CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/27/2021

'Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America' opens at MoMA

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."