Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America

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Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America

Edited with text by Sean Anderson and Mabel O. Wilson. Preface by Robin D. G. Kelley. Text by Emanuel Admassu, Germane Barnes, Adrienne Brown, Sekou Cooke, Milton S. F. Curry, J. Yolande Daniels, Charles L. Davis II, Felecia Davis, Arièle Dionne-Krosnick, Aruna D’Souza, Ifeoma Ebo, Tonya M. Foster, Mario Gooden, Dianne Harris, Walter J. Hood, Olalekan Jeyifous, V. Mitch McEwen, Justin Garrett Moore, David Naguib Pellow, Jennifer Newsom, Audrey Petty, Christina Sharpe, Carla Shedd, Roberta Washington, Michelle Joan Wilkinson, Amanda Williams. Photographic portfolio by David Hartt.

Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America is an urgent call for architects to accept the challenge of reconceiving and reconstructing our built environment rather than continue giving shape to buildings, infrastructure and urban plans that have, for generations, embodied and sustained anti-Black racism in the United States.

The architects, designers, artists and writers who were invited to contribute to this book—and to the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art for which it serves as a “field guide”—reimagine the legacies of race-based dispossession in 10 American cities (Atlanta; Brooklyn, New York; Kinloch, Missouri; Los Angeles; Miami; Nashville; New Orleans; Oakland; Pittsburgh; and Syracuse) and celebrate the ways individuals and communities across the country have mobilized Black cultural spaces, forms and practices as sites of imagination, liberation, resistance, care and refusal.

A broad range of essays by the curators and prominent scholars from diverse fields, as well as a portfolio of new photographs by the artist David Hartt, complement this volume’s richly illustrated presentations of the architectural projects at the heart of MoMA’s groundbreaking exhibition.

How American architecture can address systemic anti-Black racism: a creative challenge in 10 case studies

A shotgun house in the Bayou Saint John neighborhood of New Orleans damaged by Hurricane Katrina, 2006. Photo by Carlos Froggy May (Infrogmation).