Whiteness and the Architectural Profession in the United States
In 1899, riding high on a fresh wave of imperialism, nine suited men posed for a photograph on the steps of the Chester County Bank (figure 1). Designed over half a century earlier by the young architect Thomas Ustick Walter in the height of “Grecian mania,” as some contemporaries called it, the Doric-ordered facade was now draped in more than thirty American flags. When the bank was built in 1835, white-columned piles were proliferating in nearby Philadelphia, several under Walter’s direction. Veins of neoclassicism reached across eastern Pennsylvania and up and down the Atlantic Coast and were rapidly making their way into the continental interior. Like the discursive justifications for the settler colonialism displacing Indigenous People through violence and white property claims, this architecture was an aesthetic piece of a broad argument for both the heritage and progressive rights of white civilization on the North American continent.
Figure 1. Bank of Chester County, West Chester, PA, 1899. Library of Congress.
I do not think it’s controversial to say that architectural history and theory has lagged behind many of its intellectual neighbors in thinking critically about racism and white supremacy. One of the reasons for this, I’d suggest, is that we have continued to relate architecture to “race” on nineteenth century’s terms. Take for instance the “Make Federal Buildings Beautiful Again” draft executive order that circulated earlier this year, which clumsily tried to make neoclassicism the federal style. But focus not on the unreconstructed order, or its Wikipedia footnotes. Instead consider the many critical responses to it from the architectural academy and the profession that pushed back by either arguing for the superiority of eclecticism and/or that neoclassicism is racist. These responses, I’d suggest, work from within the institutional and discursive confines that nineteenth-century architects like Walter created, but it is whiteness that structures these very confines, or “parentheses” as Manfredo Tafuri called them. Whiteness worked not just through the Chester County Bank’s appearance, but through the very definition of a profession whose agency was primarily found in authority over this appearance.
This short essay outlines an argument for how considering the imbrication of religion and capitalism into the foundations of the architectural profession is necessary for an effective critique of architecture’s whiteness. That is, to reconstruct architectural education and discourse in the U.S. with antiracist aims, we have to ferret out the pernicious intellectual and institutional constructs of white supremacy. But these constructs are not isolated. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, “we can’t undo racism, without undoing capitalism.” To this, I’d add that for architecture, we can’t undo its racism, without undoing its particular forms of faith. In the “Souls of White Folks,” W. E. B. Du Bois said that when he asked “what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it,” the answer would invariably come back that “whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, amen!” Whiteness’s property is expressed in a prayer. Whiteness is a kind of faith.
“Mid-nineteenth century architects … understood their work as a type of intercession between the body politic and divinely guided world history.”
Sometime in 1877, on the tail end of an incredibly productive career, Walter’s comrade the New York architect A. J. Davis wrote to his reverend Henry Ward Beecher that “Our pursuits are the same. We are both in search of Truth: you in words of History, and . . . I in works incontrovertible of the same!"[1] Architecture was built history; it was the “geology of humanity,” in his and Walter’s Baltimorean colleague Robert Cary Long, Jr.’s naturalizing terms. Neither Walter, Davis, Long, nor their colleagues thought architecture simply took place in history. Rather they saw their work as a type of interpretive expression. Architecting, like ministering, provided a legible understanding of a people’s place in world-historical Truth. A profession that understood history could make it.
We need to dwell on this point. Mid-nineteenth century architects like Davis, Long, and Walter understood their work as a type of intercession between the body politic and divinely guided world history. The architect’s work, to quote Walter, was to raise a people’s thought to a “pure and lofty tone” so that they could “grasp things of higher import.” Now, this faith in the practice’s world-making power is not a shock to anyone who has spent time on a studio review. (figure 2). And that Davis slept in his office for most of his career, seeing his family on occasion, is probably not a surprise to most architecture students. In 1989, Colin Rowe, whose hand lingers across the landscape of American architectural education, described architecture as “rather like a theological exercise” and architectural education as a “calamity.” Smuggling flagellation in through disciplinary devotion in the midst of perpetual existential crisis remains one of the most enduring constants of our studio culture.
Figure 2. Plan and section of A. J. Davis’s Office Library, New York Exchange Building, ca. 1842-1862. Davis’s bed is on the far right. Alexander Jackson Davis papers. Manuscripts and Archives Division. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.
Our contemporary profession and academic institutions in the U.S. have been thoroughly shaped by these mid-nineteenth-century architects. Walter, Davis, and Long were all involved in the formation of the first professional architectural body in the U.S. in 1836: the American Institution of Architects (AIA). While the 1837 panic stalled these efforts, the institutional and discursive arrangements they developed would ground the rebirth of the AIA in 1857 and the formation of university-based professional schools after the Civil War in fundamental ways that are still with us today.
In 1836, the fledgling AIA outlined procedures for protecting their work through stamped drawings and their membership through exams. Architectural history was first on their list of five testable fields. The history that grounded professional knowledge for these early organizers, was not just “like” a theological exercise; it was one. Davis, Walter, and Long’s lecture notes and writings are rife with accounts of progress and improvement that intertwine their material work and their faith. “Charlatan Architects, and mere draftsmen, with eyes . . . void of reason, true moral beauty, fitness, stability, and economy,” Davis said, “misemployed the Order” and neglected the “Christian Principle” that should govern all of the architect’s work.[2] Protestant commitments were not just guides for architects’ labor, they fundamentally shaped the bonds of capitalism, whiteness, nationalism, and imperialism in whose shadow the profession took shape.
Historians of the Atlantic World have deftly shown that racism was intertwined with Christianity and the formations of capitalism in the vast reach of the extractive plantation system from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. The financial and material imbrications of the built work of architects in this system are expansive. But what I want to drive at here is the way the institutions and discourses of architecture that took shape in the U.S. in the nineteenth century were also intertwined with the protestant white supremacy that accompanied racial capitalism.
Two and half decades after designing the Chester County Bank, Walter was in Washington, D.C. working as the Architect of the Capitol when the Civil War broke out (figure 3). Although he would quickly become a fierce critic of slavery that year, in his prior decade living in the Capitol, Walter enslaved two men. And after the war, which he saw as an advance of civil liberty and true Christianity, he would tell his Baptist Sunday School class (which he taught for decades) that history inevitably converged towards the “universal sway of the white race.”[3] The divinely guided narrative arc of global architectural history, which he had taught since the 1840s, was one of progressive whitening.
Figure 3. Thomas Ustick Walter, U.S. Capitol Section/Elevation of New Dome, 1859. Athenaeum of Philadelphia.
By 1851, when he took on the role as Architect of the Capitol, Walter was already out of the disciplinary avant-garde. Merciless attacks on Grecian mania from younger positions within the profession had reached a fiery pitch. The talented Providence-based architect Thomas Tefft lambasted Walter’s “wholly inexcusable” work at the Capitol both in relationship to style and to Walter’s own character. But what Tefft didn’t attack, nor did his new generation of professional colleagues, was the rapidly solidifying institutional apparatuses like its professional codes, contracts, and billing standards that positioned the architect’s power in a kind of mediation between capital and labor whose authority derived from the ability to divine the historical tides. And in his lectures on architectural history, Tefft, like Walter, envisioned civil architecture’s aim as the embodiment of the “character and dignity” of American “institutions that have already become the admiration of the enlightened and progressive world.”[4] The way the architect worked, and the way their work had affective power was set.
“We have to see how whiteness inheres in the very definition of the gentlemanly professional, the very way a pious historical imagination drew the boundaries around this identity and delimited its means of power .”
The confines of the profession drove the historical arguments of disciplinary discourse, which in turn made the profession’s limits appear as natural givens and its self-imposed limits as its strength. Narrated in a certain way, history could create the illusion that the practice they were professionalizing had always already existed (the sign “architecture” may very well still do this in our revived global historical efforts). But history also provided a way to envision continual progress—the “watchword” of architecture according to Tefft and countless others. Architects, looking backwards and forwards, framed their practice as one of making a body politic by organizing its field of perception. And indeed, what Moynihan asked over a hundred years later in 1962 of architecture in the federal guidelines that so many of the anti-MFBBA statements and articles defended was the same. In calling for a kind of eclecticism, he defined good federal architecture as that which testifies to the government’s “dignity, enterprise, vigor, and stability.” This was the associationist language of the nineteenth century’s normative gaze, language that the authors of the MFBBA order easily assimilated.
Figure 4. 1883 AIA Convention Members. From Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Convention of the American Institute of Architects, 1884.
It is not that the terms of nineteenth-century discourse have no merit. As a theory of architecture’s practical power, Walter and Davis’s words are often quite frankly not that far off from what Sarah Williams Goldhagen argued for recently in Welcome to your World using contemporary theories of embodied cognition. And my point also is not that we cannot talk about style and ornament as types of legible expression. Rather, what I’m suggesting is that we can’t adequately undo the racism of the architectural profession at this level. We have to see how whiteness inheres in the very definition of the gentlemanly professional, the very way a pious historical imagination drew the boundaries around this identity and delimited its means of power (figure 4). We have to undo this outlined body that appeared in 1883 as faceless suited gentlemen on another set of steps. The only way out of these confines is through a process of institutional reconstruction that so thoroughly denaturalizes the parentheses of the profession and the academy, and the regulatory institutions that support them, that it destructs the identity of the “architect” itself.
NOTES
[1] Alexander J. Davis to Henry Ward Beecher, n.d., ca. 1877, Alexander Jackson Davis papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Volume 2, p. 93. Hereafter AJD.
[2] Alexander J. Davis, “Architecture. Symbols. Principles.,” undated, AJD, Box 1, Folder 10.
[3] Thomas Ustick Walter, “Landing from the Ark,” Genesis 8:15-22 and 9:1-16, July 14, 1867, Thomas U. Walter Collection, The Athenaeum of Philadelphia, Box 21, Folder 303.
[4] Thomas Tefft, “Architecture: Ancient and Modern,” Lecture delivered before the Mechanics Association in Providence, July 31, 1853, Thomas Tefft Papers, Rhode Island Historical Society, Box 1.
