![]() I had this vague interest in the built environment at that point, and I had written my senior thesis on the suburbs. She was in the studio all the time, so I ended up spending a lot of time in that space and just got really interested in this work that architects-in-training were doing that seemed so different from the humanities and English. I knew I couldn’t really be an architect-I didn’t have depth perception-but one of my best friends in college was in architecture school. I did my undergraduate degree at the University of Maryland. How did you get interested in skyscrapers? The “Black skyscraper” is a term in the book that really allows me to talk about all these different ways of being and feeling and knowing Blackness that get yoked to the skyscraper. For Black writers the skyscraper is a site for reimagining the city, reimagining democracy, reimagining a public space. Black writers were interested in the skyscraper not just as white space that they were outside of, but as a place Black characters worked or visited, or took in as a tourist. I also write about the way that Black writers were imagining skyscrapers as sites of modernity. They seem to be struggling with the question: What is race going to be in the future if we live in a world where we’re so scaled out that race becomes a category that’s less functional or less useful? That’s one kind of Blackness I explore in the book. They describe a view from the top of the skyscraper in which people look like ants, or dots, or specks, like dark ephemera. These writers imagine skyscrapers, in some instances, turning everyone Black. What “perceptual strains” did skyscrapers put on people? I see these writers asking: How have skyscrapers changed the ways we see race, how we see bodies, how we perceive and make judgments about people in the world given the perceptual strains that the skyscraper puts on people or bodies. In this book, I’m thinking about how writers from 1880 to 1930 tried to make sense of skyscrapers when they were new. ![]() How do you go about and understand your world when the scale of your world is changing, the density of the world is changing, the height at which you see is changing, the height at which you work is changing? As skyscrapers become taller, as they evolve aesthetically and structurally, those questions of what it means to see and how you see change, too. I’m interested in this early moment of the skyscraper when people are learning how to live in dense spaces, how to live and operate on different stories, but more importantly for me, it’s about learning to perceive. The skyscraper is a product of all of these forces and movements, but it’s also contributed to these discourses at the same time. It came of age in the late-nineteenth century with urbanization, mass immigration to the U.S., and industrialization. The skyscraper is really a symptom of an era. For me it’s not only about the invention of a building type, though that’s certainly important, but also the invention of a new language or descriptive language to describe height, density. My project is really around the invention of the skyscraper. Adrienne Brown, Assistant Professor, University of Chicago The early language with which we talked about skyscrapers was childlike, poetic, almost utopian. Originally, the word was hyphenated-“sky-scraper”-to point out the artifice of the term. ![]() Instead, a steel interior holds the weight. We tend to think about the skyscraper now as merely a tall building, but when the word was invented it referred to a building structure that’s not wedded to construction rooted in walls or masonry that holds the weight of the building. But it’s called a skyscraper because it had a steel frame. It wasn’t even the tallest building in Chicago at the time. The Home Insurance Building in Chicago was once considered the “first skyscraper,” but it was only 10 stories tall. ![]() “Skyscraper” is an interesting word because it has really changed a lot. What is a skyscraper? And more specifically, what is a Black skyscraper?Īdrienne Brown: Oh, my gosh, those are really big questions. The following interview has been edited and condensed.Ĭatherine Halley: You’re working on a book called The Black Skyscraper. I met Brown in her office at the University of Chicago, where’s she’s taught in the English department since 2011. Adrienne Brown’s forthcoming book The Black Skyscraper teaches us how early “sky-scrapers” shifted our perception of race in America.
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