PS08 Transnational Histories of Architecture and Racial Violence

This paper illuminates architectural responses to death as a slow form of racial violence by examining a deadly episode in Canadian residential school history. Residential schools separated Indigenous children from their families to assimilate them into white settler society. Initially built by religious bodies, the buildings faced increasing government scrutiny in 1907 following reports detailing extremely high death rates from tuberculosis. The Department of Indian Affairs’ chief medical officer, Peter Henderson Bryce, blamed the epidemic on admission of sick children, overcrowding, and defective sanitation and ventilation in the institutions. Their “polluted” and “foul” air, he wrote, was worsened by tuberculosis, which added “an infective quality to the atmosphere” that threatened children’s lives.

Engaging with the physical and metaphorical dimensions of what Kristen Simmons calls, after Christina Sharpe, “settler atmospherics,” I argue that in attempting to ameliorate the schools’ diseased interior atmospheres, the state used architecture to consolidate its colonial project. On both sides of the Canada-US border, “dying race” discourses, hereditary and racial theories of disease, and fears of infecting white populations affected tuberculosis treatment infrastructure (or lack thereof) for Indigenous communities. Canada ignored Bryce’s urgent call for regular medical inspection and construction of tent hospitals to treat sick children. Government response to the crisis was delayed until 1911, when it signed contracts with churches that offered “per-capita” federal funding in exchange for minimum building standards. The resulting architectural changes included additions such as porches and cupolas for ventilation, along with new, larger buildings with elaborate ventilation systems, sick wards, and balconies. These changes signaled delayed attempts to preserve life, but they did so symbolically, disregarding medical advice while strengthening the state’s capacity to institutionalize Indigenous children. The response to the crisis was architectural, rather than medical, and as such proposed assimilation as a cure for disease.

Colonial policies promoting racial miscegenation have deeply shaped former Portuguese colonies’ modernist architecture. In this paper, I analyze how the architecture in MoMA’s Brazil Builds exhibition (1942) applied in Angola negotiated colonial premises of political domination. While architectural historiography has focused on Portugal’s former African colonies, Brazil’s modernist architecture and its centrality in Portugal’s imperialist efforts remain unmapped. Central to a 1952 geopolitical theory responding to international pressures for Africa's self-determination, Portugal’s fascist regime (1932-1968) defended an allegedly Portuguese and Mediterranean proclivity to colonizing the tropics. According to the Brazilian and influential sociologist Gilberto Freyre, Brazil attested to a “luso-tropicalism” in its eminent racial mixing, assimilation of tropical peoples into civilization, and salubrious tropical acclimatization of white settlers, due to the social and spatial centrality of the colonial master’s house typology, in which the enslaved and the enslaver coexisted harmoniously. Influential to modernism, Freyre inspired associations between tradition and modernity as well as the subsequent international promotion of Brazil’s modernist architecture as a tropical regionalist symbiosis between the international style and local knowledge. Racial and climatic equivalences between Brazil and the Portuguese settlers’ colony of Angola, the Portuguese ownership of Brazil’s modernism as a continuum from its colonial architecture, and the international traction by the exhibit further drove local experimentations with Brazil’s modernism. As a colonial tool, this architecture was adopted as a more racially inclusive cultural model compared to other European powers, while taming local socio-political climates and fulfilling infrastructural and sanitary demands for the white settlers’ occupation. Analyzing particular modernist buildings in Luanda along with colonial documents, this paper will examine the geopolitical forces embedded in the promotion of Brazil’s architecture model, as both a national and imperialist strategy to be applied on the other side of the Atlantic.

In the early twentieth century, Swedish immigrant Bror Dahlberg conceived of a new product that he hoped would revolutionize home building. Having worked in Minnesota’s paper industry, Dahlberg understood that logging operations would soon run out of virgin wood. Louisiana, home to hundreds of sugarcane plantations, offered a surprising solution – the dense, pulpy byproduct of sugar production called bagasse, which was seen as a waste product. After intensive research and development, Dahlberg made a compressed fiberboard from bagasse. He called it Celotex. In 1921, Dahlberg moved South to realize his dream. He was going to build houses out of sugar.

Historians commonly accept that the “New South” was not much more than a continuation of the “Old South.” Nevertheless, historians have little explored the ways that modern industry preserved, protected and prolonged the plantation system. In the case of Celotex, the plantation system and industrialization went hand in hand.

Celotex owned and operated four plantations in South Louisiana that stretched over 39,000 acres. Their purchase in 1927 included former slave cabins, with resident cane workers still living on site. By all means a modern industry, with worldwide distribution that led it to proudly proclaim that “the sun never sets on Celotex,” it was also firmly rooted in plantation practices. From high rises in Chicago, executives oversaw a business that extracted wealth by manual labor from Louisiana soil.

This paper is a microhistory of the Celotex industry, including its birth and expansion into a multi-national corporation that relied upon plantation labor. I demonstrate that Celotex had a vested interest in maintaining plantation labor practices, thus helping to extend the life of Louisiana’s plantation system. I argue that modernization and industrialization were not at odds with the Old South plantation regime, but that the two existed in harmony.

From the 1790s, Britain seemed on the verge of ending slavery. The Haitian Revolution emboldened black people, terrified whites, and precipitated abolition (1807), heralding a shifting labor regime for increasingly absentee proprietors. Planters implemented spatial, mechanical, and labor management techniques during ensuing decades' amelioration, apprenticeship, and emancipation policies. Hedging against volatility, owners distanced themselves from Caribbean holdings, physically retreating to English countryside estates, then financially, by divesting. They adjusted production techniques and, accordingly, building practices for remote management. I argue that hedging and detachment characterize the architecture of the nineteenth-century Atlantic, from transnational economies to construction details.

Through comparative analysis of two estates commissioned by Chaloner Arcedeckne, in Jamaica and England, this paper proposes new readings of plantation and aristocratic country houses and grounds from the labor, materials, and land for constructing each. Arcedeckne never visited his Jamaican Golden Grove property, replete with its own wharf and ship. Corresponding with his local “attorney,” however, Arcedeckne insisted on building in brick rather than local stone, with wooden window and door frames shipped from England. Meanwhile, in Suffolk, England, Arcedeckne funded Glevering Hall from sugar hedged with hurricane and marine insurance. Gesturing toward its source of capital, this brick house included mahogany from Caribbean forests clear-cut for sugar cultivation. Glevering, designed by John White with a Humphry Repton-designed landscape, contrasts against Golden Grove, whose designers—let alone builders—remain anonymous. Likewise, Repton's picturesque landscape diverges from the productive Jamaican one: pro-slavery accounts labeled Golden Grove's enslaved quarters' inhabitants “improvident” for building poorly. Planters hedged, profiting as slavery declined; yet they denied enslaved people capacity of foresight.

As transnational economies aligned toward liberalism, owners sought detachment, and formerly enslaved workers became wage laborers. Thus webs of architecture, landscapes, and materialities persisted in the wake of transatlantic slavery, as tangible traces of black dehumanization.