Links to prominent writings and near-exhaustive lists of resources at the intersection of race and architecture and design.
African American Design Nexus | Explores the intersection of design, identity, and practice
Anti-Racism Design Resources | Avenues to support BIPOC designers
Anti-Racism, Equity, and Inclusion Resources Archive | Crowd-sourced resources collected by AIGA Design Educators Community
BIPOC Architects and Designers | List of international BIPOC-owned firms
Black Architects Archive | Work of the Data Humanism by Design Research Group and is supported by grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts; the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks; and the College of Arts, Media, and Design at Northeastern University
Black Lives Matter | Collection of Essays by Architectural Historians and Organized by Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative
Great Diverse Designers Library | A resource to the profession as well as a platform to elevate diverse designers
Race and Architecture: Studying the Historical Intersection of Form and Culture | A Blog by Charles Davis
Race/Space Reading List | Extensive crowd-sourced list started by Anna Maria Leon at the University of Michigan
Society of Architectural Historians Special Booklist: Race and Diversity
Books on equity, diversity, and inclusion, many donated by the Graduate Architecture, Landscape, and Design Student Union.
African American Architects by 
Black Built by
While Black architects produce extraordinary works, they account for only two percent of the profession in the United States. Many of their works exist in the Black community and have helped preserve and restore history and culture. Though architecture is often not associated with Black Culture, it is an integral aspect in defining a community and requires careful consideration of design, context, and resident relationships. This book explores over forty works by Black architects and their impact in the Black community. A wide variety of projects are featured, from residences of affluent African Americans, to historic churches, to memorials and museums of Black culture and history. Each work, through brief examination of its history and architecture, exhibits the magnificent work of Black architects from past to present, and provides inspiration to architects of current and future generations.
The Black City by
A portrait via interviews and essays of New York City at the end of the 1970s as the center of the African diaspora."Fichte did away with the opposition between objective and poetic writing-his heightened objectivity becomes poetic, his poetry journalistic. He wrote to fight against bigotry and provincialism, and developed approaches in the 1970s that are discussed today in queer studies and postcolonialism." -Diedrich Diederichsen The Black City is a portrait of New York City written by Hubert Fichte between 1978 and 1980. One of Germany's most important postwar authors, Fichte researched the city as the center of the African diaspora, conducting interviews and composing essays about syncretism in culture and the arts, material living conditions in the city, and political and individual struggles based on race, class, and sexuality. His interview partners include Michael Chisolm, arts educator and coordinator of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition; German emigre and artist Lil Picard; photographer Richard Avedon; Leopold Joseph, publisher of the exile newspaper Haiti Observateur; and Teiji Ito, composer and Vodou initiate. The book opens with notes on an exhibition of Haitian art at the Brooklyn Museum, and closes with a self-reflective literary analysis of Herodotus, the first white European to write extensively of his travels and (desirous) encounters in Africa. Often compared to the work of Jean Genet and Kathy Acker, Fichte's novels and nonfiction are exuberant and erudite, contesting the stylistic and ethnographic norms of the time to locate a "utopic potential" for poetic and political revolution in the cultural heritage and contemporary life of the African diaspora. Fichte's writing in The Black City provocatively exposes the complexities of its author's subjectivity in a manner that underscores the singularity of his writing, while prompting questions about how notions of exploitation, authority, and authenticity manifest themselves in pseudo-ethnographic practices.Translated into English for the first time,The Black Cityis part of Fichte's multivolume experimental literary cycle,The History of Sensitivity, which was left unfinished due to his untimely death in 1986. Published in conjunction with the project "Hubert Fichte- Love and Ethnology," a collaboration between the Goethe-Institut and Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin, supported by S. Fischer Stiftung and S. Fischer Verlag.
Black Futures by
What does it mean to be black and alive right now? "A literary experience unlike any I've had in recent memory . . . a blueprint for this moment and the next, for where Black folks have been and where they might be going."-The New York Times Book Review(Editors' Choice) What does it mean to be Black and alive right now? Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham have brought together this collection of work-images, photos, essays, memes, dialogues, recipes, tweets, poetry, and more-to tell the story of the radical, imaginative, provocative, and gorgeous world that Black creators are bringing forth today. The book presents a succession of startling and beautiful pieces that generate an entrancing rhythm- Readers will go from conversations with activists and academics to memes and Instagram posts, from powerful essays to dazzling paintings and insightful infographics. In answering the question of what it means to be Black and alive, Black Futures opens a prismatic vision of possibility for every reader.
Black Geographies and the Politics of Place by
The history of black people in the Americas and the Caribbean cannot be told without addressing powerful geographical shifts: massive forced migrations, land dispossession, and legal as well as informal structures of segregation. From the Middle Passage to the Whites Only signposts of US apartheid, the black Diasporic experience is rooted firmly in the politics of place. Literature has long explored the cultural differences in the experience of blackness in different quarters of the Diaspora. But what are the real differences between being a maroon in the hills of Jamaica and a runaway in the swamps of Florida? How does location impact repression and resistance, both on the ground and in the terrain of political imagination? Enter Black Geographies. In this path-breaking collection, fourteen authors interrogate the intersection between space and race. For instance, confronted with the importance of space in black cultural creation and preservation, some activists have sought to protect or restore black historical sites such as Tulsa's Black Wall Street and the African Burial Ground in New York City. For the dispossessed, all markers of history and belonging, including cultural property, become paramount. Yet each of these sites has in common acts of racial hatred and state terrorism that have left few of the historical structures standing-making them unlikely candidates for preservation. This begs the question: Is it even possible that advocating for preserving historic locations can act as a vehicle for social justice and spur community redevelopment? Other contributors consider how Bob Marley's music maps a path to freedom, whether Malcolm Little could have emerged asMalcolm X outside of a black urban center, and if lost communities can be recovered. Katherine McKittrick authored Demonic Grounds: Black Women and Cartographies of Struggle. Clyde Woods authored Development Arrested: Race, Power, and the Blues in the Mississippi Delta.
Black Landscapes Matter by
The question "Do black landscapes matter?" cuts deep to the core of American history. From the plantations of slavery to contemporary segregated cities, from freedman villages to northern migrations for freedom, the nation's landscape bears the detritus of diverse origins. Black landscapes matter because they tell the truth. In this vital new collection, acclaimed landscape designer and public artist Walter Hood assembles a group of notable landscape architecture and planning professionals and scholars to probe how race, memory, and meaning intersect in the American landscape. Essayists examine a variety of U.S. places--ranging from New Orleans and Charlotte to Milwaukee and Detroit--exposing racism endemic in the built environment and acknowledging the widespread erasure of black geographies and cultural landscapes. Through a combination of case studies, critiques, and calls to action, contributors reveal the deficient, normative portrayals of landscape that affect communities of color and question how public design and preservation efforts can support people in these places. In a culture in which historical omissions and specious narratives routinely provoke disinvestment in minority communities, creative solutions by designers, planners, artists, and residents are necessary to activate them in novel ways. Black people have built and shaped the American landscape in ways that can never be fully known. Black Landscapes Matter is a timely and necessary reminder that without recognizing and reconciling these histories and spaces, America's past and future cannot be understood.
Building Character by
In the nineteenth-century paradigm of architectural organicism, the notion that buildings possessed character provided architects with a lens for relating the buildings they designed to the populations they served. Advances in scientific race theory enabled designers to think of "race" and "style" as manifestations of natural law: just as biological processes seemed to inherently regulate the racial characters that made humans a perfect fit for their geographical contexts, architectural characters became a rational product of design. Parallels between racial and architectural characters provided a rationalist model of design that fashioned some of the most influential national building styles of the past, from the pioneering concepts of French structural rationalism and German tectonic theory to the nationalist associations of the Chicago Style, the Prairie Style, and the International Style. In Building Character, Charles Davis traces the racial charge of the architectural writings of five modern theorists--Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Gottfried Semper, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and William Lescaze--to highlight the social, political, and historical significance of the spatial, structural, and ornamental elements of modern architectural styles.
The Color of Law by
In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America's cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation?that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de jure segregation?the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments?that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day. Through extraordinary revelations and extensive research that Ta-Nehisi Coates has lauded as "brilliant" (The Atlantic), Rothstein comes to chronicle nothing less than an untold story that begins in the 1920s, showing how this process of de jure segregation began with explicit racial zoning, as millions of African Americans moved in a great historical migration from the south to the north. As Jane Jacobs established in her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, it was the deeply flawed urban planning of the 1950s that created many of the impoverished neighborhoods we know. Now, Rothstein expands our understanding of this history, showing how government policies led to the creation of officially segregated public housing and the demolition of previously integrated neighborhoods. While urban areas rapidly deteriorated, the great American suburbanization of the post?World War II years was spurred on by federal subsidies for builders on the condition that no homes be sold to African Americans. Finally, Rothstein shows how police and prosecutors brutally upheld these standards by supporting violent resistance to black families in white neighborhoods. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited future discrimination but did nothing to reverse residential patterns that had become deeply embedded. Yet recent outbursts of violence in cities like Baltimore, Ferguson, and Minneapolis show us precisely how the legacy of these earlier eras contributes to persistent racial unrest. ?The American landscape will never look the same to readers of this important book? (Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund), as Rothstein's invaluable examination shows that only by relearning this history can we finally pave the way for the nation to remedy its unconstitutional past.
Dark Matters by
In Dark Matters Simone Browne locates the conditions of blackness as a key site through which surveillance is practiced, narrated, and resisted. She shows how contemporary surveillance technologies and practices are informed by the long history of racial formation and by the methods of policing black life under slavery, such as branding, runaway slave notices, and lantern laws. Placing surveillance studies into conversation with the archive of transatlantic slavery and its afterlife, Browne draws from black feminist theory, sociology, and cultural studies to analyze texts as diverse as the methods of surveilling blackness she discusses: from the design of the eighteenth-century slave ship Brooks, Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, and The Book of Negroes, to contemporary art, literature, biometrics, and post-9/11 airport security practices. Surveillance, Browne asserts, is both a discursive and material practice that reifies boundaries, borders, and bodies around racial lines, so much so that the surveillance of blackness has long been, and continues to be, a social and political norm.
Decolonizing Methodologies by
To the colonized, the term 'research' is conflated with European colonialism; the ways in which academic research has been implicated in the throes of imperialism remains a painful memory.This essential volume explores intersections of imperialism and research - specifically, the ways in which imperialism is embedded in disciplines of knowledge and tradition as 'regimes of truth.' Concepts such as 'discovery' and 'claiming' are discussed and an argument presented that the decolonization of research methods will help to reclaim control over indigenous ways of knowing and being.Now in its eagerly awaited third edition, this bestselling book includes a co-written introduction and features contributions from indigenous scholars on the book's continued relevance to current research. It also features a chapter with twenty-five indigenous projects and a collection of poetry.
Diversity among Architects by
Diversity among Architects presents a series of essays questioning the homogeneity of architecture practitioners, who remain overwhelmingly male and Caucasian, to help you create a field more representative of the population you serve. The book is the collected work of author Craig L. Wilkins, an African American scholar and practitioner, and discusses music, education, urban geography, social justice, community design centers, race-space identity, shared landscape, and many more topics.
Exhibiting Blackness by
In 1927, the Chicago Art Institute presented the first major museum exhibition of art by African Americans. Designed to demonstrate the artists' abilities and to promote racial equality, the exhibition also revealed the art world's anxieties about the participation of African Americans in the exclusive venue of art museums?places where blacks had historically been barred from visiting let alone exhibiting. Since then, America's major art museums have served as crucial locations for African Americans to protest against their exclusion and attest to their contributions in the visual arts. In Exhibiting Blackness, art historian Bridget R. Cooks analyzes the curatorial strategies, challenges, and critical receptions of the most significant museum exhibitions of African American art. Tracing two dominant methodologies used to exhibit art by African Americans?an ethnographic approach that focuses more on artists than their art, and a recovery narrative aimed at correcting past omissions?Cooks exposes the issues involved in exhibiting cultural difference that continue to challenge art history, historiography, and American museum exhibition practices. By further examining the unequal and often contested relationship between African American artists, curators, and visitors, she provides insight into the complex role of art museums and their accountability to the cultures they represent.
The House That Race Built by
Original essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and others on Black Americans and politics in America today.
How to Kill a City by
A journey to the front lines of the battle for the future of American cities, uncovering the massive, systemic forces behind gentrification -- and the lives that are altered in the process. The term gentrification has become a buzzword to describe the changes in urban neighborhoods across the country, but we don't realize just how threatening it is. It means more than the arrival of trendy shops, much-maligned hipsters, and expensive lattes. The very future of American cities as vibrant, equitable spaces hangs in the balance. Peter Moskowitz's How to Kill a City takes readers from the kitchen tables of hurting families who can no longer afford their homes to the corporate boardrooms and political backrooms where destructive housing policies are devised. Along the way, Moskowitz uncovers the massive, systemic forces behind gentrification in New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco, and New York. The deceptively simple question of who can and cannot afford to pay the rent goes to the heart of America's crises of race and inequality. In the fight for economic opportunity and racial justice, nothing could be more important than housing. A vigorous, hard-hitting expose, How to Kill a City reveals who holds power in our cities-and how we can get it back.
Structural Inequality by
Architecture is a challenging profession. The education is rigorous and the licensing process lengthy; the industry is volatile and compensation lags behind other professions. All architects make a huge investment to be able to practice, but additional obstacles are placed in the way of women and people of color. Structural Inequality relates this disparity through the stories of twenty black architects from around the United States and examines the sociological context of architectural practice. Through these experiences, research, and observation, Victoria Kaplan explores the role systemic racism plays in an occupation commonly referred to as the "white gentlemen's profession." Given the shifting demographics of the United States, Kaplan demonstrates that it is incumbent on the profession to act now to create a multicultural field of practitioners who mirror the changing client base. Structural Inequality provides the context to inform and facilitate the necessary conversation on increasing diversity in architecture.
The Undercommons by
In this series of essays Fred Moten and Stefano Harney draw on the theory and practice of the black radical tradition as it supports, inspires and extends contemporary social and political thought and aesthetic critique. Today the general wealth of social life finds itself confronted by mutations in the mechanisms of control, from the proliferation of capitalist logistics through governance by credit and management of pedagogy. Working from and within the social poesis of life in the undercommons Moten and Harney develop and expand an array of concepts.
W. E. B. du Bois's Data Portraits by
The colorful charts, graphs, and maps presented at the 1900 Paris Exposition by famed sociologist and black rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois offered a view into the lives of black Americans, conveying a literal and figurative representation of "the color line." From advances in education to the lingering effects of slavery, these prophetic infographics --beautiful in design and powerful in content--make visible a wide spectrum of black experience. W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits collects the complete set of graphics in full color for the first time, making their insights and innovations available to a contemporary imagination. As Maria Popova wrote, these data portraits shaped how "Du Bois himself thought about sociology, informing the ideas with which he set the world ablaze three years later in The Souls of Black Folk."
We Gon' Be Alright by
A provocative and timely collection of essays from a celebrated cultural critic on race, diversity, and resegregation. "The Smartest Book of the Year" (The Washington Post) In these provocative, powerful essays acclaimed writer/journalist Jeff Chang (Can't Stop Won't Stop, Who We Be) takes an incisive and wide-ranging look at the recent tragedies and widespread protests that have shaken the country. Through deep reporting with key activists and thinkers, passionately personal writing, and distinguished cultural criticism, We Gon' Be Alright links #BlackLivesMatter to #OscarsSoWhite, Ferguson to Washington D.C., the Great Migration to resurgent nativism. Chang explores the rise and fall of the idea of "diversity," the roots of student protest, changing ideas about Asian Americanness, and the impact of a century of racial separation in housing. He argues that resegregation is the unexamined condition of our time, the undoing of which is key to moving the nation forward to racial justice and cultural equity.
