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Erasure by Design - by V Mitch McEwen (Paperback)
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Highlights
- How has erasure formed the space around us?
- About the Author: V. Mitch McEwen is an assistant professor at Princeton University's School of Architecture and principal of Harlem-based design practice Atelier Office.
- 368 Pages
- Architecture, Criticism
Description
About the Book
Erasure by Design tracks the methods, terms, and racial protocols that continue to do the work of displacement, demolition, and extraction into the present day.
Book Synopsis
How has erasure formed the space around us? How do we come to know it, so that we can design differently? Erasure by Design tracks the methods, terms, and racial protocols that continue to do the work of displacement, demolition, and extraction into the present day.
This book travels back and forth in time through scenes of erasure at three primary locations--Southwest, Washington DC (displacement); North St Louis (demolition), and South Los Angeles (extraction). Erasure by Design shares first person narratives of growing up in the wake of slum clearance--that is, "urban renewal"--in Southwest, Washington DC, while assembling archival references that narrate racialized erasure and its legal and spatial precedents. It traces a military complex under construction, where St Louis's cleared grounds and blacked out sites are also defined by satellites, body experiments, explosions, and emptiness. It moves through specific grounds in Los Angeles--dirt walls, hills, oil fields, gas lines, and houses in the forest--to trace how those grounds matter and how their holding intersects with maps that plan erasure, inhabitation, and extraction.
Between these three scenes, Erasure by Design takes on the aesthetics of bad design and good design, as innovated within the intellectual domain of modern architecture at the Museum of Modern Art and Philip Johnson's Glass House. Through a curated cockroach at MoMA--and even the humor, rumors, and gossip about this roach--Erasure by Design reads the role that the museum invents for exhibiting, curating, and re-shaping policy, worldview, and the built environment, as well as how protocols of erasure, demolition, and design conscript the modern built environment into the policing of human and subhuman. In this nuanced reading, the Glass House and its twin, the Brick House, stage a haunting allegory of total violence.
Review Quotes
Erasure by Design offers a series of startlingly original readings of urban space by way of an investigation into the racial protocols of demolition. Throughout this book, V. Mitch McEwen asks inconvenient but utterly necessary questions, like: Why was the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe filmed and broadcast? And, what is MoMA's commitment to keeping the name of Philip Johnson alive even after the revelations of his Nazism? The answers that emerge from McEwen's intense close readings will and should surprise you! This book will become essential reading for everyone who wants to understand the links between slum clearance and fascist investments in racial purity.--Jack Halberstam
In Erasure by Design, V. Mitch McEwen wanders and invites readers into that practice of trying to see the "surface and protocols of erasure." How do you map a void? How do you mark erasure (of living, of resistance, of planned removal, and more) without producing another erasure? From Southwest DC to MoMA to Los Angeles to the plans for Negro removal and Japanese removal and incarceration (and so much more), McEwen attends to the languages, strategies, and materialities of erasure, and builds a connective web across time, space, and geography that is resonant and capacious and able to show us in astonishing clarity the spatial projects, the design, of total violence subtended by antiblackness.--Christina Sharpe
About the Author
V. Mitch McEwen is an assistant professor at Princeton University's School of Architecture and principal of Harlem-based design practice Atelier Office. She is one of ten co-founders of the Black Reconstruction Collective. McEwen's design work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Museum of Modern Art, and the Venice Architecture Biennale.