Building Black

"Building Black: Towards Antiracist Architecture brings together the forefronts of Black Studies and architectural theory. Only recently, architecture and urban planning have started to confront their constitution of race as a social referent, and their part in the establishment of racist logics. This confrontation usually results in projects that respond to their surroundings, that merge into a changing and multicultural city. Building Black, however, proposes the construction of a Black radical position: building islands of resistance against the expanding sea of imperial architecture. In Building Black, Mason reads the racial meaning of current construction projects in England through the histories of race and architecture. Closely reading Immanuel Kant's formulation of the Subject as the creator of space and the development of whiteness in Modernist architecture, Mason finds that Blackness is an ongoing, antecedent island that can never quite be subsumed in the racializing project of modernity. Pushing this further, he positions antiracist architecture on a self-enclosed island de-linked from the city, preserving a sociality that cannot be incorporated into liberal universality"--Page 4 of cover