Figure 5 - available via license: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Content may be subject to copyright.
Source publication
The beautiful city of Charleston, South Carolina, was built by enslaved Africans, and the painful historical connections between classical architecture and slavery have encouraged some critics to see classicism as racist. Contemporary black artist Jonathan Green, however, proposed a new way of viewing Charleston’s buildings: as a testament to black...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... Kush, and Ethiopia, but they knew that connections between them and the Mediterranean had been sustained since antiquity. By Rayfield's day, such ties were discussed using, among other bodies of evidence, architecture. As early as 1814, the English traveler Henry Salt (1780-1827) published praise of a 400 AD monolithic obelisk in Axum, Ethiopia (Fig. 5), as a "highly wrought and very magnificent work of art. " His admiration only grew when he "compared the design… with many of Egyptian, Grecian and Roman structure," as he declared it "as the most admirable and perfect monument of its time," assuming, with a hint of prejudice, that Greek architects had designed it (Salt 1816: 313). In ...
Context 2
... colonizers in the early 1900s. This building is well known, but there are many other less studied structures, some of them newly built, that speak the tectonic language of classicism in similar vernacular terms. The ca. 1995 mosque of Nangoyo, for example, contains an orderly grid of great square columns with sculpted capitals supporting arcades (Fig. 15). Thick beads of plaster emphasize round arches, with narrow apertures punctuating their spandrels, adding an upper register to this rhythmic, human-scaled space, which is crowned by a simple but well-proportioned cornice. Half-circle windows, like those of Roman baths, shower light along every row; these windows are framed on the ...
Context 3
... example of African traditional design with classical features: the akrafokonmu, or "soul washer's badge," which embodied the light and warmth of the life-giving sun. There is a great deal of variety in these objects, but they always exhibit radial symmetry and usually offer botanical forms, with cast or hammered foliage, petals, and rosettes (Fig. ...
