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.
How American architecture can address systemic anti-Black racism: a creative challenge in 10 case studies
A New York Times critics' pick | Best Art Books 2021
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.
A shotgun house in the Bayou Saint John neighborhood of New Orleans damaged by Hurricane Katrina, 2006. Photo by Carlos Froggy May (Infrogmation).
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Architectural Digest
Camille Okhio
Space, land, the ways each are apportioned and navigated—these are the central concerns of “Reconstructions,” which includes multidisciplinary work by 10 Black talents, among them artist Amanda Williams and AD100 landscape architect Walter Hood, as well as photography created by David Hartt in response... “It is architecture that is not specifically about buildings, but about how the architecture of certain spaces is emblematic of anti-Black racism.”
Surface
Editors
Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America,”... explore[s] the ways space and land are apportioned and navigated. Using a combination of analog and digital collage, the [book] depicts dystopian [cities] overtaken by climate change and explores “vanishing urban ephemera and architecture""...succumbing to gentrification.
Archinect
Sean Joyner
[Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America] look[s] at contemporary architecture and its role in the systemic racism that has facilitated discrimination and injustice in the U.S. A system that has informed and continues to inform the design of American cities through public policies, municipal planning, and architecture that has specifically impacted the Black community.
Los Angeles Times
Carolina Miranda
Unearths the ways in which systemic racism has shaped architecture and how an unexamined whiteness has served as a default in the field. More important, the exhibition — and its very worthwhile catalog — presents myriad architectural possibilities framed by the Black experience.
Architect's Newspaper
Jess Myers
Heavy hitters of contemporary critical race discourse... An invitation to transform.
New York Times
Michael Kimmelman
All of these projects reimagine architecture from the perspective of Black people, a mission of the collective — and a first for the Modern. [...] Which is to say, the Modern itself partly necessitated the Black Reconstruction Collective. The group addresses the bigger question: How can Blackness construct America?
Artforum
Jay Cephas
If architecture can be a “vehicle of liberation and joy,” as the statement claims, then the work in [this book] soars especially when it sets aside the instrumental potential of architecture in favor of speculative investigations of Black presents, pasts, and futures.
Architect's Newspaper
Jess Myers
Reconstructions proposes a wild imagining in order to push the viewer to engage with an expanded history of architecture. But it does not quite offer enough remove from that history to allow the viewer to envision another world. However, in its many cartographic gestures, a savvy audience may find the map to one.
Hyperallergic
Sinclair Spratley
Reconstructions asks not for full comprehension or memorization, but puts forth the question of what it would take to move beyond presumptions that these architectural interventions are too speculative or verging on the fantastical[...] Reconstructions present these possible futures not as provisional but rather as vital concerns worth pondering.
New York Times
Siddhartha Mitter
Supplements [the exhibit's] propositions with texts by prominent scholars and critics that give the project an open feel and cross-disciplinary weave.
STATUS: Out of stock
Temporarily out of stock pending additional inventory.
Felicia Davis's 2020 "Fabricating Networks Quilt" (detail: scenes from Pittsburgh) is reproduced from Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America, published to accompany the landmark exhibition opening at MoMA this weekend. A collection of 10 case studies on how American architecture can address systemic anti-Black racism, this is essential reading for Black History Month and beyond. "A conjoining of scales, historical research, and projective interventions transcends the limits of architecture to assert one's contribution toward a shared history of belonging and a recuperation of humanity," editors Sean Anderson and Mabel O. Wilson conclude in their Introduction. "In 2020, the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic further reified the boundaries inscribed on redlining maps between those who live and those who die, underscoring the precarity of America's social contract. Returning to Du Bois, who writes that the most significant problem of the twentieth century was the 'color line,' what might be said of those traces of the self-governing Black communities of Mound Bayou in Mississippi, Nicodemus in Kansas, Eatonville in Florida, Allensworth in California, and Seneca Village in New York City? We read these place-names and conjure the lives that inhabited the porches and kitchenettes, juke joints and schoolrooms, law offices and churches beyond the line, not because of it. And through these names we are able to retrace histories that speak to human cruelty, unspeakable depredation, and imperial misadventure, while also securing—with unlimited promise—the prospect to think about, design, and build spaces of resistance and refusal, imagination and liberation." continue to blog
FORMAT: Pbk, 8 x 10 in. / 176 pgs / 185 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $45.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $63 ISBN: 9781633451148 PUBLISHER: The Museum of Modern Art, New York AVAILABLE: 3/2/2021 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: Out of stock TERRITORY: NA ONLY
Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America
Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 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.
How American architecture can address systemic anti-Black racism: a creative challenge in 10 case studies
A New York Times critics' pick | Best Art Books 2021
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.
