In a political climate where it is assumed that there are no alternatives to capitalism, architectural design and design-based activism are often heralded as providing solutions to capitalism’s negative effects. This dissertation is concerned with how contemporary architectural design naturalizes the organization of racial capitalist labor as it purports to solve ills created by it. It brings a performance studies lens to bear on architecture to see how architecture is made to work under racial capitalism, examining how design is employed to manage surplus labor populations. Reading architectural design through the lens of performance is to understand that architecture is not a passive background but an active agent that compels the body both to labor and to rest. This project looks at how architecture presents acts of labor and consumption as performative scenes that spectators read and interpret as indicators of the health of capitalism. In these instances, architectural design becomes the tool to create better urban streetscapes and, thus, seemingly better forms of racial capitalism. Applying the theories of performance to design and architecture is to call our attention, at times, to the dissonance between the narratives that architecture stages and the labor and resources required to produce these narratives. In essence, how an architectural scene appears is often in opposition to how this image is produced. For example, while a newly renovated train station may appear to be a sign of capitalism’s health, such urban scenes of beauty, cleanliness, and safety are based on capitalism’s ability to aggregate its wealth into particular urban spaces at the expense of other places. Bringing together architectural theory, critical theory, critical race theory, feminist theory, and performance studies, this study examines why design appears to be capable of humanizing capitalism and delivering a better future but consistently fails to do so. The first chapter charts how architecture contained and choreographed black life, through a comparative examination of the architecture of slave ships, mid-twentieth-century public housing high rises, and urban streetscapes. The second chapter examines how tiny house designs are being championed as a new form of affordable housing in an era when wage labor for many no longer secures access to homeownership. The last chapter takes readers on a trip to three Airbnb locations: Airbnb’s San Francisco headquarters, backstage with a live-in Airbnb host, and to an Airbnb apartment in Tokyo to show how Airbnb uses performance and design to frame its commodity of home sharing as providing a community-oriented, economically independent form of work in a time of increasing automation and job loss. This dissertation throughout will make the case that the tenets of racial capitalist production, while not (always) directly referenced or intended by designers, politicians, or patrons, are reproduced within design practices and often within its theories. Since the system of capitalist labor is the premise and limit through which architectural designs emerge, changes in the form of the built environment can alter, at best, the phenomenological experience of racial capitalism’s landscapes, not correct the economic constraints that constitute them. It argues that we must grasp the performative nature of architecture if we are ever to understand how its “solutions” prevent us from demanding an alternative to racial capitalism.

Creator

• Sandoval, Ashlie Andrea

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-qyn3-6a29

Subject

• Labor relations
• Architecture
• American studies

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:14730
• etdadmin_upload_672474

Keyword

• Tiny Houses
• Racial Capitalism
• Labor
• Architecture
• Performance Studies
• Airbnb

Date created

• 2019-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright