Erasure by Design traces the racial protocols embedded in architectural and urban practice — moving between Washington DC, North St Louis, and South Los Angeles to show how displacement, demolition, and extraction continue to structure the built environment today.
About This Book
What does erasure look like when it is systematic, spatial, and designed? V. Mitch McEwen answers this question not through abstraction but through specific sites and scenes: the cleared grounds of Southwest Washington DC, the blacked-out lots of North St Louis, and the oil fields, dirt walls, and forest houses of South Los Angeles. Moving across time and geography, the book connects first-person accounts of growing up in the wake of so-called urban renewal with archival research, legal history, and spatial analysis. It also turns to the aesthetics of modern architecture — examining the Museum of Modern Art, Philip Johnson's Glass House, and the racial politics encoded in institutions that curate what counts as good design. A work of critical urbanism and architectural theory for anyone willing to look at how the built environment has been conscripted into the policing of human life.
Key Features
- 417 pages of archival research, first-person narrative, spatial analysis, and architectural criticism
- Authored by V. Mitch McEwen
- Case studies across Southwest Washington DC (displacement), North St Louis (demolition), and South Los Angeles (extraction)
- Analysis of MoMA, Philip Johnson's Glass House, and the Brick House as sites of racial and aesthetic politics
- Published by Columbia Books on Architecture and the City
What You'll Discover
- How the legal and spatial precedents of slum clearance — rebranded as "urban renewal" — continue to operate in contemporary urban planning and design
- The relationship between military infrastructure, satellite technology, and the erasure of Black communities in St Louis
- How extractive logics shape landscape in South Los Angeles, from oil fields to mapped plans for future demolition and displacement
- The role that institutions such as MoMA play in shaping policy and worldview through curatorial aesthetics — and how the Glass House stages what McEwen reads as an allegory of total violence
About the Author
V. Mitch McEwen is the author of Erasure by Design, a work that draws on personal history, archival research, and spatial theory to interrogate the racial logics of the built environment. [Details available upon request]
Specifications
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 417
- Dimensions: 203mm x 133mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9781941332856
- Publisher: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Architects, urban designers, and researchers working at the intersection of race, policy, and the built environment; students of critical urbanism, architectural history, and spatial theory; readers engaged with the ongoing politics of urban renewal, displacement, and institutional power.