Residential Forms or Thinking Race and Homeownership as a Humanist
Adrienne Brown, University of Chicago
Adrienne Brown is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Race and Real Estate (co-edited with Valerie Smith, Oxford UP) and The Black Skyscraper: Modern Architecture and the Shape of Race and Writing (Johns Hopkins UP, 2017).
“I did my undergraduate degree at the University of Maryland. I knew I couldn’t really be an architect—I didn’t have depth perception—but one of my best friends in college was in architecture school. She was in the studio all the time, so I ended up spending a lot of time in that space and just got really interested in this work that architects-in-training were doing that seemed so different from the humanities and English. I had this vague interest in the built environment at that point, and I had written my senior thesis on the suburbs. I grew up in suburban Maryland, so I was really interested in the suburbs as a site of racial construction.”
A Guy Lombardo Lecture, as part of "FAULT", Architecture Program Public Event Series | Spring 2021