CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/10/2021

'In Search of African American Space' redresses racism in our built and social spaces

Featured spreads are from In Search of African American Space: Redressing Racism, the recent release from Lars Müller Publishers. A 256-page anthology drawing on architecture, performance art, history and visual theory, this well illustrated volume explores the creative relationship between the African diaspora and social space in America. "If the African American experience emerges from the structure of slavery," editor Jeffrey Hogrefe asks in his Introduction, "how does architecture speak to that experience, and how can the African American person respond to such an architecture that traditionally serves to fortify the state? This is a question that we ask in the face of escalating state violence toward Black people, which is occurring at the same time as the emergence of a Black aesthetics that has repositioned blackness as central to a politics of transformation… For the most part, architecture has been designed to regulate, survey, punish, and erase the Black person, which is why, until recently, the African American experience of space has remained largely outside of the study and practice of architecture. This is remarkable, considering that slavery, a key material practice in the European colonization of the western hemisphere, was carried out in the carceral spaces of the slave ship, slave plantation cabin and urban 'slum/ghetto.' From these architectural typologies, African Americans have self-fashioned other uses and meanings by appropriating space for resistance through everyday practices."