In Search of African American Space
Fall 2020
If African American experience emerges from the structure of slavery, how does architecture relate to that experience? Rather than seek affirmation from a Eurocentric discipline that has regulated and excluded them from its study and practice, African Americans have claimed space in unexpected locations such as the slave ship, the slave plantation cabin, and in the urban “slum/ghetto.” In Search of African American Space examines these typologies in the context of historical record and personal and collective memory to uncover where African Americans have appropriated the practice of the everyday for themselves and where they have claimed spaces of resistance as their own. African American space is often a subversive interpretation of space that takes the form of speech and performance, reflecting its fleeting nature. This anthology compiles essays from contemporary architects, historians, and artists in order to present a broad range of knowledge and practices and in order to evoke consciousness of this form of space-making that persists in the afterlife of slavery.
edited by Jeffrey Hogrefe and Scott Ruff, with Carrie Eastman and Ashley Simone