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07/07/2020 Statement and Resources on Race and Architecture - The Architectural League of New York

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Statement and Resources on Race and


Architecture
The murder of George Floyd by the police in Minneapolis—and the murders of Tony McDade, Ahmaud
Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and so many others—lays bare, yet again, the pervasive and enduring racism
that disfigures American society. 

Simultaneous with these deaths, systemic racist violence shows itself as part of all of the converging
crises of this moment: the coronavirus pandemic and its attendant economic collapse; climate
change; our ongoing “everyday” crises of police brutality, housing insecurity, lack of access to
healthcare, radically unequal and unjust education and criminal legal systems, and overarching
economic inequality. Each of these sources of oppression in American society has had and is having
massively disproportionate impacts on Black and brown Americans. 

Every system, every institution in American society, including the discipline of architecture, is
implicated. The built environment—our public, private, and civic spaces, and the ways we design,
construct, and inhabit them—reifies lopsided power relationships, economic inequality, and thwarted
opportunity. Through inadequately examined design, planning, and land-use decisions; through the
negligent or malevolent location of infrastructure, “renewal,” and noxious uses in poor and minority
neighborhoods; through embodying and failing to challenge the aggrandizement of Whiteness and the
depreciation of Blackness and all other cultures in aesthetic, technological, and historical norms and
values; through our inadequate commitment to helping provide the human right of adequate shelter
and other basic needs, we perpetuate the status quo and the unjust world it has created.

Dismantling and rebuilding these systems and practices—and the very structures of American society
—is not the work of a month or a year; it is work that must engage all of us, immediately, continuously,
for a lifetime.

We commit The Architectural League to ongoing action for change.

Paul Lewis, President, Rosalie Genevro, Executive Director, and the board and staff of The
Architectural League

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07/07/2020 Statement and Resources on Race and Architecture - The Architectural League of New York

Resources for reading and viewing on race and architecture, compiled


by Mario Gooden, with Mabel O. Wilson and the Architectural League
staff

Books and Articles

Aggregate Collaborative Black Lives Matter project


     Introduction: Black Lives Matter • Jonathan Massey, Meredith TenHoor with Sben Korsh
     Is “Justice Architecture” Just? • Raphael Sperry
     Schools and Prisons • Amber Wiley
     Fair Policing for the Fair City? • Researchers for Fair Policing
     Defensible Space and the Open Society • Joy Knoblauch
     Designing the Great Migration • James D. Graham and Michael Abrahamson
     The Invisible Brother with a Brick • Brian Goldstein
     Race, Planning, and the American City • Joseph Heathcott
     The Rights to the Suburb • Dianne Harris
     Air and the Politics of Resistance • Derek R. Ford
     Black Spaces Matter • Charles Davis II
     Toward a Black Formalism • Darell Fields
     Farming the Revolution • Mike Carriere, Antoine Carter, and Fidel Verdin
     Valuing Black Lives Means Changing Curricula • Héctor Tarrido-Picard

James Baldwin, “A Letter to My Nephew,” Progressive Magazine, 1962

James Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son” (Beacon Press, 1955)

Craig Barton, ed., Sites of Memory: Perspectives on Architecture and Race (Princeton Architectural
Press, 2001)

Adrienne Brown, The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race (Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2019)

David Brown and William Williams, Row: Trajectories Through the Shotgun House (Rice School of
Architecture, 2004)

Simone Brown, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Duke University Press, 2015)

Anne Anlin Cheng, Second Skin: Josephine Baker & the Modern Surface (Oxford University Press,
2010)

Irene Cheng, “Race and Architectural Geometry: Thomas Jefferson’s Octagons”  J19: The Journal of
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07/07/2020 Statement and Resources on Race and Architecture - The Architectural League of New York

Nineteenth-Century Americanists, Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2015

Irene Cheng, Charles L. David, Mabel O. Wilson, Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from
the Enlightenment to the Present (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020)

Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic, June 2014

Kimberly Dowdell, “Racism is built into US Cities,” Fast Company, June 2020
Darrell Wayne Fields,  Architecture in Black: Theory, Space and Appearance (Bloomsbury, 2015)

Thelma Golden, ed, Harlemworld: Metropolis as Metaphor (Studio Museum in Harlem, 2004)

Mario Gooden, “Appearances and (Non)Erasures: Mapping Confederate Monuments and the Racial
Conditionedness of Liberation,” Chicago Architecture Biennial, 2019

Mario Gooden, Dark Space: Architecture, Representation, Black Identity (Columbia Books on
Architecture and the City, 2016)

Nikole Hannah-Jones, “The 1619 Project,” The New York Times Magazine

Dianne Harris, Little White Houses (University of Minnesota Press, 2012)

Le Corbusier, “The Spirit Of The Machine, And Negroes In The USA,” When the Cathedrals Were
White,  pp. 158-164 (McGraw-Hill, 1964)

Bryan Lee, Jr., “America’s Cities Were Designed to Oppress,” Citylab, June 2020

Lesley Lokko, White Papers Black Marks: Architecture, Race, Culture (University of Minnesota Press,
2000)

Joanne Merwood-Salisbury, “Western Architecture: Regionalism and Race in the Inland Architect,”
Chicago Architecture Histories: Revisions and Alternatives, ed. by Charles Waldheim and Katerina
Ruedi Ray (University of Chicago Press, 2005)

Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Vintage, 1992)

Melvin Mitchell, The Crisis of the African-American Architect: Conflicting Cultures of Architecture and
(Black) Power (iUniverse, 2002)

Jimmy Robert, “Imitation of Lives” , interview with Mario Gooden, Performa 17 Magazine, November
2017

Sarah Schindler, “Architectural Exclusion: Discrimination and Segregation Through Physical Design of
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07/07/2020 Statement and Resources on Race and Architecture - The Architectural League of New York
Sarah Schindler, Architectural Exclusion: Discrimination and Segregation Through Physical Design of
the Built Environment,” Yale Law Journal, April 2015

Sharon Sutton, When Ivory Towers Were Black: A Story about Race in America’s Cities and Universities
(Fordham University Press, 2017)

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Race for Profit (University of North Carolina Press, 2019)

Huda Tayob and Suzanne Hall, “Race, Space and Architecture: towards an open-access curriculum”
(London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Sociology, 2019)

Dell Upton, What Can and Can’t be Said: Race Uplift and Monument Building in the Contemporary
South (University of California Press, 2015)

Paul A. Wellington, Black Built: History and Architecture in the Black Community (2019)

Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses (MIT Press, 1996)

Craig Wilkins, Diversity Among Architects: From Margin to Center (Routledge, 2016)

Craig L. Wilkins, The Aesthetics of Equity: Notes on Race, Space, Architecture, and Music (University
of Minnesota Press, 2007)

Mabel O. Wilson, Begin with the Past: Building the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African
American History and Culture

Mabel O. Wilson, “Black Bodies/White Cities: Le Corbusier in Harlem” ANY: Architecture New York,
No. 16, Whiteness: WHITE FORMS, FORMS OF WHITENESS, 1996

Mabel O. Wilson, “Carceral Architectures,” e-flux

Mabel O. Wilson, “Mine Not Yours,” e-flux

Mabel O. Wilson, Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (University of
California Press, 2012)

Mabel O. Wilson, “White by Design” Among Others: MoMA and Blackness,” ed. by Darby English and
Charlotte Barat (MoMA Publications, 2019)

Whitney M. Young, 1968 AIA Convention Speech

Films and Performances

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07/07/2020 Statement and Resources on Race and Architecture - The Architectural League of New York

13th (dir. Ava DuVernay, 2016) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krfcq5pF8u8&feature=youtu.be 

Black and Tan (dir. Dudley Murphy, 1929) –


https://criticalcommons.org/Members/kfortmueller/clips/black-and-tan-1929/view

Black Power Mixtape: 1967-1975 — Available to rent at Youtube, Google Play, iTunes

Do the Right Thing (dir. Spike Lee 1989) — Available to rent at Youtube, Google Play, iTunes

Eyes on The Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years 1954-1965 (dir. Henry Hampton, 1987) – Available to
purchase at PBS. All interviews from the series are available for free viewing and reading at the
Washington University of St. Louis Film and Media Archive. 

Fruitvale Station (dir. Ryan Coogler, 2013) — Available to rent at Youtube, Google Play, iTunes

I Am Not Your Negro (dir. Raoul Peck, 2016) — Available for free viewing at PBS until 6/21/20,
available to rent at Youtube, Google Play, iTunes

Imitations of Lives (performance by Jimmy Robert, 2017) –


https://pinupmagazine.org/articles/imitation-of-lives-performance-video-pinup-jimmy-robert 

I Wanna Be Ready, (Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, 2018) – https://www.youtube.com/watch?


v=J3eO7xD8gmo

Killer of Sheep (dir. Charles Burnett, 1978) – https://www.milestonefilms.com/products/killer-of-sheep

Modern Living: Villa Savoye (performance de Gerard & Kelly, 2019) - Leia um artigo da performance de
Alexander Gorlin e assista a um trecho aqui .

Selma (dir. Ava DuVernay, 2014) - Disponível para locação gratuita no YouTube, Google Play, iTunes
para o mês de junho

Os Panteras Negras: Vanguarda da Revolução (dir. Stanley Nelson, 2015) - Disponível para
visualização gratuita na PBS até 04/07/2020, disponível para locação no Youtube, Google Play, iTunes

Organizações

Design Justice Movement Design Justice exige


   

NOMA: Organização Nacional de Arquitetos Minoritários

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07/07/2020 Statement and Resources on Race and Architecture - The Architectural League of New York

ADPSR (Arquitetos / Designers / Planejadores de Responsabilidade Social)

Preto em Design

Mulheres negras em arquitetura

BlackSpace

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