I decided to organize Black Boxes: Enigmas of Space and Race after a professor claimed that African-American architecture was an oxymoron. In defense of his course content, which included Brunelleschi, Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier, he told us students, "Why aren't we studying black [architecture]? Because it doesn't exist!" He said this in front of a class of 40 Yale School of Architecture graduate students: that architecture made by someone of color, like me, was unimaginable.
His comment, unyielding and unapologetic, slapped me back into my seat. Right then, I realized the irony of my existence. I was in love with this thing, "architecture," yet the foundations of this discipline were blind to the possibility of my contribution, and of the contributions of my forefathers and foremothers. I was both inside and outside the Western canon at the same time. Architecture couldn't see me, even though I was sitting in the room.
I soon realized that I suffered from the same ignorance that befell my professor. He could assert that black architecture didn't exist because no instructor before him had ever said it had or could. He had no interest in reexamining those claims, and no one had forced him to do so.
I was ashamed that I had also let myself be passively misguided. While stunned by my teacher's boldfaced statement, I couldn't think of anything to counter his assertion. Despite my expensive years at an Ivy League university, I was still grossly uneducated. I knew nothing of my race's contributions to architecture, or of how culture and race influence what we build, where we build it, and why.
| Continue Jennifer Newsom's Metropolis Magazine article "Does African-American Architecture Exist?" (via dangerousmeta!) on Yale University's recent "Black Boxes: Enigmas of Space and Race," whose summary mentions the upcoming Studio Museum at Harlem exhibit "Harlemworld: Metropolis as Metaphor"
posted in articles on January 18, 2004 11:55 AM | t (0)
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