The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race

摘要

The Black Skyscraper, a critical reflection on sociotechnical changes to American racial consciousness and identity, reveals that an overdue literary turn in the history of technology may have arrived. Readers of David Nye's Electrifying America and Emily Thompson's Soundscapes of Modernity may find, in Adrienne Brown's The Black Skyscraper, an unfamiliar framework for intellectual and cultural history of industrial urbanism- critical race theory-envelops a familiar body of evidence: the memoirs and novels of metropolitan elites and strivers. However, The Black Skyscraper illuminates archival and analytical paths rarely taken by historians of technological determinism and enthusiasm since Bruce Sinclair and Carroll Pursell assembled Technology and the African-American Experience: Needs and Opportunities for Study and A Hammer in Their Hands: A Documentary History of Technology and the African-American Experience in 2006. Likewise, The Black Skyscraper is not just a road map to overlooked observers, producers, and critics of technological change but also a treasure map leading to those who invested, financially and intellectually, in racial perspectives of architectural invention.