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Greatness

Pascale Sablan, CEO of Adjaye Associates’ New York studio, did a Google search for the term “great architect.” The results overwhelmingly favoured white men. When she visited Google headquarters in 2019, she learned why: Not enough online sources refer to women or BIPOC designers as “great.” It’s not that those designers don’t exist or that they aren’t considered great, it’s that the SEO algorithm was stacked against them. With this book, Sablan aims to break this cycle of erasure that has rendered diverse practitioners (not just Black, but also women and other POC) largely invisible in the architectural canon. In doing so, she interrogates the history many have come to recognize as truth, seeking to redefine what greatness means by considering new metrics to define good architecture.

The book groups the 47 featured designers by typology, showcasing work across scales from urban planning to cultural and institutional buildings and residential projects. Each chapter is fronted by a short essay that demonstrates its respective typology’s capacity for cultural preservation and healing — while also acknowledging how they have historically contributed to systemic inequalities. The project case studies that follow illustrate these principles in practice. One highlight: Amanda Fuller’s Freedom River project — a mobile museum that pays homage to the heritage and resilience of Princeville, the oldest town chartered by freed slaves in the US.

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Crafted Kinship

In exploring how her Caribbean heritage informed her sense of identity and creative practice, multidisciplinary artist and textile designer Malene Barnett was inspired to write this book. Her MFA research at Temple University guided her to seek out other Caribbean makers on a similar self-exploratory journey. Here, she has gathered interviews with sixty multidisciplinary creators for whom the Caribbean is “the source of their work, identities and spiritual belonging.” Practitioners from Trinidadian product designer Marlon Darbeau to Toronto’s SOCA (helmed by Tura Cousins-Wilson and Shane Laptiste) are asked a series of common questions, touching on how they got into design, challenges they have encountered in practice, how their work connects to Caribbean culture and finding community in the diaspora. Several themes emerge, whether reckoning with colonial histories or embracing the land, materiality or simply joy. These common threads, which Barnett refers to as Threads of Kinship, tie the featured works together as uniquely Caribbean.

Throughout the book, prominent scholars, collectors and advocates also weigh in on the state of Caribbean art and design. In her introduction, for instance, Barnett explores the connection between art and design, which have been separated in Western societies. “Many of us expressly reject this means of segregating the terms themselves — the meanings and value systems implicitly in words like art, design and craft,” she explains. Intended to serve as an archival record, this book not only demonstrates how contemporary designers are carrying forward ancestral traditions, it will undoubtedly be an invaluable resource in highlighting the immense talent that exists in the Caribbean and the diaspora for decades to come.

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Civil Sights

A “nexus of Black culture and commerce,” Atlanta’s Sweet Auburn district served as a backdrop to some of the most important moments of the Civil Rights Movement. But despite being designated a National Historic Landmark in 1976, years of disinvestment left the neighbourhood in peril. Since then, it has lost 47 per cent of its historic buildings, unravelling the fabric of its architectural history. Developer Gene Kansas has made it his mission to change that. This guide is just one aspect of his work as a preservationist, exploring not only the buildings and streets of Sweet Auburn but also the stories of the people who inhabited them — including Jacqueline Jones Royster, an American academic who spent much of her childhood there (and wrote the Afterword, highlighting some of her favourite places and memories of them).

Atlanta Daily World building

Armed with a map of the Atlanta Streetcar, Civil Sights leads readers on an in-depth tour of historic sites from the Queen Anne-style birth home of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to the Cox Brothers Funeral Home and the Atlanta Daily World Building — the home of the longest continuously operating African American daily publication  — which Kansas, as a developer, had a hand in preserving through its adaptive reuse into modern residences. With each chapter, the narratives of these buildings unfold, interwoven with sketchbook illustrations by architect Clay Kiningham. But the theme of preservation goes beyond storytelling and immortalizing the built environment through images: it is integral to the book’s design. Even the key typeface (Martin, designed by Tré Seals, founder of Vocal Type) embodies this ethos, inspired by signage from the Memphis Sanitation Strike of 1968, which took place the night before King’s assassination.

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Black Architects & Designers Digest

PHOTO: Keren Dillard

Of course, the study of Black architecture and design history should not be confined to the month of February alone. For further reading, consider subscribing to the Black Architecture & Designers Digest, a monthly newsletter recently launched by AZURE contributor Keren Dillard. Its manifesto is to foreground the experiences of Black designers globally, especially women and feminists, give a voice to the marginalized, and promote the Black radical tradition of activism.

In January, the inaugural edition explored the need for intersectionality in architecture. In it, Dillard cites a sobering statistic: only two per cent of licensed architects in the United States are Black, a mere fraction of which are Black women. Intersectionality, she argues, can help us design a more equitable built environment. “The fight against the idea that architecture is inherently political, whether as an object in space or as a discipline in practice, seems always to be justified by some form of abstraction,” she writes. “Dismissals like “a building can’t be racist” don’t seem to measure up when confronted with phrases such as a “virgin landscape,” a “found object,” or “tabula rasa,” and the colonial implication of imposing oneself onto something without the background or history of the thing.”

Launching February 19, the upcoming newsletter will draw on the example of Vitruvius, unpacking the role of the architect as politician and their social responsibilities to uphold civil rights.