“How are the spatial experiences of community embodied today?” This question is at the heart of architect Shane Laptiste’s work. Through his award-winning practice SOCA, or the Studio of Contemporary Architecture, Laptiste works alongside co-founder Tura Cousins Wilson to design spaces that tell the stories of Black communities in a contemporary context. These narratives have often been excluded from the architectural canon: When Laptiste first enrolled at the McGill School of Architecture, he was one of few Black students and rarely, if ever, saw his culture celebrated in the profession. On February 6, Laptiste (now a studio instructor) delivered the below address at McGill University in honour of Black History Month, connecting his personal history as a member of the Caribbean diaspora to his work in architecture — and demonstrating just how far the field has come.

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When I was asked to present, I considered a range of topics related to Black identity and architecture — a decolonial approach to architecture, reconsidering the way that architecture is practiced, the way that buildings are constructed, the under representation of Black professionals in architecture in North America, considerations of space and aesthetics regarding Black culture and identity in the built environment, different approaches to architecture considerate of present and future impacts to diverse communities. And I decided to not choose anything and just go with a bit of everything. I’ll start with the context of where I’m presenting now, and most of the stories will actually be in this immediate area. This is a rendering of an early project that incorporates some work of my uncle, who’s right here.

I want to start with a family story. I’m going to begin with my great-grandmother who, in 1922, sailed from Grenada, landing in St John, New Brunswick, on her way to her destination in Montreal. She came to Montreal as a domestic worker, leaving behind my one-year-old grandfather and she spent nearly five decades in Montreal living in a range of housing, most mostly adjacent to the St. Antoine neighbourhood now known as Little Burgundy. A largely Black area, Little Burgundy was a convenient neighbourhood for Black rail workers to settle, being sandwiched between the Canadian Pacific and Canadian National rail lines, within blocks of their Eastern passenger terminals. Through mostly unwritten rules, it was also the one area that as a single Black woman she would have been able to obtain housing in Montreal. She worked for a family who had a house in Westmount and a summer house in Pointe-Claire, at times when opportunities for employment for Black women were limited, both here and in the Caribbean. From research from my uncle, that’s one of the places where she lived, just adjacent to Windsor station. Her presence here supported her sister and subsequent generations to settle in Montreal, carving out new spaces and building community. In my family, for example, I have three generations before me who lived here, and my generation is the first to be born here.

I want to highlight the interconnection between Canada and the Caribbean, and the ways in which it has informed the considerations of space and the built environment in both regions of the continent. This personal history informs my exploration of Black space in Montreal, its past, present and future.

So, how does the evolving nature of Montreal’s Black community shape the city’s spatial dynamics? How are the spatial experiences of community embodied today? The Black community in Montreal was incredibly visible in certain spaces in the first half of the 20th century. This visibility, though, occurred primarily in three spaces — in wealthy domestic spaces, in the St Antoine ward or Little Burgundy, and on the train. Outside of these spaces, the Black community was less visible, though still present, and I’ll be exploring the traces that Montreal’s Black communities have established on the landscape in the past, present and future, and how these narratives are connected to broader discourse around Black space and architecture. I’ll also explore Black space, representation and architecture through historical and contemporary examples. My work explores a narrative approach to architecture rooted in Black communities, acknowledging lived realities to create new environments for collective thriving.

Many people have asked how I became interested in architecture. My journey actually started right around the corner. I was born just north of here at the former Royal Victoria Hospital, and as an enthusiastic Lego builder, I became aware of architecture when I was in elementary school after seeing a Black architect on TV. I was inspired to become an architect and enrolled at McGill School of Architecture. Being one of the few Black students, I encountered a certain invisibility of Black agency in the shaping of space, as well as a lack of recognition of the architecture of Black cultures and communities, historically and into the present — and not only Black communities, also many communities from the global South, Indigenous communities — not represented in what is considered the canon of architecture. I graduated and not long after, I began my career in the profession in Edmonton, where I became a licensed architect in Alberta.

I’m currently based in Toronto where I lead my own architecture practice, Studio of Contemporary Architecture, or SOCA. My studio co-founder Tura Cousins Wilson and I independently started design practices in the summer of 2018, and within a couple of years joined forces. Since that time, we’ve collaborated on numerous projects for municipalities, for homes, community spaces, community organizations, arts institutions, and especially, we’ve had opportunity to work with a lot of Black community organizations in Toronto, Southern Ontario, Michigan and here in Montreal.

Architecture has often been used both as a tool of oppression and also as a tool of empowerment. In exploring Black space and visual culture, we not only use physical spaces to inform our work, we also use stories, histories, narratives, but also are informed by different materials from the African diaspora like materials and fabrics and artwork and craft, and artists and music and culture and sculpture, and also architecture. We’re informed by historical works of architecture from the African diaspora, more contemporary works as well as more recent projects.

I’m sharing this quote from American architect Sekou Cooke around space and the way that Black communities have appropriated space: “From slave quarters and farm settlements in the American South, to post migration urban ghettos and slums in the Northeast, to public housing projects throughout American cities, the predominant spaces of Black inhabitation in this country have been leftover, disposable and characterless environments. But, from these devalued spaces emerged some of America’s most valuable cultural contributions: the blues, jazz, the Harlem renaissance and Hip-Hop. The porch, the hallway, the stoop, the corner, each became a site for newly adapted and improvised social activity.”

We often explore our work through three primary spatial and narrative signifiers in space that are relevant to the Black community. One idea is looking at the Shell, which provides external protection and visibility for communities, the Threshold, which is a liminal space of gathering and safety, and the Hearth, which forms a heart of community and care. The Shell may be at both a personal level, a building scale or a city scale and creates a sense of impenetrability. However, it also creates a sense of a presence, a face onto the world. The Threshold, as exemplified by the porch, has a significant presence in many cultures throughout the diaspora as a space of gathering and safety and is both functional climatically and creates a space of protection and gathering that is both private and open to the community. It is not always explicitly designed for the purpose of gathering but spatially creates the ideal condition to do so. And the Hearth is a site of care, resilience and empowerment: Black spaces have long been sites where alternative modes of care and community emerge, spaces where the Black experience is reimagined outside the power structures of racism. An act of spatial resistance, Black people are creating self-sustaining spaces outside of dominant power structures, and these are often female-led spaces. Examples of these are the living rooms, kitchens, community spaces and churches. This is a church from the late 19th century in Oakville, Ontario, a Black church.

Looking at Montreal in particular, the great historian Dorothy Williams has written: “Our history then is of a people whose history has been ignored, deliberately omitted, or distorted. By excluding Black history, especially the story of slavery, Canadians have distorted their own history. The writing of Afro-Canadian history re-aligns Canadian history.” I think, through this, just thinking about how the different narratives, the different stories of different communities, how without their understanding, without their appreciation really provides gaps in the knowledge of the stories that we tell of the place where we live.

This is my father, grandfather and great-grandmother. Going back, understanding that the presence of Black communities intersects with and is layered onto historical narratives of other communities, fragments of Black urban life are woven into Montreal’s broader urban history. There are several significant examples of the contested ways in which Black people have negotiated space in this city and have defined spaces for themselves and for their communities. Jumping through centuries, these include the enslaved Marie-Joseph Angélique and her resistance and her conviction in the burning of a significant portion of Montreal in 1734 (an interesting thing spatially, and architecturally, is that this series of major fires then led to a change in building requirements in the city, requiring buildings to be built out of stone rather than wood), to the George Williams Affair which include the occupation of space as a counterpoint to racist authorities. So this is spatial history, architectural history, not necessarily in the traditional sense of buildings, but understanding space and the occupation of space and the response to space in a different way.

Now, thinking of architecture as a profession, for those who are marginalized from spaces of authority the built environment can often be used as an instrument of control — something that amplifies and promotes segregation, exclusion and surveillance. A lot of people have a perception of what architecture is or what architects do. It seems like a straightforward question, but it’s actually not something that even as architects we fully appreciate the nuances of. Architects definitely design buildings, however, there’s also the balance of social, aesthetic, functional, economic, cultural and environmental considerations that are key to the process, and it’s impossible for that to be done from a singular viewpoint. Scottish-Ghanaian curator and architect Lesley Lokko has said: “In architecture particularly, the dominant voice has historically been a singular, exclusive voice, whose reach and power ignores huge swathes of humanity — financially, creatively, conceptually — as though we have been listening and speaking in one tongue only. The ‘story’ of architecture is therefore incomplete. Not wrong, but incomplete.”

Then, in terms of representation in the profession, despite the fact that in North America the Black population is around 11 to 12 per cent, only two per cent of architects are Black or identify as African-American in Canada and the US. In the US, where there are actual statistics (which you don’t have in Canada), there have only ever been just over 400 Black female architects in the last 150 years of the profession. Another aspect of architecture is that, as a profession, it has been developed as a fairly elitist space with the myth of the singular, often white male visionary exerting his vision on the environment and communities. Within the late 19^th century in the construction industry, the profession established itself, separating the white-collar jobs, the architects, from the blue-collar builders and labourers. It created this very strict distinction in terms of how labour was separated, how labour was arranged. This framing of the profession has rendered it homogeneous, and through the 20^th century, with some notable exceptions, has excluded Black voices in North America.

So, I wanted to zoom in a little more to local context and looking at some concrete examples of how architecture is related to broader themes of colonialism, trades and the extraction of labour. Looking at the McGill campus, considering that James McGill himself owned Black and Indigenous slaves, is an interesting starting point. In this image here, you have Peter Redpath, and as an understanding of how architecture informs the structures of trade, labour and materials in the built form, there’s an interesting story, not directly related to him, but adjacent. The Redpath National History Museum on campus was founded from money donated by the Redpath family, which derived its wealth from a sugar importer from the British West Indies. They actually began in the 1840s after emancipation, and in Barbados, a significant source of sugar, the workers who were recently emancipated could not own their land, but they could own their own buildings. This is an interesting example of architecture and design that created itself on a non-temporary basis, or non-temporary architecture. After emancipation, the slaves were still landless since most of the land was still owned by the plantations. Through an act in 1840, former slaves were allowed to build their homes on rented, marginally productive plantation lands, but the plantation owners reserved the right to evict tenants at short notice. Houses therefore had to be chattel, which means movable possession, and for this reason were built of timber so they could be easily dismantled and sectioned, moved to another spot on an oxcart and reassembled in a single day. They also had to be strong enough to survive this upheaval with minimal damage. Their form was derived from a roof pitch informed by Indigenous structures that could withstand both heavy rains and winds, including hurricane force winds. As most of the island had been deforested in the 17th century to facilitate the arrival of slaves and the sugar plantation economy, any long-standing forests were not available. As ships of the mid 19th century would not travel a route empty, the trade between Canada and Barbados was one of bringing sugarcane to Canada, and on the return trip was Canadian wood. So, most of the domestic spaces in the 19th century, these movable houses, were built with Canadian wood that was sized and manufactured to be placed on ships of a certain scale, and so even the scale of the house, the form of the house, was both informed by oxcarts but also the ships going back and forth with sugar. So, the architecture, and the domestic architecture, the spaces that people inhabit, is not independent of other factors that inform community and also the way that labour plays out.

My Masters thesis project was a cultural centre on St. Catherine and Mansfield. The site I chose was based on the idea of reclaiming space. On that site in the 1920s, in the Loews Theatre, a Black patron sat in the lower seating area and was told by the theater management that he had to leave his seat, so he contested that in court and the court said that the theater owners had every right to do that, and it was confirmed that segregation was allowed to be maintained in a public space in Quebec. The project explored different ways of creating a vibrant cultural hub, a space for exchange, artistic expression and community support, hosting a range of cultural and community programs. The idea was it would embrace pluralism, layered meanings and drawing from diverse influences such as African fractal patterns, cultural symbolism and colour schemes, and references to the Black community’s socio-historical experiences. The central area was both a site of memory and identity, but also served as a passive ventilation system with sustainability as a key concern, and this was a key point in my journey exploring the architecture of cultural and community spaces.

Now, to touch on some projects worked on with our firm, SOCA, one of the projects that we’ve worked on collaboratively with the artist Curtis Santiago was for a fountain in a public park on the east end of Toronto. The idea was that this fountain was meant to honour the Black community that had lived in the area, and we explored this city directory from the mid 19th century that established all the residents of Toronto, their trade, their address and, for Black people, their race. A common thing, not surprising, but just the idea that in terms of visibility, indigeneity and Blackness are two races that have been codified in law in Canada and the Americas, and if you are not that, then there’s a different system that has existed for you. So, we looked at different sources, both Dame Lorraine masquerade legend, looking at histories of civic fountains, looking at busts from the 19th century and how those could be applied, and created this form that was informed by a diverse set of references, and bringing them together into a singular vision.

Another project that we are currently working on is looking at supporting the investigation into an interpretive centre for the Oro African Methodist Episcopal Church in Oro, Ontario. Oro is right on the edge of what was the colony of Upper Canada. The colonial government, in 1815, purchased some land from local Indigenous communities and established, after the war of 1812, a community for Black veterans of the War of 1812. This is one of the few government sponsored Black communities that existed in British North America or the British Americas even. And the community, Oro, was designed for their settlement. So, this is a map of Oro, and there were multiple reasons that the colonial government provided this community at the far north edge of the colony. One was they were both worried about relations with Indigenous communities further to the north and also to the Americans, and wanted these Black war of 1812 veterans to serve as a buffer to the northern edge of the colony. And so, a community was developed, several hundred residents ended up settling here, but the land was not well suited for agriculture. However, later on, in 1849, a church was built and the church structure is still standing and has been rehabilitated over the years. Oro African Methodist Episcopal Church, as a National Historic Site, still stands on the site but the community itself no longer exists. Most of the residents moved away by the 1920s, however, many descendants had kept the building functional, and they said it was restored 10 or 15 years ago. So, we’re working with an organization, looking at creating an interpretive space that honours both the church and an adjacent cemetery — there’s an unmarked cemetery behind and adjacent to the church. It’s an in-progress project but the history of that site is incredibly interesting.

Another Ontario site I’ll point out here — so Toronto is here and then Oakville is here, just on the shore of Lake Ontario. There were a significant number of Black residents who had escaped slavery in the US. This was a very significant end to the Underground Railroad in the 19^th century, and we’re working with a group of descendants of one of those early settlers, named Samuel Adams, who was a blacksmith in Virginia. One of the interesting elements of this is metal work, and blacksmiths in West Africa were historically incredibly well-regarded as they held almost a spiritual power to turn soil into this useful art material that could be used for many different functions. It’s actually similar to certain ideas of architecture in terms of this master builder, this person that creates something from the soil into a tool that the community can use. Metal work and iron work was brought over to the Americas through the slave trade, and there are significant instances of metal work in in the Caribbean, in the southern US, from enslaved Black metal workers. New Orleans especially has a significant quantity of metal work designed by Black iron workers. There are certain Adinkra symbols that are incredibly common in iron work that you see in North America that actually came through the slave trade and formed a certain element of communication, but there’s a certain visual language that is carried through in the built environment. It’s incredibly relevant that it has been maintained.

Samuel Adams was an iron worker from Virginia who came from a lineage of iron workers and settled in Oakville in the early 1850s. He developed a tool, a metal rake called a stone hook, which was used to collect stones from the bottom of Lake Ontario. Up until reinforced concrete was developed, from the mid 19th century to the early 20th century, almost every structure in the Toronto area, from Toronto to Niagara Falls, was built upon the stones that were developed by Samuel Adams. So, the foundation of a large portion of that area was built upon the work of a Black iron worker. He built a house and formed a successful business, and then the house that he built was demolished around 15 years ago. The descendants of Samuel Adams and the town had the foresight to collect a significant number of the stones from his house, from the foundation, and they are in a depot in the town. We’re working on a memorial that incorporates both some rammed earth and the stones themselves, and uses some iron work to create a monument to Samuel Adams and to early black settlers in Oakville.

Another project, the Wildseed Centre for Arts and Activism in Toronto, is the home of Black Lives Matter Canada. We’ve been working with them, establishing a renovation to their existing space, and in looking at the building, one of the things we came across was the fact that in the 1950s, two doors down from their Centre, there was a Black-led organization founded by a recent immigrant, Donald Moore. He created what was called the Don Avalon Center, and this whole strip in downtown Toronto was originally settled by Eastern European Jewish immigrants, then later many Chinese immigrants and it was always home to a lot of progressive organizations. Donald Moore was extremely instrumental in pushing for the domestic workers scheme that allowed women from Trinidad and Barbados and Jamaica to come and work as domestic workers in the early 1950s. There was a gap, as I referenced earlier, my great-grandmother came in the 1920s. After the mid 1920s, there was essentially a restriction on Black immigration and the domestic worker scheme was the first opportunity, outside of people attending University, to allow Black immigration to Canada. This is the current building, and the colour are the current and contemporary interventions with a historical photo of the Don Avalon Centre, thinking about outdoor space, like the threshold, was an important consideration in this project. We are considering inclusivity and difference, community, and the politics of care within the space.

The Wildseed Centre is named for the novel Wild Seed by Octavia E. Butler, and Butler’s work contests racist, sexist and heteronormative hegemonies, and champions, queer, feminist, anti-racist constructions of family for their active resistance of oppression. That was important for the organization as they have a significant desire to support all members of the Black community, but specifically, those who are differently abled and queer communities within Black communities. One of the design cues that we took when looking at the project was the main character of the novel whose name is Anyanwu. She was inspired by a legend in southern Nigeria of this shape shifter called Atagbusi, and the idea of this shape shifter was someone who helped her community. When she died, a threshold was created by planting this tree, and there was a shrine that protected the community through the dedication of Atagbusi’s body being buried adjacent to this tree. So, we were informed by the idea of creating this sense of protection and this threshold as you come into the space. That’s an example of the wall, the sense of enclosure.

We are also working with a researcher from a group called the Radical Research Agency, whose name is Victoria McKenzie, who explored some ideas around the idea of protection and looking at the centre itself being an architectural representation of the idea of maroonage. Maroons, in slavery societies, were communities that would escape slavery and create communities of their own, in opposition to the slavery-adjacent society. The project itself is grounded in decolonial methodology, that brings together Black feminist infrastructural guidance; pre-colonial African ways of being and building; and ecological sustainability. And so, in working through and thinking about the project and how we imagine it, I asked my uncle to create some sketches — some from the 1970s and collages looking at the interior of the building and how that could inform the design of the space. We used rammed Earth and a lot of Indigenous plantings throughout the site to really create a sense of welcome and openness but also being rooted in the land. And the project has a future phase that’s going to potentially expand the space to create a space for dance, a space for performance, and is going to be extremely ecologically sustainable in that goal. This is an interior view, there’s a lot of art sprinkled throughout, and the building itself was really an opportunity to showcase artists and artwork through the space.

Recently, we’ve had the opportunity to work with, this is 1950s or 60s Jean Drapeau, the mayor of Montreal with children from the NCC. And what’s interesting about this is that the urban redevelopment schemes that came about under the leadership of Mayor Drapeau erased certain swathes of Little Burgundy which eventually led to decline or dissipation and ultimately led to the building’s vacancy and collapse. The NCC was a cultural centre that was thriving throughout the mid 20th century. Here’s a map of some of the approaches that the city was looking at to demolish and recreate social housing throughout the neighbourhood. There’s a lot of displacement of community, and the image on the right is a really interesting series of photographs where workers from the city documented each building that was going to be demolished, both on the interior and the exterior, notwithstanding whether it was in someone’s kitchen, and whether they were there or not as an act of defiance. He was about to lose his home through this scheme and many people were displaced as part of that process. After the building funding was lost, after many years, a wall ended up collapsing in 2014 and the building was demolished. In 2022, the city of Montreal purchased the site and is supporting an initiative to create a new community centre on the site.

Over the last three years, I’ve been teaching a studio here at the School of Architecture, looking at how we can reimagine the site by being informed by community desires, community needs and looking at ways of reinterpreting architecture. We created a website where all the student work is posted. The students did a significant amount of research into the site to understand the historical context and the current context of the neighbourhood to create something based on the past but designed to support future use. We held workshops with students and the students presented their work to two community groups.

Just this week, in another studio, we built a model and we’re hoping to share the site model with the community group so they can use it as a resource for their future work. The project itself is in a very preliminary stage but the students are exploring different ideas and sharing them with the community group, so they could use students’ work as a resource to be informed by new ideas for the site.

I want to look at or consider how Black communities who have been displaced and marginalized can reclaim agency in shaping urban environments, and to really reinforce the idea of community spaces, Black spaces, being sites of care, imagination and self-determination, and also reinforcing idea that every community has opportunities to explore how to create spaces where the community feels a sense of care, a sense of nurturing.

One thing that we explore is the idea of architecture going beyond aesthetics and engaging with equity to create truly liberatory spaces. Some of the sites we touched on, but I also wanted to reinforce the idea of how new buildings can be reflective and responsive to layers of multiple communities and multiple individuals, considering that this space is really a space that the Black community has inhabited and thrived in. Since the first European settlers came, Black people have been intertwined with and have been on these lands, so it is important to understand inclusion and the ways in which Black communities relate to the space in Montreal.