ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Amos Rapoport’s explanations on the connection between culture and built form in the context of African American storefront churches in a central city Milwaukee neighborhood. This case study provides insight into the ways churches have emerged as an important space where marginalized groups shape their own designs for modes of worship, communion, and expressivity, disassociated from the dominant society. The chapter argues that it has been perpetual operations of racism (whether systemic or covert) faced by African Americans that have primarily shaped the social and architectural phenomenon of these storefront churches. Examining Rapoport’s work on culture as a primary determinant of built form, the chapter argues that an extension to this framework should include social, political, and economic forces as equally viable determinants of built form, as Rapoport has indeed alluded in his later work. The chapter provides a step forward in this direction: first, by discussing the unique case of storefront churches, a situation of ‘high criticality’, of a marginalized population within an oppressive socio-political structure, and of a ruptured cultural continuity; and second, by examining the social variables as determinants of built form, both at macro level (slavery, segregation, sanctified religion, the Great Migration, redlining, racial steering, confinement, and economic disinvestment) and micro level (the individualization of each storefront church in terms of the pastor’s outlook and the congregants’ needs). In summary, we advocate that examining situations of ‘high criticality’ through specific social variables as macro- and micro-level determinants of built form facilitates further understandings of the way built environments are shaped and provides a direction for larger cultural determinants to be studied.
