The Modernisms Research Workshop will be holding its final event of the semester this afternoon, when we host Charles Davis (Architecture) for a work-in-progress presentation on “Building a Post-Frontier California: Race, Pageantry and the Architectural Management of National Identity.” He provides this abstract to his ongoing research:

“I would like to discuss the contents of a public lecture that I delivered last spring as I am trying to turn it into a chapter. It can be found here​. (My presentation begins at 03:06:38). This work examines the racial politics of Bernard Maybeck’s eclectic modern architectural style. The American Census Bureau’s official declaration of the ‘Closing of the American Frontier’ in 1890 prompted many politicians to contemplate the future of American power. Was the fulfillment of Manifest Destiny a cue to cement local notions of American character, or instead to return back to its roots in Europe by extending its power across the Asia-Pacific? California’s leaders were especially plagued by this question as they held a strategic position for managing military and trade relations with Asia. This research uses new archives on Maybeck’s personal contact with Asian-Pacific cultures to reinterpret the meaning of his eclectic style. As Asian migrant labor flooded into the quiet hamlets of Northern California, Maybeck provided a stabilizing influence for white elites attempting to manage the social anxieties caused by these demographic changes. From the architect’s stage designs for Orientalist plays to his Asian-inspired domestic interiors, this work enabled elites with a space to ‘perform’ their whiteness—both a literal and metaphorical form of pageantry during a time of dramatic historical change.”

Charles L. Davis, II was a 2018-19 HI Faculty Fellow. Charles teaches architectural history and criticism as an Assistant Professor 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.