August 30, 2021 • 52 mins
Dianne Harris offers a rare exploration of the racial and class politics of architecture in her book LITTLE WHITE HOUSES, which examines how postwar media representations associated the ordinary single-family house with middle-class whites to the exclusion of others. This book adds a new dimension to our understanding of race in America and the inequalities that persist in the housing market in the United States. Harris is an architectural historian and dean of the University of Washington College of Arts & Sciences. She is joined in conversation by Mabel O. Wilson, an architect, designer, cultural historian, and curator who teaches at Columbia University. This conversation was recorded in July 2021.
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Dianne Harris (00:06):
I think we have to understand housing at every
level we can possibly understandit. And if we're gonna really
understand what has undergirdedthe ability for this country to
very purposefully not see theways housing discrimination has
been enacted over decades anddecades and decades of time. Hi.
(00:30):
I'm Diane Harris. I'm the authorof, University of Minnesota
Press book, Little White Houses,How the Postwar Home Constructed
Race in America that was firstpublished in 2013.
And has just, I'm very pleasedto say, gone into a second
printing that's now out that wasjust came out this year. And on
that occasion, I'm here to talkabout the book again, with my
(00:54):
colleague, the brilliant MabelWilson. Just to introduce myself
briefly, I'm an architecturaland urban historian. I am, newly
the dean of the College of Artsand Sciences at the University
of Washington in Seattle, andI'm thrilled to be here with
Mabel.
Mabel O. Wilson (01:10):
Yeah. Thank you, Diane. It's a pleasure to
be back and in conversation,about the second printing of
your book. And just one to saycongratulations. I am a
designer, a cultural historian,curator.
I teach at Columbia University,both in architecture and also in
(01:34):
African American and Africandiaspora studies. And I'm really
excited to, again, be inconversation with you about
little white houses and how thepost war home constructed race
in America. And I sort of wannabegin there maybe with a
question for you because weoften think the home, the suburb
is constructed by race, but wealso don't think about how the
(01:55):
home actually constructs race inAmerica. So can we start with a
little bit about the book'sorigins?
Dianne Harris (02:03):
Absolutely. And it's a pleasure and a delight to
be in conversation with youabout the book as well. You
know, to have been able to havethe opportunity to talk with
you, my friend, as a as ascholar and a thought partner
and as a, as a supporter for thework over these many years has
(02:24):
been, just incredible. And andyour work has influenced my own
in in so many ways. So thank youagain for doing this today.
So I started working on theproject many years ago. It
started as early as 1996,actually, just shortly after I
had finished my dissertation,which was on an entirely
different topic on theeighteenth century. It it
(02:46):
focused on, eighteenth centuryNorthern Italian villas. But it
was also about questions ofbelonging and exclusion and
identity formation in andthrough the built environment.
And I just had an opportunitywhen I started my my very first
academic tenure track job at theUniversity of Illinois in 1996
through, one of my dissertationadvisers, to have the
(03:07):
opportunity to start lookinginstead for briefly for a
symposium on questions aboutwhat was happening in the
ordinary postwar suburb, between1945 and 1960.
And from that project, I startedto look differently at all kinds
of questions. And I what Ireally wanted to understand from
that point forward as soon as Istarted working on this was I
(03:28):
really wanted to understand themillions of houses that belonged
to a majority of middle classAmericans after the end of the
second World War. They were thehouses that frankly had
surrounded me for most of mylife since I've been a child and
that I'd lived in and that Iencountered everywhere in the
built environment outside oflarge urban centers. They were
(03:49):
everywhere around me when Imoved to, Urbana, Illinois. I
saw them every time I drove tothe grocery store, every time I
took my daughter to to school,every time I went to work.
Yet, I could find very littlein-depth scholarship about them.
I noticed that suburbanhistories, and there were some
really excellent ones, out therein 1996, focused primarily on
(04:11):
the planning of suburbsthemselves, but not on the
houses. And once I starteddigging in during the late
nineteen nineties and the veryearly February, I found glancing
references in the publishedscholarship to the segregated
nature of these houses andneighborhoods. But at that time
and and you'll remember this,Mabel. There was really nothing
(04:32):
in the architectural historyliterature about this aspect,
about race and racism andhouses.
At least, you know, nothing thatwas more than a couple of
paragraphs that would saysomething like, you know, and,
of course, these houses wererestricted largely to whites.
And I kept reading theseparagraphs and thinking, really?
That's that's the end of thestory? That's all you're gonna
tell me? Planning history istold a bit more about redlining
(04:55):
practices and so on, but nothingthat dug more deeply, into the
houses themselves and not muchelsewhere, either when it came
to really understanding thattopic.
So I've long been interested inquestions of exclusion and
belonging in the builtenvironment. And as I said
earlier, my first book and mydissertation focused on those
(05:17):
issues in a totally differentcontext. But these became
compelling questions for me, andthey remain so during my career.
The autobiographical piece ofthe book, which I'll talk a
little bit of, more about later,generated a really powerful
resonance for me between what Iknew about my family's history
and these issues ofdiscrimination and exclusion and
(05:39):
unfair housing policies andpractices that kept large
numbers of folks out of thehousing market then just as they
do now. So it started as afairly straightforward
architectural history driven bywhat were at first a fairly
conventional set of questionsabout ordinary post war houses.
You know? Why did they look thatway? Why were they the sizes
(06:00):
they were? Why did they grow, byseveral hundred square feet over
the period that I was interestedin studying? Where did people
store all their stuff in a timewhen credit was more readily
available and people had moreincome than they'd had before,
but these houses didn't havebasements or attics because they
were building slab on grade forthe first time in many parts of
The US and not always havingbasements and often not having
(06:22):
basements.
You know, these are verytraditional architectural
history questions became onethat focused on questions of
race and post war houses. Andthe more I researched the
project, the more I realizedthat a big part of the story was
about white supremacy and theways ordinary post war houses
became vehicles for variousmodes to assert white identities
(06:44):
and the unearned privileges anddominance that obtained to them.
It became clear to me that thosewere the compelling questions
about these ubiquitous housesand that the real story to be
told, or at least the one that Ineeded to tell, was about trying
to understand the links betweenhouses and the ways race and
identity are intertwined andformulated. I wanna say too that
(07:07):
there there's always been adriving sense for me as a
scholar of trying to understandthose questions, but I also
found myself at the Universityof Illinois amid a group of
scholars and in a very richintellectual environment where I
was able to learn more, than Iwould have, I think, in many
(07:27):
other places. It was a placewhere there was, an incredible
vibrancy and fertile ground forfolks who wanted to do
interdisciplinary scholarship,opportunities to connect with
brilliant historians, theorists,folks in ethnic studies, race
studies through the humanitiescenter, through the center for
(07:47):
advanced study, and coffeeshops.
It's a re an unusual place thatway. And I think being there too
and being around a group ofscholars who are working on
similar issues helped advance myown work in this area and and
probably substantially helpedshift the the direction of the
questions I was asking. So allof those forces and factors came
(08:08):
to bear on the shape of the bookand how it ended up being the
book that it is that reallyfocused on this looking at these
questions about race, belonging,exclusion, identity formation,
racism, segregation, whitesupremacy, but all through the
granular sort of micro level ofthe house, its possessions, its
arrangement display, rhetoric,advertising, and so on.
Mabel O. Wilson (08:33):
And and with that in mind, thinking about,
you know, how you start tocraft, a kind of language,
right, for understanding race inthe built environment. That's
why I found the book sorevelatory, and useful in my own
teaching, teaching graduatestudents. But also, you know,
(08:55):
I've I've used the the book forcourses that, you know, that
aren't specifically for, let'ssay, architectural historians or
designers. Outside the field,there's a kind of rigor both in
the method, which I I wannafollow-up with you about in
part, but also very just veryclear descriptions about, you
know, like, what race is, whatwhiteness is, and why it's
(09:18):
important to think about it inin regards to the built
environment. So can you explainhow you define whiteness and why
it's important to understandthis in relationship to
architecture, especially sinceit hadn't been a question
previously?
Dianne Harris (09:33):
Absolutely. And, you know, it's a good segue from
what I was just saying aboutbeing at Illinois because I've
really been profoundlyinfluenced by a generation of
scholars whose work reallyarose, in the nineteen eighties
and nineteen nineties, kindabecame better known and
established. And there arescholars who really forged the
field of critical studies ofwhiteness. David Roediger, who
(09:56):
was a colleague of mine atIllinois, whose work has been
profoundly influential for meand who was incredibly generous
in taking time to to to teach meand to share sources and ideas
in the, beginning stages of thisproject. But then a range of
scholars who are examining thefluidity of white identity and
(10:17):
over long periods of time andwhat that's meant for Jews,
Italians, the Irish, Mexicans,and Asians.
You know, Matthew FryeJacobson's work was as important
to me as Karen Brodkins was. Andthen we began to see some
scholars who study the visualworld focusing on whiteness as a
theoretical category as well.Scholars like Martin Berger, for
(10:40):
example, whose work is justreally superb thinking about
whiteness and visual culture. SoI've always been having said
that. So that's sort of the thesome of the scholars who
influenced this work and helpedme think about how I'm defining
whiteness.
But I've always been very awareof the critiques of that work.
So I wanna say that too before Igo back to thinking about the
(11:00):
definition. And especially thecharges that critical studies of
whiteness has just been anotherway of putting whites at the
center of everything. Legitimatecritique. Right?
Something to really be aware of.But I believed then, as I do
now, that we cannot dismantlewhite supremacy if we don't
(11:20):
understand very deeply how itoperates and the structures
through which it defines andasserts itself. So for me,
housing is one of the mostpervasive and pernicious of
those structures because it canseem so benign. And the ways
whiteness asserts itself througharchitecture and material
culture related to houses is sosubtle yet powerful and
(11:42):
persistence that for me itdemands that we examine it and
we examine whiteness through it.So I define whiteness as a
racial category that had afairly significant degree of
fluidity throughout thetwentieth century and remains in
flux today, but that has beenstatic in the ways it
consistently aligns with modesof dominance and supremacy that
(12:05):
are linked to the mosttraumatic, devastating, and
harmful aspects of this nation'spast and present.
There are scholars today whowould define the construct that
is whiteness as a pathology. Andbecause of its ties to the
trauma and harm I justmentioned, and if we were to be
honest about the past at all, wehave to see it that way. It's
(12:25):
important to understand it inrelation to architecture because
the built environment is one ofthe most powerful structures
through which white supremacycirculates and persists. But one
of the things I'm fairlyinsistent on in the book and
that I hope readers take awayfrom the book is the fluidity of
whiteness. The ways in which ithas, on the one hand, morphed
(12:49):
and changed and moved over timeto accommodate different
historical forces, and thesubtleties of of history and
those forces while at the sametime remaining static, as I
said, in its dominance and inits force toward domination.
Right? That that's always kindof at the, forefront of what
(13:13):
whiteness seeks to be. I try tohelp students understand, you
know, as as all of us who workwith students and try and try to
help them have a more nuancedand rich and full and accurate
sense of race and racism. Thatrace is a category, that it that
has shifted over time, a set ofcategories, that it's a
(13:35):
construct, that skin color isnot always nor, is it
consistently what race has beenabout, but that skin color is
the manifestation of thestructural forces that come to
play through those constructsthat make up racism and race and
whiteness. I actually spend agood deal of time in the
(13:58):
beginning parts of the bookwalking readers through that
because I just couldn't be surethat any of, the readers who I
imagined to the audience wouldhave been familiar when I wrote
the book with that work.
One of the things that's reallyinteresting to me right now, and
we can talk about this a littlebit more later too. When I was
(14:20):
writing that book and even up tothe point where it was
published, the words whiteprivilege were not really in
particularly wide circulation. Ithink it's fair to say they now
are, and that's a remarkableshift in in our culture that
deserves some attention, Ithink, and is getting some
attention. So, the book, I don'tthink, has much to do with that
(14:41):
at all, but, but it'sinteresting to to think about
that change that's happened inthat in the intervening eight
years.
Mabel O. Wilson (14:48):
Yeah. No. I I think that's absolutely right. I
mean, I think that's one of theinnovative dimensions both of
your, you know, of the thebook's content, but also of the
the method by which you underundertake it and to really
scrutinize whiteness. Becauseoften in architectural
scholarship, people would focuson, for example, the failure of
(15:09):
modernist housing, writing it,right, race as blackness.
Right? That, you know, there'ssome sort of clearly so so, you
know, social failure, you know,that results in the inability of
the housing to sort ofaccommodate a certain kind of of
social life, in fact. And sorace always often gets, you
(15:30):
know, associated with blacknessand whiteness sort of remains
transcendent and andtransparent. You know? And those
let's say the the histories cango to the archives of a
Yamasaki.
It can go to the archives of aChicago Housing Authority.
Right? And and write thosenarratives. And I think, you go
to other sources. And so can youyou maybe share a bit about the
(15:52):
kind of methodology of what youyou look at and and why it's
important?
And I think why it's importantin part is because I think one
of the things that's clear, youknow, is that institutions are
significant in how they shaperacial discourse. Right? And the
ways in which then individualslive that. And and I think you
find these archives with reallyremarkable content. So so yeah.
(16:16):
Can you can you share more aboutthe the method of writing?
Dianne Harris (16:19):
Sure. And, you know, as a lead into that, it's
interesting to think about whenyou mentioned, you know, the
example of public housing andhigh you know, high rise public
housing, for example, and theways that that's been considered
in terms of race. One of thethings I would say, you know,
when I started out earliersaying that there wasn't much in
(16:40):
architectural history that hadto do with race and architecture
when when I was writing thisbook, I would nuance that by
saying that when architecturalhistorians have written about
race before Little White Housesand and before your work, and I
wanna really importantly pointto your work, Mabel, as a real
inspiration from my own, with,you know, Negro building coming
(17:01):
out very shortly on on the heelsof of the White houses and and
having wide influence on somany. And we'll talk about that
in a minute too. But whenarchitectural historians were
writing about race, they weredoing it in spaces that they
understood to be overtlyracialized.
So, you know, a so calledghetto, a barrio, a reservation,
a Chinatown. And in thoseinstances, there were particular
(17:26):
methods for doing that. Youknow, if it was high rise
housing, you could probably goto an architectural archive if
you're an architecturalhistorian and find plans and
drawings and documentspertaining to that. Harder to
do, but, in the context of, say,a Chinatown or, an American
Indian reservation, but scholarsof the so called vernacular,
(17:48):
world have been doing that forsome time and and sort of
finding a wider range of ofcollections and and evidence on
which to base that work anddoing superb work in that in
that way. But what I was tryingto do was to show through this
book that all of the builtenvironment is about race,
whether or not we understand itto be that way because the
(18:08):
spaces that have been consideredto be not raced are white spaces
and that they are thereforeracialized and are very much
about race and exclusion andidentity.
So I was really trying to turnthat piece of architectural
history on its head. I'm gonnago back a little bit when I
think about the method, andespecially I wanna talk a little
(18:30):
bit also about theautobiographical aspect of the
work, which is a little bit of apiece of the method. So I grew
up hearing a lot of stories frommy my maternal grandparents, who
immigrated who were Jewish, whoimmigrated from Germany to The
United States about houses. AndI heard about them in at least
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two ways. One was that mygrandfather was an electrical
engineer who specialized in highfidelity sound systems and had
his own retail store, on MelroseAvenue in Los Angeles in the
'19, forties and fifties andinto the sixties.
It was called WeingartenElectronics, and he did high end
custom installations of stereosystems, into architect designed
(19:13):
homes. And he was fascinatedwith architecture from the time
he was a young man in Germanyand was fascinated by what he
saw and heard about and learnedabout happening in the Bauhaus.
He was a passionate fan of ourof of mid century modernism.
And, so he would tell us storieswhenever we visited about the
architects he worked with. Andso my my older sister, who is an
(19:35):
architect, and I especially,grew up hearing those stories
and being very, very influencedby them.
And and he he really enjoyedworking with with the architect.
He worked with Richard Neutra,with Quincy Jones, with John
Lautner in Los Angeles and hadwonderful stories to tell about
them. So there were thosestories just about architecture
(19:56):
that were interesting inmodernism. But there were also
the less frequently told storiesbecause I think my grandparents
were in some ways, sort oftypical in their their optimism
about what The United Statespromised them as immigrants. And
so they tended to focus on allthe positive things in their
lives.
My grandfather and grandmotherwould sometimes talk about their
(20:17):
search for housing when theyarrived in California. And I
understood over years becausethey didn't talk very much about
the kinds of exclusionarypractices that kept them from
readily finding houses in thattime. I only found out later as
an adult about some of thechallenges they faced in finding
housing. And, so, of course, inthe book, I spend a good deal of
(20:39):
time focusing on their theirordinary post warehouse that
they ended up purchasing towardthe end of the nineteen fifties,
in the San Fernando Valley in anarea that was not, exclusive,
for for Jews. So I wanted totell their story not because it
was unusual, but because it wasso common at that time.
And I knew telling it would helpme set set the stage for the
(21:02):
detailed granular study ofresidential segregation that I
hope to tell. But I also imaginetheir story would resonate with
many other Jews who might havesimilar immigration stories in
their families and with otherswhose families have immigrated
and experienced similar strugglestruggles with with unfair
housing. And it seemed to methat telling their story did at
(21:23):
least two things. First, ithelped me provide some nuance to
questions about race and space.And and this is something that
seemed very, very important tome as as I was writing the book.
In The US context and and as Iwrote in the book, I felt it was
important to shape a narrativethat would help readers
understand the race beyond anysingle binary. And that seemed
(21:47):
especially important since Iimagined my primary audience to
be architectural historians whomight not have had much
familiarity as I said earlier atthat time with theories about
race and whiteness. So myintention by including the story
of my Jewish immigrantgrandparents in their home was
to remind readers of the of themany folks who are excluded from
(22:08):
the housing market by racialracial covenants, by redlining
practices, by real estatesteering, and so on whose skin
was black or brown, but alsothose who were excluded because
they were Jewish or Muslim oreven in earlier days Italian or
Irish, including the story of myJewish grandparents and details
of the home they were eventuallyable to purchase and that they
(22:30):
cherished. They cherished thislittle home as a signal of their
own arrival as real Americans.And and it really for them was a
signal of their belonging inthis country.
And they faced a lot ofexclusion even after they got
here and got into that house.But it helped me to tell that
complex narrative of race andethnicity defined in ways that
(22:51):
have shifted over time, but thathave also remained unfortunately
static. Second, I wanted toexperiment with academic and
scholarly writing. I wanted thebook to reach architectural
historians, but I also hoped itmight attract at least a small
audience beyond the academy.I've always kind of wanted to do
(23:12):
that.
I've aspired to that. I'm notsure I know exactly how to do
that. And I think a lot of us asscholars struggle with that, but
I'm interested in that. And Iwanted it to perhaps help
interested readers understandmore about the ways housing and
segregation happens, about theways the lack of access to real
property shapes life chances anddiminishes them for folks who
(23:33):
can't access it, and to betterunderstand some nuances of race
and racism in The United Statesduring that period between 1945
and 1960. And I wanted to dothat also because everybody
lives somewhere.
You know, a residentialexperience is so common. And so
it seemed to me that using abook like this to help more
people understand how racismoperates in and through the
(23:55):
built environment was a realopportunity. So using
autobiography was partly aneffort to experiment with the
those conventions of academicwriting, which we know are
pretty rigid. And it was partlyan effort to engage a wider
audience. So if nothing else, Ido hear consistently from
students, about how much theyappreciate that aspect of the
(24:17):
book.
I think everybody likes to reada story. I do. And I also love
to write. So that part was quitefrankly just a really enjoyable
aspect of the project for me andone that held a lot of personal
meeting meaning, and and justjoy. I don't think it's an
appropriate approach for everyor even for most projects.
(24:40):
I don't think we always need toinsert ourselves into the
narrative of the scholarship.But I do think it it it does
important work in little whitehouses for the reasons that I
have mentioned.Methodologically, there were
some interesting challenges forthis book because architects
mostly haven't written aboutrace explicitly. You know, it's
every now and then and, youknow, a project I've worked on
(25:02):
recently where you'll find anarchitect who scrawled something
really racist in the margins ofa document or more than one
document. But that's not verycommon, in my experience.
So understanding the wayswhiteness whiteness and its
dominance was shaped in thehousing market, as an absolutely
de facto assumption meantlooking at different kinds of
(25:24):
sources and developing anability to decode more commonly
used sources. It really meantoften doing the opposite of what
we're trained to do. Asarchitectural historians or art
historians, we're trained tolook to look carefully at what
we can see. I think those of uswho work on race develop an
ability to look for what hasbeen consciously and sometimes
(25:49):
not consciously erased,suppressed, buried, but that is
always there running through itas a kind of resonant current if
you look for it. I had to learnto decipher what I came to think
of and to write about as codesfor whiteness that were both
textual and visual or materialto understand the underlining
(26:12):
meanings of ubiquitously andconsistently deployed rhetoric
about cleanliness, spaciousness,privacy, order, mobility, words
like that that came up over andover again in the literature on
these houses.
And then to just really analyzethem and to look at how those
those terms played out in termsof who the presumed audience was
(26:34):
for these houses. If you lookcarefully at these houses, and
I've talked I don't really talkabout this in the book so much,
but it was one of the thingsthat prompted me to think about
kind of codes and spatialdynamics of houses and how the
houses tell us who they're for.I kept thinking about, again, my
grandparents' house and howtheir postwar home didn't have a
(26:55):
place for them to keep theirextra set of kosher dishes. They
didn't keep kosher, but we hadfamily members who did, and
there was no place in the houseto do that. My grandmother had
to keep them out in the garage.
Or her built in countertoprange, it was a stovetop, and
the the oven was separate, whichis very common in post war
houses. And her range had fourburners, on two on each side of
(27:18):
a griddle and, you know, it wascalled a pancake griddle. Well,
my grandmother didn't makepancakes. She made matzo brei.
And, you know, so every time sheused her pancake pancake
griddle, though, as a GermanJewish immigrant who probably
hadn't made pancakes muchbefore, her house reminded her
that she wasn't quite itsintended occupant.
And I think about that a lot.How do our house houses tell us,
(27:40):
you know, who they were intendedfor when they were designed and
built? And it's usually not foranybody who wasn't a white
Christian American. So all ofthose things were were
interesting to try to thinkabout those codes and the
different ways we can look atthose houses. Finally, I'd say a
a key challenge of the book wasthat I wanted it to have a
national scope, and there was nosingle archive for the kinds of
(28:02):
houses I was writing about.
And in fact, they're you know,for most of the really ordinary
houses I was looking at, theywere they were builder houses.
They were often made by builderswho didn't have any kind of
affiliation with any kind of abig build. They weren't Kaufman
and Broad, for example. Right?As we would think of it now,
they were just, you know, smalltime builders.
So the questions I was askingcan't actually be answered in
(28:24):
most architectural archivesanyway. So that may meant
thinking differently about how Imight find answers to the
questions I found mostcompelling. And in the end, I'll
have to say I did find somehelpful evidence in a couple of
architects' archives. Thearchives of the architect a
Quincy Jones was really useful,but mostly for the clip files,
not so much for the housesthemselves, where I found really
(28:47):
odd and interesting things.There's something called the
Small Homes Council archive atthe University of Illinois that,
with that was a a a researchcouncil, a research center at
the School of Architecture therewhere they got a lot of did a
lot of grant funded work onbuilding ordinary small houses.
So it was useful. And then forthe chapter on television, the
NBC archive that's located atthe University of, Wisconsin in
(29:10):
Madison, was enormously helpful.But I mostly had to hunt in a
lot of strange places to findanswers to questions. And so,
you know, I used governmentdocuments. I used novels, films,
trading stamp collectioncatalogs, redemption catalogs,
popular and shelter magazines,lots of those.
They're their own kind ofarchive for this work.
(29:31):
Photographers' archives,advertising records, All these
became essential parts of thestory I needed to to tell. So an
interesting an interesting kindof treasure hunt in many ways.
Mabel O. Wilson (29:43):
Yeah. I mean, I think that's what's so rich that
each chapter has its own sort ofarchival bend and that you can
sort of sense the degree towhich. And and I think this is
important that media, right,that these magazines that, you
know, that they were circulatingthis. But these these magazines
were also backed up byinstitutions, that there were,
(30:04):
standardization in, you know,organizations that were
promoting certain things, thatthere were associations of
architects who were engaged. Itwas the Museum of Modern Art was
also engaged in building, youknow, American taste in that
post war period.
And so while and and and that'sthe thing that I appreciate is
that you oh, you think these arejust throwaway things. Right?
(30:25):
It's this month and, you know,house beautiful. But, actually,
you know, you they they theywere institutional constructs
that are that are constructing anational narrative, particularly
in that post war period asimmigrants are coming into the
country. We're having civilrights struggles that, you know,
that that these are also sitesin which America is being
(30:46):
imagined and also contested.
And that's sort of what Iappreciate and how the chapters
really do unfold.
Dianne Harris (30:52):
Oh, thanks. I mean, I that's a it's an
interesting point. And I think,you know, one of the things that
was so interesting to me aboutthinking about shelter and
popular magazines as their ownarchive is that, as you said,
it's easy to take them at facevalue and really important not
to. And to think aboutespecially in that period when
magazines like House Beautiful,which today is not, you know,
(31:14):
it's not a particularlyinfluential magazine at all. But
in the nineteen fifties and intothe nineteen sixties, it was a
very influential magazine whenit was under the leadership of a
particular editor, ElizabethGordon.
And there was a at that time, Ithink much more today. I mean,
much more to than today becauseit almost doesn't exist now. A
kind of interesting set ofinteractions between the
(31:37):
profession of architecture and akind of, you know, even well
known sort of, you know, what wecall might call high style
architects and these popularshelter magazines. You know,
they were in conversation witheach other because the
architects understood twothings, I think. One was that
merchant builders cared what wasin those popular magazines and
shelter magazines becausereaders wanted what was in them.
(32:00):
And so there was a kind ofinteresting constant circulation
and flow of information andfeedback, a kind of a feedback
loop that went from theprofession to the editors of
those magazines to the readersand back again and and then
circulating in and among themerchant builders and the
building trades who are, youknow, creating a lot of these
houses. And so they became muchmore influential than they are
(32:22):
today. And even, you know, oneof the sources that I relied on
a lot was, Popular Mechanics,which had a huge influence and
was, you know and may maybe doesstill, but to a different kind
of audience and around differentkinds of issues than it did
then. So, yeah, very interestingarchive of its own.
Mabel O. Wilson (32:39):
Yeah. And I and I think in particular, there was
a show recently that sadly justclosed at the Jewish Museum
called the Modern Look, youknow, that looked at the impact
of European emigres, artists whoare coming into The United
States. And one of the placesthey found work was in the New
York publishing industry andfashion magazines and and and
(32:59):
shelter magazines. And it wasjust really remarkable to see
these avant garde techniques ofphotographing objects, places,
and peoples being deployed inthese men. So aesthetically,
they were really sharp and quiteinteresting, You know, but we
often don't see that.
We see the fine art production,but we actually don't see how
they're engaging, in everydaylife. And that would include
(33:22):
people like also Gordon peoplelike Gordon Parks were also a
part of that. And so there werethese dialogues amongst all of
these these creatives that justaren't necessarily taking into
account in, let's say, thecanons of art history or
architectural history or designhistory for that matter.
Dianne Harris (33:36):
Absolutely. And then, you know, one of the
things that I I talk about alittle bit in the book too is,
you know, the extent to whichthe presumed audience, of
readers for those was a whiteaudience and that the ways that
that gets reinforcedrepresentationally throughout
the the genre of these shelteredpopular magazines. And thinking
about them compared to whatexisted for, say, a a black
(33:57):
audience, which would have beenEbony more than Jet. Jet wasn't
really the venue for, you know,Ebony was the large format kind
of glossier, more more heavilyillustrated, journal. And to be
sure, there are features onhousing in Ebony over the same
period of time, but they'requite different.
And, because the, masthead inEbony, you know, the the kind of
(34:23):
statement when you opened thethe magazine was that it was to
portray the brighter side ofNegro life, housing wasn't gonna
be part of that. You know?Housing was not actually at that
moment readily available newhousing to to blacks in America.
And so it would been would havebeen hard to feature that in in
the at the kind of scale andscope that it was featured in
the the shelter magazinesintended for white audiences.
(34:46):
What you do find in Ebony, andothers have written about this,
people like Andy Weese, forexample, in his his book about
African American suburbs, is,you know, more houses for
prominent black figures inAmerican life.
You know, a doctor, anastronaut, someone who has
attained a level of fame andwealth so that they could build
(35:07):
their own home in a in a suburb,where they knew that they would
be welcomed and safe, forexample. Just an interesting
point of comparison when youthink about those two sources
for the project or multiplesources for the project.
Mabel O. Wilson (35:21):
Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, thinking about
audiences, I think, sort ofcritical. And maybe to shift a
little bit to think about andand and discuss, like, what was
the response to the bookinitially, and its impact on the
field? Because not that manybooks get a second printing.
Right?
In this way, also, you know,with with years past. So there
(35:44):
was something about, I think,the book that you can say was
was ahead of its time.
Dianne Harris (35:49):
Yeah. Thank you. I mean, I'm happy to say I think
now it's been really favorable.You know, reviews of the book
were overwhelmingly favorable. Ican think of one where somebody
was kinda not happy with it.
But, for the most part, reallyfavorable, and I think it's been
especially impactful forstudents and for a younger
generation of scholars from whomI hear pretty frequently. I
(36:13):
think younger scholars werereally ready for this work, and
I really think they're the oneswho are gonna carry its
questions forward in importantways. You know, I know from my
own private Google citationscholars page that it's very
widely cited and, you know, itseems to kind of pick up as time
goes on actually as it gets kindof more well known by scholars.
(36:37):
It's been great to see the waysthe book has been taken up by
scholars from a a wide range ofdisciplines, because I see the
book cited, for example, byethnic studies scholars,
sociologists, geographers, andby scholars in in Jewish studies
and communication, materialculture studies, media studies,
gender and women's studies, and,of course, you know, historians
(36:58):
as well as those who studyarchitecture landscapes. And
that was really a goal.
I really wanted it to be a bookthat would help scholars in
other fields see the importanceof the built environment for
these issues. Because, you know,one of the things, Mabel, you
and I have talked a lot about isthe extent to which for some
reason, the built environment isseen as something that is just
not a significant cultural forcein the way, for example, a piece
(37:21):
of writing on a document in anarchive can be. And I find that
so strange in a certain waybecause the built environment is
everywhere in our lives. Itshapes our experiences every day
in, you know, a thousand myriadways that we are mostly not
conscious of, but that isprofoundly important for the
ways we conduct ourselves forwhat we have access to, for what
(37:43):
we don't have access to. I justthat that piece of it to me just
felt incredibly important andever more so now, you know, in
that kind of national moment ofreckoning around race that we're
in.
So seeing the work being takenup by such a wide range of
audiences has been enormouslygratifying. But it's also been
exciting to know that somenonacademic reading groups have
(38:05):
selected the book and have foundit a good source or starting
point for talking aboutwhiteness since it again, it
connects to something thateveryone has experienced, which
is residential life. You know?That's just something that
everybody knows. So it's a it'san entree.
If you if you have a group ofpeople who wanna explore white
privilege, the way whitesupremacy works, starting with
something that we all know everyday, the place we live, where
(38:28):
it's whether it's a house or anapartment. It's a great way to
start thinking about and talkingabout these really complicated
and difficult issues.
Mabel O. Wilson (38:37):
Yeah. Can you can you talk about also
specifically on architecture?Like, what what was it its
impact, do you think, on howarchitects were considering this
question of racial thinking?
Dianne Harris (38:49):
Oh, it's so funny that I left that out.
Mabel O. Wilson (38:52):
Yeah. Because I also think that that is the
brilliance of the book becauseit's it's interdisciplinarity,
but it also teaches, you know,particularly historians of
architecture, as you said, to tolook at what, you know, that
might be overlooked. That thatisn't necessarily seen or even
considered relevant.
Dianne Harris (39:09):
Yeah. So I think in architectural history I mean,
it's really hard for me to say.I hope that it's had an impact
in architectural history. Ithink it has. I know that it's
included on a lot of coursesyllabi, which is great.
To me, that's the impact I'drather have any day than knowing
that it's cited in a bunch ofother books. Having students
read it means everything to me,because I think that's really
(39:30):
impact. I am hesitant to saythat it's Little White Houses
that has done this. I think it'sLittle White Houses and a
constellation of publicationsthat came out around the same
time or just afterwards. Yourbook, Negro Building.
More recently, Charles Davis'sbook, that I'll talk about in a
minute, you know, the race andmodern architecture book that
(39:52):
just came out. And certainly, Iwanna, also say that the work of
the incredibly important andinfluential work of someone like
Del Upton, who was writing aboutrace and landscape, people like
John Michael Vlach, who helpedus understand the plantation in
new ways. I mean, there havebeen scholars working on Rebecca
Ginsberg, whose work on,apartheid and and houses in
(40:14):
Johannesburg. These are all haveall been incredibly influential.
Texts and I would even go backto a book that's been so
influential for me, JamesBorchardt's, alley life in
Washington DC, which was writtena long time ago and talk about a
book ahead of its time.
I mean, that was a reallybrilliant book. So certainly
people have been writing aboutrace and architecture for some
time, but it it would be hard tosay that it was any kind of a
(40:37):
real current, until very, veryrecently. And I remember, in
fact, the first time, I think itwas, in the early two thousands,
there was a special issue of thejournal of the Society of
Architectural Historians, and Iwas asked to write something
about social histories ofarchitecture. And I wrote
something about critical studiesof whiteness and the built
environment, and I was veryconscious as I did that that it
(40:59):
would be the first time thatthose words were published in
the Journalist Society ofArchitectural Historians ever,
and that nobody had beenthinking really about whiteness
studies and the builtenvironment, or writing about it
until then. So, you know, Idon't want it to claim too much
for the book, and I I reallythink that it's a constellation
of efforts and of scholarshipthat have really kind of made a
(41:22):
difference in the last five toseven years.
But I'm thrilled to see that,you know, for example, at the
annual meetings of the Societyof Architectural Historians,
there are multiple sessions nowhaving to do with race and
architecture. There areroundtable sessions. There are
events that happen outside ofthe annual meeting that the
(41:44):
Society of the vernaculararchitecture forum has been
supporting this work for a verylong time. So I I think what the
book did in terms of changingarchitectural history is, that
it contributed at a moment whenmore was about to happen, when
(42:06):
the field was starting to beready to have those
conversations in ways that itnot only hadn't been before but
was resistant to. Thatresistance is still there.
There it is very, very muchstill there, and it runs it runs
deep. But I have enormous hopein this new generation of
scholars that are coming up, whoare really interested in these
(42:27):
issues and who understand themto be central to our
understanding of the builtenvironment. In terms of the
profession of architecture, Iknow less about how the book if
the book is known amongarchitects. I just don't know.
I'm not in practice.
I'm not teaching design studio.I'm not I haven't been embedded
(42:47):
in an architecture or designschool for quite a while. My
guess is not so much. And that'swhere I would love to have it
see it have an impact because Ithink it's with the people who
produce and plan and design thebuilt environment that change
needs to happen, probably morethan anywhere else. So I'm not
(43:08):
sure how that will happen, butbut, I think it will happen when
design schools decide that theyneed to go through the kind of
culture shifts that we think,you know, they are just now
starting to wake up to.
Mabel O. Wilson (43:19):
But you have, recently, and this was a
conversation we had at DunbarOaks that you showed. I mean,
this also brings in, you know,that these weren't just minor
builders and corporations,companies making these suburbs,
but figures like Frank LloydWright were actively engaged in,
you know, certainly withBroadacre City, but also the
(43:40):
work that you you study and sortof thinking about these things.
So it's it's it isn't far afield. This is actually a
central question to modernism inthat moment. And and and could
you talk a little bit about, youknow, which which kind of speaks
to work that you're you'reengaged in now, actually?
Dianne Harris (43:56):
Yeah. So, you know, thinking about what what I
might write a little bitdifferently, given current
debates, you know, what what Imight think about differently.
And you're absolutely right. Imean, I think that the it's
interesting because I didn'tknow, you know, obviously, about
the right work, the FranklinWright rights work, that I just
(44:17):
have been working on, withBroadacre City when I wrote this
book. I did know that merchantbuilders like the Levitts were
looking at Frank Lloyd Wright'swork and in funny and
interesting ways trying toincorporate some of his design,
stuff into their mass producedhousing, which is kind of
interesting.
So, you know, but what I'mtrying to was just trying to
(44:39):
signal is that I not so muchthat I don't think there's much
to be learned by looking at whatarc you know, sort of well known
architects have done, andthinking about these issues, but
just that I don't know quite asmuch about where and how
practice people in professionalpractice are thinking about
these matters yet. I hope theywill. So thinking about what I
(45:01):
might do differently with thebook, as I mentioned when I
started working on the book inthe late nineteen nineties,
there were less than probably ahandful of architectural
historians, you know, whose workfocused explicitly on race, as I
said. And none that I couldreally point to who had
considered scholarship, onwhiteness like that developed by
historians like David Roediger.But I think it's fair to say
(45:23):
that the audience I imagined isthe primary one for the book
would not have been much awareof the key scholarship on race
or critical race theory, forexample.
So I spent time sketching outthose histories and theories for
the for those readers. I'm notsure how much of that has yet
changed in terms of awareness ofthose theories and that
literature among, you know,many, many scholars of the built
(45:47):
environment. But what haschanged is a dramatic shift over
the last couple of years in thefield of architectural history
in terms of a more widespreadrealization of the gaps in the
literature in our field. They'rereally more like chasms than
gaps. And I'm I'm incrediblyexcited to see a new generation
of scholars stepping in and upto address new questions that
(46:09):
center race in their work.
Books like your own, the editedcollection you worked on with
Irene Chang and and CharlesDavis, Race and Modern
Architecture, and Charles' book,Building Character. I think all
of these are making a realdifference in just the last
eighteen months. They're sellingbriskly. They're really, opening
the eyes of designers andhistorians, I think, to new ways
(46:32):
of thinking. But also, you know,the recent reconstructions
exhibit that you curated taughtme a lot.
There's a good deal more I thinkto be written, that I learned,
by thinking about thereconstructions exhibit about
where black folks were livingtheir hopes and dreams, about
black joy and aboutAfrofuturism. My book focused
(46:54):
pretty much on exclusion and onthe ways whiteness worked then
and now as a dominant force thatseeks supremacy, domination, and
exclusion. And I felt then as Ido now that explicating that in
detail and in the most granularlevel was important if that
process was to be fullyunderstood so that it could be
dismantled. But if I werewriting the book today, I would
(47:15):
have included at least a bitmore about the agency of black
people and other people of colorto forge communities, vibrant
neighborhoods, freedom colonies,and more. That's that's a piece
of the book that's reallymissing.
And at the same time, I wouldperhaps spend more time if I
were writing the book todaytrying to better elucidate the
(47:37):
ongoing impacts that have led usto this post George Floyd
moment. That might be too muchfor one book to try to do.
There's a lot to do in that bookas there is in any book. But I
do think we're in a a reallydifferent moment than we were in
when the book came out in 2013,just, you know, seven, eight
years ago. You know, we couldask how, for example, we might
(47:57):
think about housing when weconsider, as I believe we must
do, questions about reparations.
That's not something that Iincluded, but it could be a
really interesting interestingnew prologue for the book if it
were to be rewritten.
Mabel O. Wilson (48:11):
Yeah. I mean, as you know, I I grew up in a
little White House in, suburbanwell, not quite suburban New
Jersey, but, and it's a it's aninteresting story actually about
it. You know, there was abuilder who built the
neighborhood, you know, he wasactually a Jewish builder. And
so they are those stories that Ithink have have yet to be told.
But also, you know, like ifsomeone, yeah, somebody your,
(48:33):
your book is on a book club'slist, for example, and
somebody's thinking aboutreading like, okay, I'm gonna
pick this up.
You say, and you knowpresciently in the, the epilogue
that it's a mistake to presumethat that discrimination doesn't
exist in the housing market andthat the market is actually
fair, an open market. And sohow, you know, how might this be
(48:57):
a kind of lens to understand,like, what's going on to help
people connect the dots becauseoften more often than not, they
see this as a currentcircumstance and maybe don't see
the larger historical frame asto why things even today are are
the way at which which they'rethey're constructed.
Dianne Harris (49:17):
Absolutely. I mean, I think that the line in
the books that the fight forfair housing is not over, and it
sure as heck isn't over. Youknow, there's an enormous amount
of work to do on fair housing,and we heard about it in the
last presidential election fromsome candidates a candidate, not
as much as I would have liked tohave heard us hear from others.
(49:39):
It's astonishing to me theextent to which fair housing is
not a current topic ofconversation considering the
kind of bonkers housing market,that we're experiencing right
now, the extent of homelessnessand housing precarity in that we
saw before the pandemic, letalone now in this ongoing
(50:01):
pandemic situation. And the deepunderstanding we have, there's
no no way we can say that wedon't know the extent to which
address is linked to productivelife chances.
We know exactly the connectionsbetween where one lives and what
one's opportunities are. To justhave a dignified life, of of
(50:26):
opportunity, the kind of lifeand opportunity that we believe
everyone should have in anequitable, fair, just society. I
would love to see, Little WhiteHouses in this next part of its
life become a jumping off pointfor the connection to an entire
syllabus of of fair housing aspart of a, you know, courses on
(50:50):
just futures, equitable futures.Because to me, housing and
understanding its deep historyat every level, it's great to
know about redlining. It's greatto know about what happened
after redlining.
There's some fast fantasticliterature on that that's come
out in the last few years. Imean, I can't say enough about
the work that Keanda YamadaTaylor has put out that I mean,
(51:13):
that book is spectacular. HerRace for Profit book is
spectacular and so important.Richard Rothstein's book on
redlining, which has reached areally wide audience. Very
thankful for the audience thatit's reached.
But I think we have tounderstand housing at every
level we can possibly understandit. And if we're gonna really
understand what has undergirdedthe ability for this country to
(51:36):
very purposefully not see theways housing discrimination has
been enacted over decades anddecades and decades of time. If
we're gonna try to undo it inany way or advance conversations
about fair housing.
Mabel O. Wilson (51:51):
Well, thank you, Diane. I think this has
been a really, incredibleconversation, literally
revisiting little white houses.So thank you for for the work,
and and thank you for the, Ithink, this important
contribution across so manyfields. And I'm very excited
that, you know, you know, morepeople are going to to be be
(52:11):
reading it.
Dianne Harris (52:12):
Thank you, Mabel. This has been such a pleasure
and a delight as always, and Ilook forward to being in
dialogue with you anytime I canpossibly be in dialogue with
you. So I learn from you everytime we talk. So thank you so
much for this. It's been great.
And thank you to the Universityof Minnesota Press for all
they've done, with the book andfor the second printing. Really,
(52:33):
really glad that it'll be outthere for a while.
I think we have to understand housing at every
level we can possibly understandit. And if we're gonna really
understand what has undergirdedthe ability for this country to
very purposefully not see theways housing discrimination has
been enacted over decades anddecades and decades of time. Hi.
(00:30):
I'm Diane Harris. I'm the authorof, University of Minnesota
Press book, Little White Houses,How the Postwar Home Constructed
Race in America that was firstpublished in 2013.
And has just, I'm very pleasedto say, gone into a second
printing that's now out that wasjust came out this year. And on
that occasion, I'm here to talkabout the book again, with my
(00:54):
colleague, the brilliant MabelWilson. Just to introduce myself
briefly, I'm an architecturaland urban historian. I am, newly
the dean of the College of Artsand Sciences at the University
of Washington in Seattle, andI'm thrilled to be here with
Mabel.
Mabel O. Wilson (01:10):
Yeah. Thank you, Diane. It's a pleasure to
be back and in conversation,about the second printing of
your book. And just one to saycongratulations. I am a
designer, a cultural historian,curator.
I teach at Columbia University,both in architecture and also in
(01:34):
African American and Africandiaspora studies. And I'm really
excited to, again, be inconversation with you about
little white houses and how thepost war home constructed race
in America. And I sort of wannabegin there maybe with a
question for you because weoften think the home, the suburb
is constructed by race, but wealso don't think about how the
(01:55):
home actually constructs race inAmerica. So can we start with a
little bit about the book'sorigins?
Dianne Harris (02:03):
Absolutely. And it's a pleasure and a delight to
be in conversation with youabout the book as well. You
know, to have been able to havethe opportunity to talk with
you, my friend, as a as ascholar and a thought partner
and as a, as a supporter for thework over these many years has
(02:24):
been, just incredible. And andyour work has influenced my own
in in so many ways. So thank youagain for doing this today.
So I started working on theproject many years ago. It
started as early as 1996,actually, just shortly after I
had finished my dissertation,which was on an entirely
different topic on theeighteenth century. It it
(02:46):
focused on, eighteenth centuryNorthern Italian villas. But it
was also about questions ofbelonging and exclusion and
identity formation in andthrough the built environment.
And I just had an opportunitywhen I started my my very first
academic tenure track job at theUniversity of Illinois in 1996
through, one of my dissertationadvisers, to have the
(03:07):
opportunity to start lookinginstead for briefly for a
symposium on questions aboutwhat was happening in the
ordinary postwar suburb, between1945 and 1960.
And from that project, I startedto look differently at all kinds
of questions. And I what Ireally wanted to understand from
that point forward as soon as Istarted working on this was I
(03:28):
really wanted to understand themillions of houses that belonged
to a majority of middle classAmericans after the end of the
second World War. They were thehouses that frankly had
surrounded me for most of mylife since I've been a child and
that I'd lived in and that Iencountered everywhere in the
built environment outside oflarge urban centers. They were
(03:49):
everywhere around me when Imoved to, Urbana, Illinois. I
saw them every time I drove tothe grocery store, every time I
took my daughter to to school,every time I went to work.
Yet, I could find very littlein-depth scholarship about them.
I noticed that suburbanhistories, and there were some
really excellent ones, out therein 1996, focused primarily on
(04:11):
the planning of suburbsthemselves, but not on the
houses. And once I starteddigging in during the late
nineteen nineties and the veryearly February, I found glancing
references in the publishedscholarship to the segregated
nature of these houses andneighborhoods. But at that time
and and you'll remember this,Mabel. There was really nothing
(04:32):
in the architectural historyliterature about this aspect,
about race and racism andhouses.
At least, you know, nothing thatwas more than a couple of
paragraphs that would saysomething like, you know, and,
of course, these houses wererestricted largely to whites.
And I kept reading theseparagraphs and thinking, really?
That's that's the end of thestory? That's all you're gonna
tell me? Planning history istold a bit more about redlining
(04:55):
practices and so on, but nothingthat dug more deeply, into the
houses themselves and not muchelsewhere, either when it came
to really understanding thattopic.
So I've long been interested inquestions of exclusion and
belonging in the builtenvironment. And as I said
earlier, my first book and mydissertation focused on those
(05:17):
issues in a totally differentcontext. But these became
compelling questions for me, andthey remain so during my career.
The autobiographical piece ofthe book, which I'll talk a
little bit of, more about later,generated a really powerful
resonance for me between what Iknew about my family's history
and these issues ofdiscrimination and exclusion and
(05:39):
unfair housing policies andpractices that kept large
numbers of folks out of thehousing market then just as they
do now. So it started as afairly straightforward
architectural history driven bywhat were at first a fairly
conventional set of questionsabout ordinary post war houses.
You know? Why did they look thatway? Why were they the sizes
(06:00):
they were? Why did they grow, byseveral hundred square feet over
the period that I was interestedin studying? Where did people
store all their stuff in a timewhen credit was more readily
available and people had moreincome than they'd had before,
but these houses didn't havebasements or attics because they
were building slab on grade forthe first time in many parts of
The US and not always havingbasements and often not having
(06:22):
basements.
You know, these are verytraditional architectural
history questions became onethat focused on questions of
race and post war houses. Andthe more I researched the
project, the more I realizedthat a big part of the story was
about white supremacy and theways ordinary post war houses
became vehicles for variousmodes to assert white identities
(06:44):
and the unearned privileges anddominance that obtained to them.
It became clear to me that thosewere the compelling questions
about these ubiquitous housesand that the real story to be
told, or at least the one that Ineeded to tell, was about trying
to understand the links betweenhouses and the ways race and
identity are intertwined andformulated. I wanna say too that
(07:07):
there there's always been adriving sense for me as a
scholar of trying to understandthose questions, but I also
found myself at the Universityof Illinois amid a group of
scholars and in a very richintellectual environment where I
was able to learn more, than Iwould have, I think, in many
(07:27):
other places. It was a placewhere there was, an incredible
vibrancy and fertile ground forfolks who wanted to do
interdisciplinary scholarship,opportunities to connect with
brilliant historians, theorists,folks in ethnic studies, race
studies through the humanitiescenter, through the center for
(07:47):
advanced study, and coffeeshops.
It's a re an unusual place thatway. And I think being there too
and being around a group ofscholars who are working on
similar issues helped advance myown work in this area and and
probably substantially helpedshift the the direction of the
questions I was asking. So allof those forces and factors came
(08:08):
to bear on the shape of the bookand how it ended up being the
book that it is that reallyfocused on this looking at these
questions about race, belonging,exclusion, identity formation,
racism, segregation, whitesupremacy, but all through the
granular sort of micro level ofthe house, its possessions, its
arrangement display, rhetoric,advertising, and so on.
Mabel O. Wilson (08:33):
And and with that in mind, thinking about,
you know, how you start tocraft, a kind of language,
right, for understanding race inthe built environment. That's
why I found the book sorevelatory, and useful in my own
teaching, teaching graduatestudents. But also, you know,
(08:55):
I've I've used the the book forcourses that, you know, that
aren't specifically for, let'ssay, architectural historians or
designers. Outside the field,there's a kind of rigor both in
the method, which I I wannafollow-up with you about in
part, but also very just veryclear descriptions about, you
know, like, what race is, whatwhiteness is, and why it's
(09:18):
important to think about it inin regards to the built
environment. So can you explainhow you define whiteness and why
it's important to understandthis in relationship to
architecture, especially sinceit hadn't been a question
previously?
Dianne Harris (09:33):
Absolutely. And, you know, it's a good segue from
what I was just saying aboutbeing at Illinois because I've
really been profoundlyinfluenced by a generation of
scholars whose work reallyarose, in the nineteen eighties
and nineteen nineties, kindabecame better known and
established. And there arescholars who really forged the
field of critical studies ofwhiteness. David Roediger, who
(09:56):
was a colleague of mine atIllinois, whose work has been
profoundly influential for meand who was incredibly generous
in taking time to to to teach meand to share sources and ideas
in the, beginning stages of thisproject. But then a range of
scholars who are examining thefluidity of white identity and
(10:17):
over long periods of time andwhat that's meant for Jews,
Italians, the Irish, Mexicans,and Asians.
You know, Matthew FryeJacobson's work was as important
to me as Karen Brodkins was. Andthen we began to see some
scholars who study the visualworld focusing on whiteness as a
theoretical category as well.Scholars like Martin Berger, for
(10:40):
example, whose work is justreally superb thinking about
whiteness and visual culture. SoI've always been having said
that. So that's sort of the thesome of the scholars who
influenced this work and helpedme think about how I'm defining
whiteness.
But I've always been very awareof the critiques of that work.
So I wanna say that too before Igo back to thinking about the
(11:00):
definition. And especially thecharges that critical studies of
whiteness has just been anotherway of putting whites at the
center of everything. Legitimatecritique. Right?
Something to really be aware of.But I believed then, as I do
now, that we cannot dismantlewhite supremacy if we don't
(11:20):
understand very deeply how itoperates and the structures
through which it defines andasserts itself. So for me,
housing is one of the mostpervasive and pernicious of
those structures because it canseem so benign. And the ways
whiteness asserts itself througharchitecture and material
culture related to houses is sosubtle yet powerful and
(11:42):
persistence that for me itdemands that we examine it and
we examine whiteness through it.So I define whiteness as a
racial category that had afairly significant degree of
fluidity throughout thetwentieth century and remains in
flux today, but that has beenstatic in the ways it
consistently aligns with modesof dominance and supremacy that
(12:05):
are linked to the mosttraumatic, devastating, and
harmful aspects of this nation'spast and present.
There are scholars today whowould define the construct that
is whiteness as a pathology. Andbecause of its ties to the
trauma and harm I justmentioned, and if we were to be
honest about the past at all, wehave to see it that way. It's
(12:25):
important to understand it inrelation to architecture because
the built environment is one ofthe most powerful structures
through which white supremacycirculates and persists. But one
of the things I'm fairlyinsistent on in the book and
that I hope readers take awayfrom the book is the fluidity of
whiteness. The ways in which ithas, on the one hand, morphed
(12:49):
and changed and moved over timeto accommodate different
historical forces, and thesubtleties of of history and
those forces while at the sametime remaining static, as I
said, in its dominance and inits force toward domination.
Right? That that's always kindof at the, forefront of what
(13:13):
whiteness seeks to be. I try tohelp students understand, you
know, as as all of us who workwith students and try and try to
help them have a more nuancedand rich and full and accurate
sense of race and racism. Thatrace is a category, that it that
has shifted over time, a set ofcategories, that it's a
(13:35):
construct, that skin color isnot always nor, is it
consistently what race has beenabout, but that skin color is
the manifestation of thestructural forces that come to
play through those constructsthat make up racism and race and
whiteness. I actually spend agood deal of time in the
(13:58):
beginning parts of the bookwalking readers through that
because I just couldn't be surethat any of, the readers who I
imagined to the audience wouldhave been familiar when I wrote
the book with that work.
One of the things that's reallyinteresting to me right now, and
we can talk about this a littlebit more later too. When I was
(14:20):
writing that book and even up tothe point where it was
published, the words whiteprivilege were not really in
particularly wide circulation. Ithink it's fair to say they now
are, and that's a remarkableshift in in our culture that
deserves some attention, Ithink, and is getting some
attention. So, the book, I don'tthink, has much to do with that
(14:41):
at all, but, but it'sinteresting to to think about
that change that's happened inthat in the intervening eight
years.
Mabel O. Wilson (14:48):
Yeah. No. I I think that's absolutely right. I
mean, I think that's one of theinnovative dimensions both of
your, you know, of the thebook's content, but also of the
the method by which you underundertake it and to really
scrutinize whiteness. Becauseoften in architectural
scholarship, people would focuson, for example, the failure of
(15:09):
modernist housing, writing it,right, race as blackness.
Right? That, you know, there'ssome sort of clearly so so, you
know, social failure, you know,that results in the inability of
the housing to sort ofaccommodate a certain kind of of
social life, in fact. And sorace always often gets, you
(15:30):
know, associated with blacknessand whiteness sort of remains
transcendent and andtransparent. You know? And those
let's say the the histories cango to the archives of a
Yamasaki.
It can go to the archives of aChicago Housing Authority.
Right? And and write thosenarratives. And I think, you go
to other sources. And so can youyou maybe share a bit about the
(15:52):
kind of methodology of what youyou look at and and why it's
important?
And I think why it's importantin part is because I think one
of the things that's clear, youknow, is that institutions are
significant in how they shaperacial discourse. Right? And the
ways in which then individualslive that. And and I think you
find these archives with reallyremarkable content. So so yeah.
(16:16):
Can you can you share more aboutthe the method of writing?
Dianne Harris (16:19):
Sure. And, you know, as a lead into that, it's
interesting to think about whenyou mentioned, you know, the
example of public housing andhigh you know, high rise public
housing, for example, and theways that that's been considered
in terms of race. One of thethings I would say, you know,
when I started out earliersaying that there wasn't much in
(16:40):
architectural history that hadto do with race and architecture
when when I was writing thisbook, I would nuance that by
saying that when architecturalhistorians have written about
race before Little White Housesand and before your work, and I
wanna really importantly pointto your work, Mabel, as a real
inspiration from my own, with,you know, Negro building coming
(17:01):
out very shortly on on the heelsof of the White houses and and
having wide influence on somany. And we'll talk about that
in a minute too. But whenarchitectural historians were
writing about race, they weredoing it in spaces that they
understood to be overtlyracialized.
So, you know, a so calledghetto, a barrio, a reservation,
a Chinatown. And in thoseinstances, there were particular
(17:26):
methods for doing that. Youknow, if it was high rise
housing, you could probably goto an architectural archive if
you're an architecturalhistorian and find plans and
drawings and documentspertaining to that. Harder to
do, but, in the context of, say,a Chinatown or, an American
Indian reservation, but scholarsof the so called vernacular,
(17:48):
world have been doing that forsome time and and sort of
finding a wider range of ofcollections and and evidence on
which to base that work anddoing superb work in that in
that way. But what I was tryingto do was to show through this
book that all of the builtenvironment is about race,
whether or not we understand itto be that way because the
(18:08):
spaces that have been consideredto be not raced are white spaces
and that they are thereforeracialized and are very much
about race and exclusion andidentity.
So I was really trying to turnthat piece of architectural
history on its head. I'm gonnago back a little bit when I
think about the method, andespecially I wanna talk a little
(18:30):
bit also about theautobiographical aspect of the
work, which is a little bit of apiece of the method. So I grew
up hearing a lot of stories frommy my maternal grandparents, who
immigrated who were Jewish, whoimmigrated from Germany to The
United States about houses. AndI heard about them in at least
(18:50):
two ways. One was that mygrandfather was an electrical
engineer who specialized in highfidelity sound systems and had
his own retail store, on MelroseAvenue in Los Angeles in the
'19, forties and fifties andinto the sixties.
It was called WeingartenElectronics, and he did high end
custom installations of stereosystems, into architect designed
(19:13):
homes. And he was fascinatedwith architecture from the time
he was a young man in Germanyand was fascinated by what he
saw and heard about and learnedabout happening in the Bauhaus.
He was a passionate fan of ourof of mid century modernism.
And, so he would tell us storieswhenever we visited about the
architects he worked with. Andso my my older sister, who is an
(19:35):
architect, and I especially,grew up hearing those stories
and being very, very influencedby them.
And and he he really enjoyedworking with with the architect.
He worked with Richard Neutra,with Quincy Jones, with John
Lautner in Los Angeles and hadwonderful stories to tell about
them. So there were thosestories just about architecture
(19:56):
that were interesting inmodernism. But there were also
the less frequently told storiesbecause I think my grandparents
were in some ways, sort oftypical in their their optimism
about what The United Statespromised them as immigrants. And
so they tended to focus on allthe positive things in their
lives.
My grandfather and grandmotherwould sometimes talk about their
(20:17):
search for housing when theyarrived in California. And I
understood over years becausethey didn't talk very much about
the kinds of exclusionarypractices that kept them from
readily finding houses in thattime. I only found out later as
an adult about some of thechallenges they faced in finding
housing. And, so, of course, inthe book, I spend a good deal of
(20:39):
time focusing on their theirordinary post warehouse that
they ended up purchasing towardthe end of the nineteen fifties,
in the San Fernando Valley in anarea that was not, exclusive,
for for Jews. So I wanted totell their story not because it
was unusual, but because it wasso common at that time.
And I knew telling it would helpme set set the stage for the
(21:02):
detailed granular study ofresidential segregation that I
hope to tell. But I also imaginetheir story would resonate with
many other Jews who might havesimilar immigration stories in
their families and with otherswhose families have immigrated
and experienced similar strugglestruggles with with unfair
housing. And it seemed to methat telling their story did at
(21:23):
least two things. First, ithelped me provide some nuance to
questions about race and space.And and this is something that
seemed very, very important tome as as I was writing the book.
In The US context and and as Iwrote in the book, I felt it was
important to shape a narrativethat would help readers
understand the race beyond anysingle binary. And that seemed
(21:47):
especially important since Iimagined my primary audience to
be architectural historians whomight not have had much
familiarity as I said earlier atthat time with theories about
race and whiteness. So myintention by including the story
of my Jewish immigrantgrandparents in their home was
to remind readers of the of themany folks who are excluded from
(22:08):
the housing market by racialracial covenants, by redlining
practices, by real estatesteering, and so on whose skin
was black or brown, but alsothose who were excluded because
they were Jewish or Muslim oreven in earlier days Italian or
Irish, including the story of myJewish grandparents and details
of the home they were eventuallyable to purchase and that they
(22:30):
cherished. They cherished thislittle home as a signal of their
own arrival as real Americans.And and it really for them was a
signal of their belonging inthis country.
And they faced a lot ofexclusion even after they got
here and got into that house.But it helped me to tell that
complex narrative of race andethnicity defined in ways that
(22:51):
have shifted over time, but thathave also remained unfortunately
static. Second, I wanted toexperiment with academic and
scholarly writing. I wanted thebook to reach architectural
historians, but I also hoped itmight attract at least a small
audience beyond the academy.I've always kind of wanted to do
(23:12):
that.
I've aspired to that. I'm notsure I know exactly how to do
that. And I think a lot of us asscholars struggle with that, but
I'm interested in that. And Iwanted it to perhaps help
interested readers understandmore about the ways housing and
segregation happens, about theways the lack of access to real
property shapes life chances anddiminishes them for folks who
(23:33):
can't access it, and to betterunderstand some nuances of race
and racism in The United Statesduring that period between 1945
and 1960. And I wanted to dothat also because everybody
lives somewhere.
You know, a residentialexperience is so common. And so
it seemed to me that using abook like this to help more
people understand how racismoperates in and through the
(23:55):
built environment was a realopportunity. So using
autobiography was partly aneffort to experiment with the
those conventions of academicwriting, which we know are
pretty rigid. And it was partlyan effort to engage a wider
audience. So if nothing else, Ido hear consistently from
students, about how much theyappreciate that aspect of the
(24:17):
book.
I think everybody likes to reada story. I do. And I also love
to write. So that part was quitefrankly just a really enjoyable
aspect of the project for me andone that held a lot of personal
meeting meaning, and and justjoy. I don't think it's an
appropriate approach for everyor even for most projects.
(24:40):
I don't think we always need toinsert ourselves into the
narrative of the scholarship.But I do think it it it does
important work in little whitehouses for the reasons that I
have mentioned.Methodologically, there were
some interesting challenges forthis book because architects
mostly haven't written aboutrace explicitly. You know, it's
every now and then and, youknow, a project I've worked on
(25:02):
recently where you'll find anarchitect who scrawled something
really racist in the margins ofa document or more than one
document. But that's not verycommon, in my experience.
So understanding the wayswhiteness whiteness and its
dominance was shaped in thehousing market, as an absolutely
de facto assumption meantlooking at different kinds of
(25:24):
sources and developing anability to decode more commonly
used sources. It really meantoften doing the opposite of what
we're trained to do. Asarchitectural historians or art
historians, we're trained tolook to look carefully at what
we can see. I think those of uswho work on race develop an
ability to look for what hasbeen consciously and sometimes
(25:49):
not consciously erased,suppressed, buried, but that is
always there running through itas a kind of resonant current if
you look for it. I had to learnto decipher what I came to think
of and to write about as codesfor whiteness that were both
textual and visual or materialto understand the underlining
(26:12):
meanings of ubiquitously andconsistently deployed rhetoric
about cleanliness, spaciousness,privacy, order, mobility, words
like that that came up over andover again in the literature on
these houses.
And then to just really analyzethem and to look at how those
those terms played out in termsof who the presumed audience was
(26:34):
for these houses. If you lookcarefully at these houses, and
I've talked I don't really talkabout this in the book so much,
but it was one of the thingsthat prompted me to think about
kind of codes and spatialdynamics of houses and how the
houses tell us who they're for.I kept thinking about, again, my
grandparents' house and howtheir postwar home didn't have a
(26:55):
place for them to keep theirextra set of kosher dishes. They
didn't keep kosher, but we hadfamily members who did, and
there was no place in the houseto do that. My grandmother had
to keep them out in the garage.
Or her built in countertoprange, it was a stovetop, and
the the oven was separate, whichis very common in post war
houses. And her range had fourburners, on two on each side of
(27:18):
a griddle and, you know, it wascalled a pancake griddle. Well,
my grandmother didn't makepancakes. She made matzo brei.
And, you know, so every time sheused her pancake pancake
griddle, though, as a GermanJewish immigrant who probably
hadn't made pancakes muchbefore, her house reminded her
that she wasn't quite itsintended occupant.
And I think about that a lot.How do our house houses tell us,
(27:40):
you know, who they were intendedfor when they were designed and
built? And it's usually not foranybody who wasn't a white
Christian American. So all ofthose things were were
interesting to try to thinkabout those codes and the
different ways we can look atthose houses. Finally, I'd say a
a key challenge of the book wasthat I wanted it to have a
national scope, and there was nosingle archive for the kinds of
(28:02):
houses I was writing about.
And in fact, they're you know,for most of the really ordinary
houses I was looking at, theywere they were builder houses.
They were often made by builderswho didn't have any kind of
affiliation with any kind of abig build. They weren't Kaufman
and Broad, for example. Right?As we would think of it now,
they were just, you know, smalltime builders.
So the questions I was askingcan't actually be answered in
(28:24):
most architectural archivesanyway. So that may meant
thinking differently about how Imight find answers to the
questions I found mostcompelling. And in the end, I'll
have to say I did find somehelpful evidence in a couple of
architects' archives. Thearchives of the architect a
Quincy Jones was really useful,but mostly for the clip files,
not so much for the housesthemselves, where I found really
(28:47):
odd and interesting things.There's something called the
Small Homes Council archive atthe University of Illinois that,
with that was a a a researchcouncil, a research center at
the School of Architecture therewhere they got a lot of did a
lot of grant funded work onbuilding ordinary small houses.
So it was useful. And then forthe chapter on television, the
NBC archive that's located atthe University of, Wisconsin in
(29:10):
Madison, was enormously helpful.But I mostly had to hunt in a
lot of strange places to findanswers to questions. And so,
you know, I used governmentdocuments. I used novels, films,
trading stamp collectioncatalogs, redemption catalogs,
popular and shelter magazines,lots of those.
They're their own kind ofarchive for this work.
(29:31):
Photographers' archives,advertising records, All these
became essential parts of thestory I needed to to tell. So an
interesting an interesting kindof treasure hunt in many ways.
Mabel O. Wilson (29:43):
Yeah. I mean, I think that's what's so rich that
each chapter has its own sort ofarchival bend and that you can
sort of sense the degree towhich. And and I think this is
important that media, right,that these magazines that, you
know, that they were circulatingthis. But these these magazines
were also backed up byinstitutions, that there were,
(30:04):
standardization in, you know,organizations that were
promoting certain things, thatthere were associations of
architects who were engaged. Itwas the Museum of Modern Art was
also engaged in building, youknow, American taste in that
post war period.
And so while and and and that'sthe thing that I appreciate is
that you oh, you think these arejust throwaway things. Right?
(30:25):
It's this month and, you know,house beautiful. But, actually,
you know, you they they theywere institutional constructs
that are that are constructing anational narrative, particularly
in that post war period asimmigrants are coming into the
country. We're having civilrights struggles that, you know,
that that these are also sitesin which America is being
(30:46):
imagined and also contested.
And that's sort of what Iappreciate and how the chapters
really do unfold.
Dianne Harris (30:52):
Oh, thanks. I mean, I that's a it's an
interesting point. And I think,you know, one of the things that
was so interesting to me aboutthinking about shelter and
popular magazines as their ownarchive is that, as you said,
it's easy to take them at facevalue and really important not
to. And to think aboutespecially in that period when
magazines like House Beautiful,which today is not, you know,
(31:14):
it's not a particularlyinfluential magazine at all. But
in the nineteen fifties and intothe nineteen sixties, it was a
very influential magazine whenit was under the leadership of a
particular editor, ElizabethGordon.
And there was a at that time, Ithink much more today. I mean,
much more to than today becauseit almost doesn't exist now. A
kind of interesting set ofinteractions between the
(31:37):
profession of architecture and akind of, you know, even well
known sort of, you know, what wecall might call high style
architects and these popularshelter magazines. You know,
they were in conversation witheach other because the
architects understood twothings, I think. One was that
merchant builders cared what wasin those popular magazines and
shelter magazines becausereaders wanted what was in them.
(32:00):
And so there was a kind ofinteresting constant circulation
and flow of information andfeedback, a kind of a feedback
loop that went from theprofession to the editors of
those magazines to the readersand back again and and then
circulating in and among themerchant builders and the
building trades who are, youknow, creating a lot of these
houses. And so they became muchmore influential than they are
(32:22):
today. And even, you know, oneof the sources that I relied on
a lot was, Popular Mechanics,which had a huge influence and
was, you know and may maybe doesstill, but to a different kind
of audience and around differentkinds of issues than it did
then. So, yeah, very interestingarchive of its own.
Mabel O. Wilson (32:39):
Yeah. And I and I think in particular, there was
a show recently that sadly justclosed at the Jewish Museum
called the Modern Look, youknow, that looked at the impact
of European emigres, artists whoare coming into The United
States. And one of the placesthey found work was in the New
York publishing industry andfashion magazines and and and
(32:59):
shelter magazines. And it wasjust really remarkable to see
these avant garde techniques ofphotographing objects, places,
and peoples being deployed inthese men. So aesthetically,
they were really sharp and quiteinteresting, You know, but we
often don't see that.
We see the fine art production,but we actually don't see how
they're engaging, in everydaylife. And that would include
(33:22):
people like also Gordon peoplelike Gordon Parks were also a
part of that. And so there werethese dialogues amongst all of
these these creatives that justaren't necessarily taking into
account in, let's say, thecanons of art history or
architectural history or designhistory for that matter.
Dianne Harris (33:36):
Absolutely. And then, you know, one of the
things that I I talk about alittle bit in the book too is,
you know, the extent to whichthe presumed audience, of
readers for those was a whiteaudience and that the ways that
that gets reinforcedrepresentationally throughout
the the genre of these shelteredpopular magazines. And thinking
about them compared to whatexisted for, say, a a black
(33:57):
audience, which would have beenEbony more than Jet. Jet wasn't
really the venue for, you know,Ebony was the large format kind
of glossier, more more heavilyillustrated, journal. And to be
sure, there are features onhousing in Ebony over the same
period of time, but they'requite different.
And, because the, masthead inEbony, you know, the the kind of
(34:23):
statement when you opened thethe magazine was that it was to
portray the brighter side ofNegro life, housing wasn't gonna
be part of that. You know?Housing was not actually at that
moment readily available newhousing to to blacks in America.
And so it would been would havebeen hard to feature that in in
the at the kind of scale andscope that it was featured in
the the shelter magazinesintended for white audiences.
(34:46):
What you do find in Ebony, andothers have written about this,
people like Andy Weese, forexample, in his his book about
African American suburbs, is,you know, more houses for
prominent black figures inAmerican life.
You know, a doctor, anastronaut, someone who has
attained a level of fame andwealth so that they could build
(35:07):
their own home in a in a suburb,where they knew that they would
be welcomed and safe, forexample. Just an interesting
point of comparison when youthink about those two sources
for the project or multiplesources for the project.
Mabel O. Wilson (35:21):
Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, thinking about
audiences, I think, sort ofcritical. And maybe to shift a
little bit to think about andand and discuss, like, what was
the response to the bookinitially, and its impact on the
field? Because not that manybooks get a second printing.
Right?
In this way, also, you know,with with years past. So there
(35:44):
was something about, I think,the book that you can say was
was ahead of its time.
Dianne Harris (35:49):
Yeah. Thank you. I mean, I'm happy to say I think
now it's been really favorable.You know, reviews of the book
were overwhelmingly favorable. Ican think of one where somebody
was kinda not happy with it.
But, for the most part, reallyfavorable, and I think it's been
especially impactful forstudents and for a younger
generation of scholars from whomI hear pretty frequently. I
(36:13):
think younger scholars werereally ready for this work, and
I really think they're the oneswho are gonna carry its
questions forward in importantways. You know, I know from my
own private Google citationscholars page that it's very
widely cited and, you know, itseems to kind of pick up as time
goes on actually as it gets kindof more well known by scholars.
(36:37):
It's been great to see the waysthe book has been taken up by
scholars from a a wide range ofdisciplines, because I see the
book cited, for example, byethnic studies scholars,
sociologists, geographers, andby scholars in in Jewish studies
and communication, materialculture studies, media studies,
gender and women's studies, and,of course, you know, historians
(36:58):
as well as those who studyarchitecture landscapes. And
that was really a goal.
I really wanted it to be a bookthat would help scholars in
other fields see the importanceof the built environment for
these issues. Because, you know,one of the things, Mabel, you
and I have talked a lot about isthe extent to which for some
reason, the built environment isseen as something that is just
not a significant cultural forcein the way, for example, a piece
(37:21):
of writing on a document in anarchive can be. And I find that
so strange in a certain waybecause the built environment is
everywhere in our lives. Itshapes our experiences every day
in, you know, a thousand myriadways that we are mostly not
conscious of, but that isprofoundly important for the
ways we conduct ourselves forwhat we have access to, for what
(37:43):
we don't have access to. I justthat that piece of it to me just
felt incredibly important andever more so now, you know, in
that kind of national moment ofreckoning around race that we're
in.
So seeing the work being takenup by such a wide range of
audiences has been enormouslygratifying. But it's also been
exciting to know that somenonacademic reading groups have
(38:05):
selected the book and have foundit a good source or starting
point for talking aboutwhiteness since it again, it
connects to something thateveryone has experienced, which
is residential life. You know?That's just something that
everybody knows. So it's a it'san entree.
If you if you have a group ofpeople who wanna explore white
privilege, the way whitesupremacy works, starting with
something that we all know everyday, the place we live, where
(38:28):
it's whether it's a house or anapartment. It's a great way to
start thinking about and talkingabout these really complicated
and difficult issues.
Mabel O. Wilson (38:37):
Yeah. Can you can you talk about also
specifically on architecture?Like, what what was it its
impact, do you think, on howarchitects were considering this
question of racial thinking?
Dianne Harris (38:49):
Oh, it's so funny that I left that out.
Mabel O. Wilson (38:52):
Yeah. Because I also think that that is the
brilliance of the book becauseit's it's interdisciplinarity,
but it also teaches, you know,particularly historians of
architecture, as you said, to tolook at what, you know, that
might be overlooked. That thatisn't necessarily seen or even
considered relevant.
Dianne Harris (39:09):
Yeah. So I think in architectural history I mean,
it's really hard for me to say.I hope that it's had an impact
in architectural history. Ithink it has. I know that it's
included on a lot of coursesyllabi, which is great.
To me, that's the impact I'drather have any day than knowing
that it's cited in a bunch ofother books. Having students
read it means everything to me,because I think that's really
(39:30):
impact. I am hesitant to saythat it's Little White Houses
that has done this. I think it'sLittle White Houses and a
constellation of publicationsthat came out around the same
time or just afterwards. Yourbook, Negro Building.
More recently, Charles Davis'sbook, that I'll talk about in a
minute, you know, the race andmodern architecture book that
(39:52):
just came out. And certainly, Iwanna, also say that the work of
the incredibly important andinfluential work of someone like
Del Upton, who was writing aboutrace and landscape, people like
John Michael Vlach, who helpedus understand the plantation in
new ways. I mean, there havebeen scholars working on Rebecca
Ginsberg, whose work on,apartheid and and houses in
(40:14):
Johannesburg. These are all haveall been incredibly influential.
Texts and I would even go backto a book that's been so
influential for me, JamesBorchardt's, alley life in
Washington DC, which was writtena long time ago and talk about a
book ahead of its time.
I mean, that was a reallybrilliant book. So certainly
people have been writing aboutrace and architecture for some
time, but it it would be hard tosay that it was any kind of a
(40:37):
real current, until very, veryrecently. And I remember, in
fact, the first time, I think itwas, in the early two thousands,
there was a special issue of thejournal of the Society of
Architectural Historians, and Iwas asked to write something
about social histories ofarchitecture. And I wrote
something about critical studiesof whiteness and the built
environment, and I was veryconscious as I did that that it
(40:59):
would be the first time thatthose words were published in
the Journalist Society ofArchitectural Historians ever,
and that nobody had beenthinking really about whiteness
studies and the builtenvironment, or writing about it
until then. So, you know, Idon't want it to claim too much
for the book, and I I reallythink that it's a constellation
of efforts and of scholarshipthat have really kind of made a
(41:22):
difference in the last five toseven years.
But I'm thrilled to see that,you know, for example, at the
annual meetings of the Societyof Architectural Historians,
there are multiple sessions nowhaving to do with race and
architecture. There areroundtable sessions. There are
events that happen outside ofthe annual meeting that the
(41:44):
Society of the vernaculararchitecture forum has been
supporting this work for a verylong time. So I I think what the
book did in terms of changingarchitectural history is, that
it contributed at a moment whenmore was about to happen, when
(42:06):
the field was starting to beready to have those
conversations in ways that itnot only hadn't been before but
was resistant to. Thatresistance is still there.
There it is very, very muchstill there, and it runs it runs
deep. But I have enormous hopein this new generation of
scholars that are coming up, whoare really interested in these
(42:27):
issues and who understand themto be central to our
understanding of the builtenvironment. In terms of the
profession of architecture, Iknow less about how the book if
the book is known amongarchitects. I just don't know.
I'm not in practice.
I'm not teaching design studio.I'm not I haven't been embedded
(42:47):
in an architecture or designschool for quite a while. My
guess is not so much. And that'swhere I would love to have it
see it have an impact because Ithink it's with the people who
produce and plan and design thebuilt environment that change
needs to happen, probably morethan anywhere else. So I'm not
(43:08):
sure how that will happen, butbut, I think it will happen when
design schools decide that theyneed to go through the kind of
culture shifts that we think,you know, they are just now
starting to wake up to.
Mabel O. Wilson (43:19):
But you have, recently, and this was a
conversation we had at DunbarOaks that you showed. I mean,
this also brings in, you know,that these weren't just minor
builders and corporations,companies making these suburbs,
but figures like Frank LloydWright were actively engaged in,
you know, certainly withBroadacre City, but also the
(43:40):
work that you you study and sortof thinking about these things.
So it's it's it isn't far afield. This is actually a
central question to modernism inthat moment. And and and could
you talk a little bit about, youknow, which which kind of speaks
to work that you're you'reengaged in now, actually?
Dianne Harris (43:56):
Yeah. So, you know, thinking about what what I
might write a little bitdifferently, given current
debates, you know, what what Imight think about differently.
And you're absolutely right. Imean, I think that the it's
interesting because I didn'tknow, you know, obviously, about
the right work, the FranklinWright rights work, that I just
(44:17):
have been working on, withBroadacre City when I wrote this
book. I did know that merchantbuilders like the Levitts were
looking at Frank Lloyd Wright'swork and in funny and
interesting ways trying toincorporate some of his design,
stuff into their mass producedhousing, which is kind of
interesting.
So, you know, but what I'mtrying to was just trying to
(44:39):
signal is that I not so muchthat I don't think there's much
to be learned by looking at whatarc you know, sort of well known
architects have done, andthinking about these issues, but
just that I don't know quite asmuch about where and how
practice people in professionalpractice are thinking about
these matters yet. I hope theywill. So thinking about what I
(45:01):
might do differently with thebook, as I mentioned when I
started working on the book inthe late nineteen nineties,
there were less than probably ahandful of architectural
historians, you know, whose workfocused explicitly on race, as I
said. And none that I couldreally point to who had
considered scholarship, onwhiteness like that developed by
historians like David Roediger.But I think it's fair to say
(45:23):
that the audience I imagined isthe primary one for the book
would not have been much awareof the key scholarship on race
or critical race theory, forexample.
So I spent time sketching outthose histories and theories for
the for those readers. I'm notsure how much of that has yet
changed in terms of awareness ofthose theories and that
literature among, you know,many, many scholars of the built
(45:47):
environment. But what haschanged is a dramatic shift over
the last couple of years in thefield of architectural history
in terms of a more widespreadrealization of the gaps in the
literature in our field. They'rereally more like chasms than
gaps. And I'm I'm incrediblyexcited to see a new generation
of scholars stepping in and upto address new questions that
(46:09):
center race in their work.
Books like your own, the editedcollection you worked on with
Irene Chang and and CharlesDavis, Race and Modern
Architecture, and Charles' book,Building Character. I think all
of these are making a realdifference in just the last
eighteen months. They're sellingbriskly. They're really, opening
the eyes of designers andhistorians, I think, to new ways
(46:32):
of thinking. But also, you know,the recent reconstructions
exhibit that you curated taughtme a lot.
There's a good deal more I thinkto be written, that I learned,
by thinking about thereconstructions exhibit about
where black folks were livingtheir hopes and dreams, about
black joy and aboutAfrofuturism. My book focused
(46:54):
pretty much on exclusion and onthe ways whiteness worked then
and now as a dominant force thatseeks supremacy, domination, and
exclusion. And I felt then as Ido now that explicating that in
detail and in the most granularlevel was important if that
process was to be fullyunderstood so that it could be
dismantled. But if I werewriting the book today, I would
(47:15):
have included at least a bitmore about the agency of black
people and other people of colorto forge communities, vibrant
neighborhoods, freedom colonies,and more. That's that's a piece
of the book that's reallymissing.
And at the same time, I wouldperhaps spend more time if I
were writing the book todaytrying to better elucidate the
(47:37):
ongoing impacts that have led usto this post George Floyd
moment. That might be too muchfor one book to try to do.
There's a lot to do in that bookas there is in any book. But I
do think we're in a a reallydifferent moment than we were in
when the book came out in 2013,just, you know, seven, eight
years ago. You know, we couldask how, for example, we might
(47:57):
think about housing when weconsider, as I believe we must
do, questions about reparations.
That's not something that Iincluded, but it could be a
really interesting interestingnew prologue for the book if it
were to be rewritten.
Mabel O. Wilson (48:11):
Yeah. I mean, as you know, I I grew up in a
little White House in, suburbanwell, not quite suburban New
Jersey, but, and it's a it's aninteresting story actually about
it. You know, there was abuilder who built the
neighborhood, you know, he wasactually a Jewish builder. And
so they are those stories that Ithink have have yet to be told.
But also, you know, like ifsomeone, yeah, somebody your,
(48:33):
your book is on a book club'slist, for example, and
somebody's thinking aboutreading like, okay, I'm gonna
pick this up.
You say, and you knowpresciently in the, the epilogue
that it's a mistake to presumethat that discrimination doesn't
exist in the housing market andthat the market is actually
fair, an open market. And sohow, you know, how might this be
(48:57):
a kind of lens to understand,like, what's going on to help
people connect the dots becauseoften more often than not, they
see this as a currentcircumstance and maybe don't see
the larger historical frame asto why things even today are are
the way at which which they'rethey're constructed.
Dianne Harris (49:17):
Absolutely. I mean, I think that the line in
the books that the fight forfair housing is not over, and it
sure as heck isn't over. Youknow, there's an enormous amount
of work to do on fair housing,and we heard about it in the
last presidential election fromsome candidates a candidate, not
as much as I would have liked tohave heard us hear from others.
(49:39):
It's astonishing to me theextent to which fair housing is
not a current topic ofconversation considering the
kind of bonkers housing market,that we're experiencing right
now, the extent of homelessnessand housing precarity in that we
saw before the pandemic, letalone now in this ongoing
(50:01):
pandemic situation. And the deepunderstanding we have, there's
no no way we can say that wedon't know the extent to which
address is linked to productivelife chances.
We know exactly the connectionsbetween where one lives and what
one's opportunities are. To justhave a dignified life, of of
(50:26):
opportunity, the kind of lifeand opportunity that we believe
everyone should have in anequitable, fair, just society. I
would love to see, Little WhiteHouses in this next part of its
life become a jumping off pointfor the connection to an entire
syllabus of of fair housing aspart of a, you know, courses on
(50:50):
just futures, equitable futures.Because to me, housing and
understanding its deep historyat every level, it's great to
know about redlining. It's greatto know about what happened
after redlining.
There's some fast fantasticliterature on that that's come
out in the last few years. Imean, I can't say enough about
the work that Keanda YamadaTaylor has put out that I mean,
(51:13):
that book is spectacular. HerRace for Profit book is
spectacular and so important.Richard Rothstein's book on
redlining, which has reached areally wide audience. Very
thankful for the audience thatit's reached.
But I think we have tounderstand housing at every
level we can possibly understandit. And if we're gonna really
understand what has undergirdedthe ability for this country to
(51:36):
very purposefully not see theways housing discrimination has
been enacted over decades anddecades and decades of time. If
we're gonna try to undo it inany way or advance conversations
about fair housing.
Mabel O. Wilson (51:51):
Well, thank you, Diane. I think this has
been a really, incredibleconversation, literally
revisiting little white houses.So thank you for for the work,
and and thank you for the, Ithink, this important
contribution across so manyfields. And I'm very excited
that, you know, you know, morepeople are going to to be be
(52:11):
reading it.
Dianne Harris (52:12):
Thank you, Mabel. This has been such a pleasure
and a delight as always, and Ilook forward to being in
dialogue with you anytime I canpossibly be in dialogue with
you. So I learn from you everytime we talk. So thank you so
much for this. It's been great.
And thank you to the Universityof Minnesota Press for all
they've done, with the book andfor the second printing. Really,
(52:33):
really glad that it'll be outthere for a while.
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