Braham, William W.

Bio Sketch

William W. Braham, PhD, FAIA, is Andrew Gordon Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has served as Department Chair of Architecture and Chair of the Faculty Senate, and directs the Master of Environmental Building Design and the Center for Environmental Building + Design. Trained as an engineer (BSE, Princeton) and as an architect (MArch and PhD, Penn), he works across architectural theory, building technologies, and energy and design — writing as both academic and architect, as the Intimus editors note of the essay ingested here. He is the co-editor of Rethinking Technology: A Reader in Architectural Theory (Routledge, 2007) and editor of Architecture and Energy: Performance and Style (Routledge, 2014). His essay "A Wall of Books: The Gender of Natural Colors in Modern Architecture" (Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 53, no. 1, 1999) is his principal contribution to this wiki.

Key Works

• *A Wall of Books: The Gender of Natural Colors in Modern Architecture* (1999) — the genealogy of colour in modern architecture: the natural/applied opposition as gendered decorative convention and the boundary between architecture and interior design, tested through the display of books; Journal of Architectural Education 53:1, reprinted in Intimus (2006).
• Rethinking Technology: A Reader in Architectural Theory (2007) — co-edited with Jonathan A. Hale (Routledge)
• Architecture and Energy: Performance and Style (2014) — edited volume on energy and architectural style (Routledge)

Key Concepts

Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:

• natural-finishes — the natural/applied opposition as flexible category, disciplinary boundary, and gendered convention
• wall-of-books — books as decorative convention, objet-type, and identity negotiation
• law-of-cladding — Loos's principle framed as the natural/neutral palette's authenticity-pursuit
• core-form-and-art-form — the German aesthetic distinction gendered into "common sense"
• Gender and the Interior — the profession split as gendered; taste as the feared feminine other
• Taste — color selection as exercise of taste; the fear of the arts of convention

Relevance to the Core Research

Braham supplies the wiki's missing link between the colour-theory sources (batchelor-david's chromophobia) and the interior-design theory cluster: where Batchelor diagnoses the whiteness myth from art theory and Baudrillard from the sociology of the object, Braham shows the myth in operational form — Hitchcock and Johnson's concession that white or off-white stucco, "even where it is obtained with paint, is felt to constitute the natural color" — and traces its social work: the natural/applied opposition as the gendered, class-marked boundary between architecture and interior design. His essay gives the wiki's ornament-vs-purity and interior-design-vs-architecture debates their palette-level analysis, and his method — decorative conventions read through books, manuals, and anecdotes, requiring "narrative forms for their exploration" — is a model for the everyday-interior research: the wall of books as the ordinary interior's most legible compromise between the decorative urge to colour and the defensive exclusion of decoration.

Source Support

Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:

• A Wall of Books (1999/2006) — excerpt from the Journal of Architectural Education essay (53:1, September 1999, pp. 4–13), reprinted in Intimus: Interior Design Theory Reader (eds. Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston, Wiley, 2006, pp. 56–64).