Architecture in Black: Theory, Space and Appearance

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 Language: Black Architectonics Spatial Linguistics and the Hall of Mirrors The Black Architectonic: A Methodological Note Now Imagine a Monkey Sitting in a Dark Place Trying to See Architecture for the First Time Étienne-Louis Boullée (1728-1799) Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806) Lebbeus Woods (1940-2012) John Hejduk (1929-2000) Darell Fields (1962-) Afterthought The End: Of Absence Works Cited Index

About the Author :
Darell Wayne Fields is a Lecturer in the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley, USA.

Review :
Darell Field's pioneering book is the first theoretical treatment of race in architecural discourse. The first mature attempt to engage in a sophisticated theoretical discourse about architecture and race using the tools of cultural studies and Afro-American literary theory. In this way, Fields has opened new critical and constructive possibilities for our intellectual discussions of modernity, architecture, and race. -- Cornel West Emerging from a context in which architectural theory increasingly avoids difficult questions, Architecture in Black engages them in a distinctive way. Beginning with a rereading of Hegel's Aesthetics and The Philosophy of History, Fields conjures an encounter between architectural theory and semiotic structures that mines the gaps of history to reconstruct the black subject in a manner that is diagrammatic, projective, and defiantly autonomous and unfixed. Interrogating both history and dialectics to unveil alternative realities, this is an important contribution to the exploration of aporias in architectural theory. -- Jeannie Kim, Assistant Dean of Academic Programming in the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto, Canada A bold and invigorating discussion of the intersection between architecture and race. By excavating the racialized history of architecture, the book opens up new territories for a wider interdisciplinary debate and discussion. An enormously important book. -- Fassil Demissie, Associate Professor of Public Policy Studies, DePaul University, USA and author of 'Colonial Architecture and Urbanism in Africa' It is best to think of this text as an allegorical demonstration of its central thesis: using the critical tools of semiotics, Darell Fields uncovers the black subjectivities hidden with the architectonic structures of Continental Philosophy. Working as the fabled 'trickster' of old, Fields cleverly uses his prose to revise the critical aims of philosophy by constructing a new world from its multiple fragments. While both serious and critical in tone, Architecture in Black is delightfully irreverent in its transformation of the very system it relies upon for existence. The results are both haunting and revelatory. The disembodied voice of its 'Black Subject' is freed of its nineteenth-century prison in time to exert its will upon the projective logic of contemporary architecture. -- Charles Davis, Assistant Professor of Architectural History and Criticism, University of North Carolina Charlotte, USA