Sites of Memory:

Perspectives on Architecture and Race Craig Barton

Summary: The issue of race in architecture is a complicated and often divisive one. Traditional methods of architectural history and theory tend to attribute a city's civic and cultural identity to the dominant culture. Ignored are more marginal cultures without a tradition of public building, often preventing a complete understanding of the city and the forces that shape it. The essays within Sites of Memory explore the historic and contemporary effects of race upon the development of the built environment, and examine the myths and realities of America's racial landscapes. Sites of Memory's multi-disciplinary approach identifies and interprets the black cultural landscape, examining its visual, spatial, and ideological dimensions. This publication only begins to scratch the surface of this dimension through investigating these notions of memory and displacement through varying scales at the planning level to memorial scale. This publication explores the historic and contemporary issues of race projected upon the development of the built environment and examines the realities and myths of American dual-racial landscapes. Within this publication we are positioned to perceive race not only as a social construct and concept, but as a profound influence on the spatial development of American landscapes, creating separate and sometimes parallel, overlapping, and even super-imposed cultural landscapes for minorities and majority American culture. Within the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, and cultural geography an emergence of theoretical, historical, and design research . This research has begun to recognize the capacity of the built environment to serve as a depository of our collective and individual cultural histories and memories.Sites of Memory offers a complex multi-disciplinary view of the intersection of race and cultural identity as it relates to representations on the American landscape. This publications seeks to reveal how contemporary methodologies of design often ignore the power of the landscape to evoke the history and memory of place, homogenizing the diverse cultural forces that reside in the landscape perpetuating a strange sense of collective memory loss. The essays in Sites of Memory present the recent fruits of such research and collectively and individually address these crucial questions: How are the ideology and political history of race represented visually and spatially in the built environment? What are the visual and spatial elements that distinguish the black [other] cultural landscape, and by what means can these often ephemeral, cultural manifestations be documented,

preserved and interpreted? Sites of Memory offers critical and provocative responses by those who view the built environment as an artifact capable of rendering a more complex interpretation of the influence of black [other] cultures on the history and memory of a place.

Critique: I find this passage to be interesting in that I have encountered many of these cultural and spatial nuances in the architectural, landscape, and planning fabrics through lived experiences within communities of marginalia and even attending an HBCU [Historically Black College and University]. I find this publication compelling in that it seeks to identify the invisibility associated with Black's and other minority in relationship to the development of urbanscapes that exist across America. While integration of many bodies, lived experiences, and cultural histories in relation to the designed environment has stimulated a recent social and cultural sensitivity, Sites of Memory calls into question on which premise these elements are included, excluded, appropriated, and customized. I find attractive the moments in the publication where the audience is presented with architects and designers who express their own methodology into designing for memory. I found the case study of African American architects Williams Stanley and Roland Wiley's attempts at working within negotiated realms of accommodation and resistance in designing Casa Umoja in San Francisco. While attempts are made at celebrating a cultural history through geometry and materials that recall African American and Latino communities, accommodating a general population while creating spatial resistance is often problematic. While this body of work is exemplary in identifying the different struggles that constitute in the reclamation of spatial histories often neglected, I question the absence of successes and failures presented in other studies outside of the realm of race. How do Jewish communities reclaim spatial memory, via temporal, permanent and displaced sites? In engaging this memory, what symbols and strategies can evoke grief, terror, anger, fear, and displacement outside of its community? How does the preservation of memory at a particular site or a place where the displaced can gather and reference commonality provide a sense of agency for bodies that do not connect physically, psychologically, and or through nostalgia? Memorials become static symbols in the urbanscape. How do South African's process memories of apartheid outside of its Apartheid museums as forms of memorial that can serve as precedence. It is not just an issue of black and white, but an issue of place and memory amongst all nationalities in which I hoped this publication might have addressed. Although this is a publication with specific interests, seeking out how these issues relate contextually provide a more rich and critical approach at revealing this invisibility.