Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Erasure by Design: Racial Protocols of Displacement, Demolition, and Extraction

Erasure by Design: Racial Protocols of Displacement, Demolition, and Extraction

McEwen, V. Mitch

Paperback

Black American StudiesGeneral Architecture

ISBN10: 1941332854
ISBN13: 9781941332856
Publisher: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City
Published: Mar 31 2026
Pages: 417
Weight: 1.05
Height: 1.40 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.20
Language: English

How has erasure formed the space around us? How do we come to know it, so that we can design differently? Erasure by Design tracks the methods, terms, and racial protocols that continue to do the work of displacement, demolition, and extraction into the present day.

This book travels back and forth in time through scenes of erasure at three primary locations--Southwest, Washington DC (displacement); North St Louis (demolition), and South Los Angeles (extraction). Erasure by Design shares first person narratives of growing up in the wake of slum clearance--that is, urban renewal--in Southwest, Washington DC, while assembling archival references that narrate racialized erasure and its legal and spatial precedents. It traces a military complex under construction, where St Louis's cleared grounds and blacked out sites are also defined by satellites, body experiments, explosions, and emptiness. It moves through specific grounds in Los Angeles--dirt walls, hills, oil fields, gas lines, and houses in the forest--to trace how those grounds matter and how their holding intersects with maps that plan erasure, inhabitation, and extraction.

Between these three scenes, Erasure by Design takes on the aesthetics of bad design and good design, as innovated within the intellectual domain of modern architecture at the Museum of Modern Art and Philip Johnson's Glass House. Through a curated cockroach at MoMA--and even the humor, rumors, and gossip about this roach--Erasure by Design reads the role that the museum invents for exhibiting, curating, and re-shaping policy, worldview, and the built environment, as well as how protocols of erasure, demolition, and design conscript the modern built environment into the policing of human and subhuman. In this nuanced reading, the Glass House and its twin, the Brick House, stage a haunting allegory of total violence.

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