Plantation Architecture

In general, plantation architecture was designed both to hide slaves and the work of slaves from the owners of the plantation and their guests as well as to control them. This was something of a balancing act, for any time one isolates a group of people one also liberates them to some extent. Anyone who has worked in an office where the boss cannot see one at all times understands this. Thus the desire to have slaves and slave labor hidden in at least some measure from the white members of the household was arguably psychologically (and culturally) highly important if slave-owners were willing to cede even a small measure of their power over slaves.

This desire to hide the work of slaves f

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he oak and other hardwoods of the main homes, wood that was often shipped from the North or even from Europe. The distinction because the beautiful, imported, refined and long-lasting woods with the locally manufactured, low-quality and temperature insensitive brick helped to symbolize and reify the differences between black slaves and white masters. Determining how the physical design of plantations helped to reinforce the power of white masters over their slaves in a particular situation is sometimes difficult slave quarters were generally built of relatively flimsy materials and where they were not torn down have generally simply fallen apart. While a number of the main plantation homes themselves have survived, most of their accompanying buildings have not. The result of this fact is that anyone making an architectural survey of the South today would come away with a distorted view of the ways in which the constructed space of plantation life functioned when it was intact: The little outbuildings and small houses around big, antebellum houses have been consistently lost throughout the 20th century as community after community has madly scrambled to save the big houses. The entire concept of the surroundings, or context, of
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Appropriation Space, North Europe, White House, Nature Difference, Thomas Jefferson, Disguising Nature, European Asian, Historical Archaeology, , Tennessean April, main house, slave quarters, white masters, physical space, plantation architecture, main plantation, space plantation, plantation homes, power slaves, land buildings,
Approximate Word count = 1674
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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