Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America

(Paperback)

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Description

During the Museum of Modern Art's 90-year history, African American architects and designers have had little to no purchase in its permanent collection and exhibition histories, reflective of larger trends in museum and architectural discourses at large. The exclusion of Black architects and designers from the academic imagination have largely been waylaid in favor of dominant formalist and stylistic concerns. This book, conceived as a field guide to accompany the exhibition at MoMA, examines how contemporary architecture may address the varied contexts of systemic anti-Black racism that have fostered violent histories of discrimination and injustice in the United States. The invited contributors reimagine the legacies of race-based dispossession in ten American cities and how individuals and communities across the United States have mobilized Black cultural spaces, forms, and practices as sites of imagination, liberation, resistance, and refusal. The catalogue will feature a portfolio of new photographs by artist David Hartt.

Reviews

Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America,"... explore[s] the ways space and land are apportioned and navigated. Using a combination of analog and digital collage, the [book] depicts dystopian [cities] overtaken by climate change and explores "vanishing urban ephemera and architecture""...succumbing to gentrification.--Editors "Surface"
Supplements [the exhibit's] propositions with texts by prominent scholars and critics that give the project an open feel and cross-disciplinary weave.--Siddhartha Mitter "New York Times"
Reconstructions asks not for full comprehension or memorization, but puts forth the question of what it would take to move beyond presumptions that these architectural interventions are too speculative or verging on the fantastical[...] Reconstructions present these possible futures not as provisional but rather as vital concerns worth pondering.--Sinclair Spratley "Hyperallergic"
Reconstructions proposes a wild imagining in order to push the viewer to engage with an expanded history of architecture. But it does not quite offer enough remove from that history to allow the viewer to envision another world. However, in its many cartographic gestures, a savvy audience may find the map to one.--Jess Myers "Architect's Newspaper"
The [book], which takes its name from a W.E.B. Du Bois essay about reconstruction in America, situate[s] itself as a continuation in the larger project of liberation for Black people.--Diana Budds "Curbed"
If architecture can be a "vehicle of liberation and joy," as the statement claims, then the work in [this book] soars especially when it sets aside the instrumental potential of architecture in favor of speculative investigations of Black presents, pasts, and futures.--Jay Cephas "Artforum"
Providing this new venue for Black architects is filling a hole, but it's also opening up the potential for new forms of architecture and design thinking that may not otherwise have emerged.--Nate Berg "Fast Company"
Though it may be invisible to some, racial segregation, separation, and violence form the framework of the American built environment, and Reconstructions unveils it and then casts it aside to make room for more just and poetic alternatives.--Stephanie Rogers "Dornob"
All of these projects reimagine architecture from the perspective of Black people, a mission of the collective -- and a first for the Modern. [...] Which is to say, the Modern itself partly necessitated the Black Reconstruction Collective. The group addresses the bigger question: How can Blackness construct America--Michael Kimmelman "New York Times"
Examines the intersections of architecture, Blackness and anti-Black racism, as well as contemporary architecture in the context of how systemic racism has fostered violent histories of discrimination and injustice in the U.S.--Kelly Beall "Design Milk"
Unearths the ways in which systemic racism has shaped architecture and how an unexamined whiteness has served as a default in the field. More important, the exhibition -- and its very worthwhile catalog -- presents myriad architectural possibilities framed by the Black experience.--Carolina Miranda "Los Angeles Times"
[Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America] look[s] at contemporary architecture and its role in the systemic racism that has facilitated discrimination and injustice in the U.S. A system that has informed and continues to inform the design of American cities through public policies, municipal planning, and architecture that has specifically impacted the Black community.--Sean Joyner "Archinect"
Heavy hitters of contemporary critical race discourse... An invitation to transform.--Jess Myers "Architect's Newspaper"
Posing the thought-provoking question, "How does race structure America's cities" this [book] focuses on the intersection of architecture, design, and Black space and the history of injustice in the built environment. Exercises in reinvention, re-imagination and liberation, 10 case studies addressing structural and anti-Black racism are on view.--Victoria Valentine "Culture Type"
The Black Reconstruction Collective (BRC) is committed to multi-scalar and multi-disciplinary work dedicated to dismantling systemic white supremacy and hegemonic whiteness within art, design, and academia.The BRC provides funding, design, and intellectual support to the ongoing and incomplete project of emancipation for the African Diaspora.-- "PIN-UP"
Space, land, the ways each are apportioned and navigated--these are the central concerns of "Reconstructions," which includes multidisciplinary work by 10 Black talents, among them artist Amanda Williams and AD100 landscape architect Walter Hood, as well as photography created by David Hartt in response... "It is architecture that is not specifically about buildings, but about how the architecture of certain spaces is emblematic of anti-Black racism."--Camille Okhio "Architectural Digest"
Whether mapping sites of non-violent protests or grappling with the architectural history of African diaspora communities, "Reconstructions: Blackness in America" looks to continue the essential work of unpacking systemic racism in the built environment. And, in the process, imaging a more just and inclusive path forward.--Evan Pavka "AZURE"

Author Bio

Sean Anderson is Associate Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Mabel O. Wilson is the Nancy and George Rupp Professor in Architecture at Columbia University.