Thread by @SoDaemmGood

gonna try something new here:

live tweeting Dianne Harris’ ‘Where Was Jim Crow: Living in Frank Lloyd Wright’s America’ @DumbartonOaks 1/x

Frank Lloyd Wright’s assumption was that his spaces were for White people...

a racialized and racist way of seeing the world that puts White people at the dominant center...

Architecture is about race ESPECIALLY when it is situated in an all-White suburb

Like most White people, Frank Lloyd Wright did not have a conception of himself as a racialized person...

Wright wrote about his sometimes-lauded Rosenwald School design using racist tropes about Black people

talking about Joseph Watson’s scholarship on the unrealized Fisher subdivision for Black residents of Whiteville, NC...

The Fisher project didn’t happen because banks wouldn’t lend to a developer building for Black people. Wright didn’t understand or care about this

This lack of recognition and care is an expression of White privilege and White supremacy

Frank Lloyd Wright’s drawings of the Fisher project were annotated with a racist slur

Auldbrass Plantation in lowcountry South Carolina was intentionally referred to as such. Harris draws attention to the implications of the word ‘plantation’...

‘Plantation’ - a term naturalized and stripped of its meanings in White culture - is a site of anti-Black violence and racist terror...

Jim Crow was everywhere, even if seldom made explicitly visible in Wright’s work

Wright’s designs emphasized personal liberty and individualism, rights reserved for people racialized as White during his entire career

Broadacre City was a theoretical scheme, elements of which Wright was able to realize in projects like the Price Tower, Usonian House and Marin County Civic Center

Broadacre can be considered a 30-year meditation on the all-White suburb

The scheme toured the nation and Europe in the late 30s and early 40s

Wright didn’t write explicitly about race or racism because he didn’t have to. He used every euphemism used at the time, though

Wright proposed a classless society, yet a society with hierarchies based on the number of cars a family owns. A society governed by a single authority - the Architect

Wright proposed that every resident of Broadacre City would be a politically active citizen. During the era of Jim Crow this was tacitly a proposal that residents could only be White

Broadacre was proposed to exist at a physical remove from cities, where Black and brown people could then find work. Wright could have intended for Black and brown people to live within the city as domestic workers

(This was standard language in the racist covenants that created ‘all-White’ suburbs - they were open to Black residents on the condition that these residents were domestic workers living on the premises of White employers)

In 1950, 20 million people racialized as White owned homes, and about 2 million people racialized as Black did.

The exclusion of Black people from the opportunity fir wealth accumulation through homeownership did not cease with the Civil Rights or Fair Housing Acts

When Frank Lloyd Wright wrote ‘every man’, what he meant was ‘every White man’.

Usonian houses reproduced design concepts embedded in Whiteness and White middle class identity (which Harris expands upon in her book ‘Little White Houses’)

Multifamily housing, except for the luxury high rise, is very rarely associated with White identity

Broadacre was organized by country clubs (hello, JC Nichols) - a tool already employed to great effect to create White-only physical and social spaces

Freedom of movement, by car or on foot, is inseparable from White privilege. Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile were all deeemed ‘out of place’ and out of order

The interstate highway system’s planning document, the ‘Yellow Book’, is juxtaposed as a White analogue to the (Negro Traveler’s) Green Book

The Yellow Book mapped out White entitlement to mobility across the continent; the Green Book mapped Black countergeographies of community and survival

New technologies like the car or airplane could change how people moved, but they did not change how people thought about race or racism. (Like AI tech today!)

In 1945 Wright wrote: ‘the White men must pioneer again across a new frontier: decentralization.’ The suburbs as settler colonies...

Weight and his followers created Broadacre amidst the Great Depression, an optimistic promise that struck a collective nerve in an anxious time

Broadacre falls apart as a utopian project as soon as you ask, ‘how can anyone not White live here?’ Pull that thread and the sweater comes undone

Evoking Whiteness as property (Cheryl Harris). We must examine and acknowledge architects and developers’ roles in creating these spatial orders

Choices led to these outcomes. The future doesn’t have to be this way

America’s most famous architect chose not to challenge social problems, but instead to buttress the status quo.

Frank Lloyd Wright was not exceptional for upholding Jim Crow - this was the status quo

Wright’s intimates testified that he was not a prejudiced man. We should know by now that this doesn’t matter

(That second sentence is me)

And now @NegroBuilding (Dr. Mabel O. Wilson) joins the chat. Among many other positions and accomplishments - a curator of ‘Reconstructions’ @MuseumModernArt

Dr. Wilson asks: What are some of the different methods of writing race into architectural historical narratives?

Dr. Harris: It starts with a memory of listening to a lecture by Angela Davis who spoke about how racism circulated at that time

By the early 2000s, overt racism was passé. Instead racism was hiding in institutions and in the processes of everyday life

Dr. Harris recognized that to write race & racism into these histories she would have to learn how to listen for things that weren’t on the drawings anymore

Transdisciplinary excursions were necessary. Who wasn’t on the page? Who wasn’t in the neighborhood? What codes were being used to talk about race without overt racism?

Race isn’t just present on the reservation or in the barrio. It’s present in all-White spaces because Whiteness is a racial identity

How to write Whiteness into the archive? Use archival sources beyond the architect’s own production: Builders’ magazines, FHA underwriting manuals, popular press...

Dr. Wilson - ‘Democracy Builds’ reifies decentralization as a 20th-century Manifest Destiny

(again, settle colonial suburbs!)

Dr. Wilson: how were Wright’s views on race influenced by his experiences in late-19th and early 20th century Chicago?

Jim Crow is usually used to describe laws in the South. Dr. Harris reminds us that Jim Crow existed, in different forms, in the North and West as well

Question from the audience: how do we teach about Wright if we’re decolonizing our syllabus?

Dr. Harris’ answer: we don’t need to teach Wright. If you do, teach the true and accurate history of him

Wright was like most of the architectural profession. If we don’t teach about the racism embedded in the profession and its schools, we are failing

Just to focus on the beauty of Wright’s work is incomplete and inaccurate

Audience Q: How did Wright’s contemporaries address race, racism and the suburbs?

Dr. Harris’ answer: Joseph Eichler in California is one example

“The key is teaching our students to ask these questions”

(to expand on Dr. Harris’ answer: Hilyard Robinson and Paul Revere Williams come to mind as well)

Dr. Harris describing her courses developing this content: important to create spaces where students feel comfortable sharing

It’s important to create space for, and listen to, students’ embodied experiences in the built environment

Interdisciplinary syllabus facilitated critical study of Whiteness

Q: What was Wright, et al designing Broadacre against? What is it the antithesis of?

A: Dr. Harris - Wright is reacting against the overcrowded, ‘unclean’ city. Against the Great Migration, immigration.

It is underexamined how segregated and exclusive spaces are damaging to the people on the inside

They’re not spaces to be sought after; they’re spaces to flee.

Dr. Wilson; The ability to control a territory can give it value and status (which is how Whiteness works - ie, a country club) or keep it suppressed (an Indian reservation)

Q: How do house museums deal with this history?

A: Tell the truth. Exactly the same as plantations like Monticello or Montpelier

If we don’t tell the truth we’re perpetuating the White supremacy and racism in our professions and in our culture, and doing a disservice to the people who visit these places

“The only real answer for me is to keep telling the truth” - Dr. Harris

(Mic drop)

Q: how do we deal with Wright’s Orientalist relationship to some of his design inspirations?

A: (Same answer.) Teach about these things. We teach about processes, patrons... we can also use architectural history to teach about the history of race in America

and that’s all. Thanks y’all for a thought provoking program!

And thanks for reading along