Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America
Edited with text by Sean Anderson and Mabel O. Wilson. Preface by Robin D. G. Kelley. Text by Emanuel Admassu, Germane Barnes, Adrienne Brown, Sekou Cooke, Milton S. F. Curry, J. Yolande Daniels, Charles L. Davis II, Felecia Davis, Arièle Dionne-Krosnick, Aruna D’Souza, Ifeoma Ebo, Tonya M. Foster, Mario Gooden, Dianne Harris, Walter J. Hood, Olalekan Jeyifous, V. Mitch McEwen, Justin Garrett Moore, David Naguib Pellow, Jennifer Newsom, Audrey Petty, Christina Sharpe, Carla Shedd, Roberta Washington, Michelle Joan Wilkinson, Amanda Williams. Photographic portfolio by David Hartt.
How American architecture can address systemic anti-Black racism: a creative challenge in 10 case studies
Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America is an urgent call for architects to accept the challenge of reconceiving and reconstructing our built environment rather than continue giving shape to buildings, infrastructure and urban plans that have, for generations, embodied and sustained anti-Black racism in the United States.
The architects, designers, artists and writers who were invited to contribute to this book—and to the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art for which it serves as a “field guide”—reimagine the legacies of race-based dispossession in 10 American cities (Atlanta; Brooklyn, New York; Kinloch, Missouri; Los Angeles; Miami; Nashville; New Orleans; Oakland; Pittsburgh; and Syracuse) and celebrate the ways individuals and communities across the country have mobilized Black cultural spaces, forms and practices as sites of imagination, liberation, resistance, care and refusal.
A broad range of essays by the curators and prominent scholars from diverse fields, as well as a portfolio of new photographs by the artist David Hartt, complement this volume’s richly illustrated presentations of the architectural projects at the heart of MoMA’s groundbreaking exhibition.
A shotgun house in the Bayou Saint John neighborhood of New Orleans damaged by Hurricane Katrina, 2006. Photo by Carlos Froggy May (Infrogmation).
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
AZURE
Evan Pavka
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.
Architectural Digest
Camille Okhio
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.”
Surface
Editors
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.
Culture Type
Victoria Valentine
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.
PIN-UP
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.
Archinect
Sean Joyner
[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.
Architect's Newspaper
Jess Myers
Heavy hitters of contemporary critical race discourse... An invitation to transform.
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Felicia Davis's 2020 "Fabricating Networks Quilt" (detail: scenes from Pittsburgh) is reproduced from Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America, published to accompany the landmark exhibition opening at MoMA this weekend. A collection of 10 case studies on how American architecture can address systemic anti-Black racism, this is essential reading for Black History Month and beyond. "A conjoining of scales, historical research, and projective interventions transcends the limits of architecture to assert one's contribution toward a shared history of belonging and a recuperation of humanity," editors Sean Anderson and Mabel O. Wilson conclude in their Introduction. "In 2020, the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic further reified the boundaries inscribed on redlining maps between those who live and those who die, underscoring the precarity of America's social contract. Returning to Du Bois, who writes that the most significant problem of the twentieth century was the 'color line,' what might be said of those traces of the self-governing Black communities of Mound Bayou in Mississippi, Nicodemus in Kansas, Eatonville in Florida, Allensworth in California, and Seneca Village in New York City? We read these place-names and conjure the lives that inhabited the porches and kitchenettes, juke joints and schoolrooms, law offices and churches beyond the line, not because of it. And through these names we are able to retrace histories that speak to human cruelty, unspeakable depredation, and imperial misadventure, while also securing—with unlimited promise—the prospect to think about, design, and build spaces of resistance and refusal, imagination and liberation." continue to blog
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FORMAT: Pbk, 8 x 10 in. / 176 pgs / 185 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $45.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $63 ISBN: 9781633451148 PUBLISHER: The Museum of Modern Art, New York AVAILABLE: 3/2/2021 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: NA ONLY
Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America
How American architecture can address systemic anti-Black racism: a creative challenge in 10 case studies
Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Edited with text by Sean Anderson and Mabel O. Wilson. Preface by Robin D. G. Kelley. Text by Emanuel Admassu, Germane Barnes, Adrienne Brown, Sekou Cooke, Milton S. F. Curry, J. Yolande Daniels, Charles L. Davis II, Felecia Davis, Arièle Dionne-Krosnick, Aruna D’Souza, Ifeoma Ebo, Tonya M. Foster, Mario Gooden, Dianne Harris, Walter J. Hood, Olalekan Jeyifous, V. Mitch McEwen, Justin Garrett Moore, David Naguib Pellow, Jennifer Newsom, Audrey Petty, Christina Sharpe, Carla Shedd, Roberta Washington, Michelle Joan Wilkinson, Amanda Williams. Photographic portfolio by David Hartt.
Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America is an urgent call for architects to accept the challenge of reconceiving and reconstructing our built environment rather than continue giving shape to buildings, infrastructure and urban plans that have, for generations, embodied and sustained anti-Black racism in the United States.
The architects, designers, artists and writers who were invited to contribute to this book—and to the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art for which it serves as a “field guide”—reimagine the legacies of race-based dispossession in 10 American cities (Atlanta; Brooklyn, New York; Kinloch, Missouri; Los Angeles; Miami; Nashville; New Orleans; Oakland; Pittsburgh; and Syracuse) and celebrate the ways individuals and communities across the country have mobilized Black cultural spaces, forms and practices as sites of imagination, liberation, resistance, care and refusal.
A broad range of essays by the curators and prominent scholars from diverse fields, as well as a portfolio of new photographs by the artist David Hartt, complement this volume’s richly illustrated presentations of the architectural projects at the heart of MoMA’s groundbreaking exhibition.
