Erasure by Design: Racial Protocols of Displacement, Demolition, and Extraction - Softcover

Mcewen, V. Mitch

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1941332854 ISBN 13: 9781941332856

Verlag: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

How has erasure formed the space around us? How do we come to know it, so that we can design differently? Erasure by Design tracks the methods, terms, and racial protocols that continue to do the work of displacement, demolition, and extraction into the present day.

This book travels back and forth in time through scenes of erasure at three primary locations—Southwest, Washington DC (displacement); North St Louis (demolition), and South Los Angeles (extraction). Erasure by Design shares first person narratives of growing up in the wake of slum clearance—that is, “urban renewal”—in Southwest, Washington DC, while assembling archival references that narrate racialized erasure and its legal and spatial precedents. It traces a military complex under construction, where St Louis’s cleared grounds and blacked out sites are also defined by satellites, body experiments, explosions, and emptiness. It moves through specific grounds in Los Angeles—dirt walls, hills, oil fields, gas lines, and houses in the forest—to trace how those grounds matter and how their holding intersects with maps that plan erasure, inhabitation, and extraction.

Between these three scenes, Erasure by Design takes on the aesthetics of bad design and good design, as innovated within the intellectual domain of modern architecture at the Museum of Modern Art and Philip Johnson’s Glass House. Through a curated cockroach at MoMA—and even the humor, rumors, and gossip about this roach—Erasure by Design reads the role that the museum invents for exhibiting, curating, and re-shaping policy, worldview, and the built environment, as well as how protocols of erasure, demolition, and design conscript the modern built environment into the policing of human and subhuman. In this nuanced reading, the Glass House and its twin, the Brick House, stage a haunting allegory of total violence.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

V. Mitch McEwen is an assistant professor at Princeton University’s School of Architecture and principal of Harlem-based design practice Atelier Office. She is one of ten co-founders of the Black Reconstruction Collective. McEwen’s design work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Museum of Modern Art, and the Venice Architecture Biennale.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1941332854
• ISBN 13: 9781941332856
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande