Racial Evidence

Our four-year project to research and compile the forthcoming volume Race and Modern Architecture, a collection of nineteen essays by distinguished scholars who explore the critical role of race in architectural discourse from the Enlightenment to the present, has raised several important questions about the methods historians employ and the archives we mine to write histories of architecture.¹ In spite of the recent global turn in the discipline, many architectural historians still ignore the constitutive importance of race within modernity. To understand the role of racial thought in shaping modern architecture, it is not enough to incorporate objects, buildings, and designers from Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East into our canonical histories. We must also contend with the complex history of racialization—specifically, how European colonial expansion and the subsequent development of racial slavery, mercantilism, and industrial capitalism depended indispensably on the creation of ideologies of human...