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White Papers Black Marks

© Nichel Anderson

Title: White Papers Black Marks
Author: Lesley Naa Norle Lokko
Data: University of Minnesota Press, 384 pages, $24.95,
ISBN: 0-8166-3777-6


"Creation is of the beholder that wishes to bring forth the art of teaching, learning, and beauty."

Lokko has brought together several contributors who provided exceptional knowledge in their field of study to produce White Papers Black Marks. Each contributor provided essays relating to themes ranging from the Victorian Attitudes to Racial Hierarchy, Black Spatial Identity, Apartheid Urban Development, Aboriginal identity, and the subsequent formal development of educational space, drawing, to the racially polarized profession of architecture in South Africa.

Persuasive, informative, and passionate is what comes to mind after reading this phenomenal exploration on architecture. Edited by Lesley Naa Norle Lokko, Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago, White Papers Black Marks illustrates an outstanding workmanship and study of the relationship between two highly symbolic and over-worked terms "race" and "architecture".

White Papers Black Marks poses three primary questions to her contributors:

1. What importance does "race" have as any kind of category in the study of architecture and the shaping of the built environment?

2. In making, using, and studying architecture, does "race" matter?

3. Should it?

White Paper Black Marks also asks five fundamental questions posed from the primary ones:

1. What is "race"?

2. What is architecture?

3. Why these two terms?

4. Why now?

5. Where and how does one begin?

In White Papers Black Marks a great effort is made to reflect on the less attentive racial identity of either maker or user and the discipline of mythical identity of the white, male and "universal" architect. Of this examination for mapping this relationship, White Papers Black Marks, succeeds in providing the notion of different figures in the shaping of the built environment.

With terms of architecture design and study - site, space, form, architect, and user are from the historical task of adapting space to an existing socioeconomic structure. The contents in the book is presented by scale:

The scale of the urban 1:125,000 to the "middle" scale of 1:1,250, the exile, "in between-ness" and finally to 1:1, the scale of detail, the intimate, and the personal.

In regards to the scale of urban 1:125,000, Dr. N. Ola Uduku's essay " The Colonial Face of Educational Space" examines the links of Victorian Attitudes to Racial Hierarchy from her extensive research in Nigeria, West African and Cape Province, and South Africa. Her analysis partakes of the relationship of built form to the practice of education in the "colonies".