Mixed Race Studies

The Skyscraper’s Unseeing Eyes: Louis Sullivan, Nella Larsen, and Racial Formalism

American Literature
Volume 89, Issue 3
2017-09-01
DOI: 10.1215/00029831-4160846

Sue Shon

Since its inception, the skyscraper has served as an icon of American innovation, modernity, and freedom. Upholding this image has erased the racial thinking and racist practices foundational to this born-and-bred American architectural form. This essay restores the import of race to the skyscraper by reading formalist theories by the father of modern architecture, Louis Sullivan, alongside a work of African American modernist fiction, Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929). Reading Sullivan alongside Larsen explains how skyscrapers and blackness together have defined what gets seen as modern. The unexpected pairing reveals the visual racial logics built into skyscraper aesthetics and adds an architectural thread to the well-established scholarship on Larsen’s novel.

Ownership, Entrepreneurship, and Identity: The Gens de Couleur Libres and the Architecture of Antebellum New Orleans, 1830-1850

Graham Foundation
Chicago, Illinois
2011

The recipient of the 2011 Carter Manny Award for doctoral dissertation writing is Tara Dudley, The University of Texas at Austin, School of Architecture
 
This dissertation examines the architectural activities of New Orleans’s gens de couleur libres or free people of color, their influence on the physical growth of New Orleans, and the implications—historical, cultural, and economic—of their contributions to nineteenth-century American architecture as builders, developers, and property owners. A unique group of people building in a specific time and place, the activities of gens de couleur libres builders and patrons set standards within and without predominantly black Creole communities. Their activities informed the types of economic endeavors suitable for black Creoles and allowed the persistence of Francophone culture in the wake of Americanization. This dissertation utilizes as case studies the Dolliole and Soulié families who were active in the building trades in the antebellum era, emphasizing their socioeconomic backgrounds as a tool to understanding their professional motivations and the creation of a specific ethnic and architectural identity in antebellum New Orleans.
 
Tara Dudley, a native of Lafayette, Louisiana, lives in Uhland, Texas, with her husband David and two toddlers, Zoya and Aria. Dudley’s specializations are nineteenth-century architecture and interior design, and historic preservation. Her research interests include material culture, gender studies, and African-American architectural history. Dudley received her BA in Art History from Princeton University and her MS in Historic Preservation from the University of Texas at Austin. She has interned at Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and at Shadows-on-the-Teche. She is an architectural historian at Hardy-Heck-Moore, Inc., a cultural resource management firm based in Austin, Texas.

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