sort-of-related to library architecture lecture

Just as an aside from what we talked about on this blog about architecture and the sense of welcoming space for all people, I saw that there's going to be an art lecture on "Architecture and the Politics of Race" by Martin Berger of UC-Santa Cruz, on Thursday, March 2 at 6 p.m. in the Chazen Museum, Room L140. Seen as how we'll be talking about race in libraries in the coming weeks, it might be relavent to our discussion. The full blurb is below:

Berger's work is concerned with the ways in which whiteness is reinforced in various visual mediums, including historical landscape photography and architectural forms. Berger arrives in Madison soon after the publication of his new book: Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, November 2005). Berger's lecture will specifically address the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1871-6), built by George Hewitt and Frank Furness: that it drew from a range of design elements that period audiences consciously understood to be the products of racially inferior peoples principally Jews, but also Muslims, and Italian Catholics), yet was accepted by Protestant European-American audiences as the epitome of whites' highest cultural aspirations. Berger will illustrate how forms originally designed by so-called inferior peoples were recombined by European-Americans to express the character of an art academy that was popularly conceived as being modern, American, and uniquely white.