Charles L. Davis, II, Assistant Professor of Architecture and OVPRED/HI Public Humanities Faculty Fellow

This presentation examines the racial politics of space that were manifest by Frank Lloyd Wright’s vision of a Prairie Style architecture. While the American prairie was spatially defined by the wide-open spaces that inspired the horizontal massing and flowing interior spaces of this style, it was also the site of a dramatic social struggle between white settlers and non-white natives competing for land. Davis argues that Wright’s separation of the symbolically ‘white’ served spaces and the ‘non-white’ servant spaces of the home constitutes a spatial allegory of the racial competitions that defined life in the Midwest. This reading invites a reassessment of the ways Wright’s style represents the central values of American democracy.

Charles teaches architectural history and criticism in the School of Architecture. He received his PhD in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and has an MArch from the University at Buffalo. His academic research examines the integrations of race and style theory in modern architectural debates from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. His current book manuscript, Building Character: The Racial Politics of Modern Architectural Style is forthcoming in the Culture, Politics and the Built Environment series of the University of Pittsburgh Press. This intellectual history traces the historical integrations of race and style theory in paradigms of ‘architectural organicism,’ or movements that modeled design on the generative principles of nature.

Join us at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center for our eighth year of Faculty Fellows talks! This lecture series brings current UB humanities research out into the community – with complimentary wine and hors d’oeuvres. Free and open to the public.