Spring 2021

The Architecture of Race

Listed in: American Studies, as AMST-301  |  Architectural Studies, as ARCH-261  |  Black Studies, as BLST-301

Faculty

Ashlie A. Sandoval (Section 01)

Description

(Offered as AMST 301, ARCH 261 and BLST 301) How might the built environment impact how we perceive, understand, and experience race? How has the built environment been used to confine, segregate, and choreograph racialized bodies? This course will examine the different ways architecture and design have lent themselves to processes of racialization, from embodied experiences of race within the built environment to racialized representations of architectural structures. The focus of this class will be architecture’s relationship to race, but what falls under the term architecture will be expansive, including objects and rhetoric from urban planning, geography, real estate, and design studies. Similarly, this course will attend to race in an expansive way—namely, as it is complicated and structured by gender, wealth inequality, and sexuality. This course’s approach to architecture and race is interdisciplinary at the level of course readings and assignments. Course readings will span the humanities and also include artistic and architectural projects. Three main goals of this course are to (1) identify how the built environment has been used historically to create, mark, and represent race; (2) deploy key theories of race to assess how racialization occurs through built objects and the process of design; and (3) reflect on our own racialized experiences within the built environment.

Limited to 15 students.  Spring semester.  Visiting Lecturer Sandoval.

AMST 301 - L/D

Section 01
M 02:10 PM - 04:55 PM ONLI ONLI

Offerings

2024-25: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2021