussure to Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Combining an historical survey of racial discourse with new readings resulting from advanced semiotic techniques doubling as spatial arrangements, Architecture in Black is an important contribution to studies of the racial in Western thought and its impact on architecture, space and time.
About the Author
Darell Wayne Fields is a Lecturer in the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley, USA.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction to Second Edition
Foreword
PART I: THEORY
Forethought: On Blackness and Time
Introduction to Part I
1. Hegel's Tropes: History, Architecture and the Black Subject
Philosophy and Aesthetics: A Total Model of History
The Subject Identified
Full Force of the Effect: The Negation of the Black Subject
The Symbolic Category: Architecture's Blackness
Transcending the Black Subject
2. Scheming the Scheme: The Technique of Revision
A Racial Model of the Dialectic
The Consistency of Ideas
A Comprehensive Diagram
A Linguistic Revision of Aesthetics
Reintroduction of the Black Subject
3. Tropological Cases: the Racial Object in Architectural Discourse
Signification of the First Order: Laws of Emergence
Case 1: An Original Essay on Style
Case 2: A Reflective Essay on Style
Case 3: A Philosophical Essay on Style
Signification of the Second Order: Operations on a Black Signifier
Contemporary Architectural Theory: Talking Black
Afterthought
A Monkey Reading ... Fanon
PART II: ORDERS OF SPACE AND APPEARANCE
Forethought: The Negative Constructs
Introduction to Part II
4. Black Autonomy
The Classical (P)eriod
Space and Time: Kant and the Indivisible
The Medieval as Symbolic: An Other Space, Another Time
Kant, Blackness and Autonomy: Towards a Black Formalism
5. Space and Time in the Classical (P)eriod
From Space to Appearance
Spatial Orders in the Birth of Tragedy
Visualizing Autonomy: A Reflection on a History of Styles
The Spatial Diagrammatic
6. Architecture and the Classical (P)eriod
Building on