Resources on Race and Architecture

Books and Articles

1. Aggregate Collaborative Black Lives Matter project

   • Introduction: Black Lives Matter | Jonathan Massey, Meredith TenHoor with Sben Korsh     

   • Is “Justice Architecture” Just? | Raphael Sperry

   • Schools and Prisons | Amber Wiley

   • Fair Policing for the Fair City? | Researchers for Fair Policing

   • Defensible Space and the Open Society | Joy Knoblauch

   • Designing the Great Migration | James D. Graham and Michael Abrahamson

   • The Invisible Brother with a Brick | Brian Goldstein

   • Race, Planning, and the American City | Joseph Heathcott

   • The Rights to the Suburb | Dianne Harris 

   • Air and the Politics of Resistance | Derek R. Ford     

   • Black Spaces Matter | Charles Davis II

   • Toward a Black Formalism | Darell Fields

   • Farming the Revolution | Mike Carriere, Antoine Carter, and Fidel Verdin

   • Valuing Black Lives Means Changing Curricula | Héctor Tarrido-Picard

2. James Baldwin, “A Letter to My Nephew,” Progressive Magazine, 1962

3. James Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son” (Beacon Press, 1955)

4. Craig Barton, ed., Sites of Memory: Perspectives on Architecture and Race (Princeton Architectural Press, 2001)

5. Adrienne Brown, The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019)

6. David Brown and William Williams, Row: Trajectories Through the Shotgun House (Rice School of Architecture, 2004)

7. Simone Brown, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Duke University Press, 2015)

8. Anne Anlin Cheng, Second Skin: Josephine Baker & the Modern Surface (Oxford University Press, 2010)

9. Irene Cheng, “Race and Architectural Geometry: Thomas Jefferson’s Octagons”  J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2015Irene Cheng, Charles L. David, Mabel O. Wilson, Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020)

10. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic, June 2014Kimberly Dowdell, “Racism is built into US Cities,” Fast Company, June 2020Darrell Wayne Fields,  Architecture in Black: Theory, Space and Appearance (Bloomsbury, 2015)

11. Thelma Golden, ed, Harlemworld: Metropolis as Metaphor (Studio Museum in Harlem, 2004)

12. Mario Gooden, “Appearances and (Non)Erasures: Mapping Confederate Monuments and the Racial Conditionedness of Liberation,” Chicago Architecture Biennial, 2019

13. Mario Gooden, Dark Space: Architecture, Representation, Black Identity (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2016)

14. Nikole Hannah-Jones, “The 1619 Project,” The New York Times MagazineDianne Harris, Little White Houses (University of Minnesota Press, 2012)

15. Le Corbusier, “The Spirit Of The Machine, And Negroes In The USA,” When the Cathedrals Were White,  pp. 158-164 (McGraw-Hill, 1964)

16. Bryan Lee, Jr., “America’s Cities Were Designed to Oppress,” Citylab, June 2020Lesley Lokko, White Papers Black Marks: Architecture, Race, Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 2000)

17. Joanne Merwood-Salisbury, “Western Architecture: Regionalism and Race in the Inland Architect,” Chicago Architecture Histories: Revisions and Alternatives, ed. by Charles Waldheim and Katerina Ruedi Ray (University of Chicago Press, 2005)

18. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Vintage, 1992)

19. Melvin Mitchell, The Crisis of the African-American Architect: Conflicting Cultures of Architecture and (Black) Power (iUniverse, 2002)

20. Jimmy Robert, “Imitation of Lives” , interview with Mario Gooden, Performa 17 Magazine, November 2017

21. Sarah Schindler, “Architectural Exclusion: Discrimination and Segregation Through Physical Design of the Built Environment,” Yale Law Journal, April 2015

22. Sharon Sutton, When Ivory Towers Were Black: A Story about Race in America’s Cities and Universities (Fordham University Press, 2017)

23. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Race for Profit (University of North Carolina Press, 2019)

24. Huda Tayob and Suzanne Hall, “Race, Space and Architecture: towards an open-access curriculum” (London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Sociology, 2019)

25. Dell Upton, What Can and Can’t be Said: Race Uplift and Monument Building in the Contemporary South (University of California Press, 2015)

26. Paul A. Wellington, Black Built: History and Architecture in the Black Community (2019)Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses (MIT Press, 1996)

27. Craig Wilkins, Diversity Among Architects: From Margin to Center (Routledge, 2016)

28. Craig L. Wilkins, The Aesthetics of Equity: Notes on Race, Space, Architecture, and Music (University of Minnesota Press, 2007)

29. Mabel O. Wilson, Begin with the Past: Building the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture

30. Mabel O. Wilson, “Black Bodies/White Cities: Le Corbusier in Harlem” ANY: Architecture New York, No. 16, Whiteness: WHITE FORMS, FORMS OF WHITENESS, 1996

31. Mabel O. Wilson, “Carceral Architectures,” e-flux

32. Mabel O. Wilson, “Mine Not Yours,” e-flux

33. Mabel O. Wilson, Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (University of California Press, 2012)

34. Mabel O. Wilson, “White by Design” Among Others: MoMA and Blackness,” ed. by Darby English and Charlotte Barat (MoMA Publications, 2019)

35. Whitney M. Young, 1968 AIA Convention Speech