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ОглавлениеColumbia School of Architecture
JOINING THE CIVIL RIGHTS movement had changed my life. As I began professional studies in architecture and planning, I wanted to know how the planning and design of cities could support the struggle for racial justice. In 1964, many of my friends decided to travel to the South to join Freedom Summer, a voter registration campaign in Mississippi led by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and a coalition of civil rights organizations. I was drawn to and impressed by this campaign which, in addition to voter registration, set up dozens of Freedom Schools, Freedom Houses, and community centers in small towns throughout the South to aid local black people.
As for me, I wanted to support the development of such helpful institutions in the inner cities of the North, so I decided to stay in New York and focus on the architecture program at Columbia University.
Teaching at Columbia’s architecture school was centered on the design studio. The first-year studio under the leadership of Peter Pragnell was a powerful and positive experience. Influenced by a design movement in Europe called Team 10, Pragnell was interested in the social factors that shape the design of buildings. He brought to our design studio the world-famous architect Aldo van Eyck, who delivered an amazing two-hour lecture about the Dogon people, an ethnic group in Mali who live in beautifully designed mud, thatch, and stone dwellings along and near the cliffs of Bandiagara.
Our project-based learning began with designing a summer camp for twenty-four people. Next, we were instructed to find an existing English town and produce a detailed map that demonstrated how people’s needs were met by the built environment. The town I chose was an agricultural settlement of fifty houses clustered around the main road. Another assignment was to do a photo essay in the city organized around a theme. I chose the theme of barriers. I noticed and photographed many walls, signs, and signals showing where not to go—restricting traffic, parking, and access to grassy lawns, for example. For a paper analyzing mechanical systems, I studied the Richards Medical Center in Philadelphia designed by Louis Kahn. For an assignment to produce working drawings and models, I chose the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University by Le Corbusier.
I did well in the course, and at the end of the first year, Professor Pragnell arranged for me to get a summer job working for the firm of Patrick Desalles in the outskirts of London. Finding a place to live proved challenging. After visiting many agents without success, I realized that “no coloreds” was on the index cards they searched. I slept in the park a few nights. Finally, I got a bed in a shared flat in Islington. One of my neighbors was an infamous neo-Nazi.
While I was abroad, I visited, at Mr. Pragnell’s suggestion, the architecture of Peter and Alison Smithson in England, Aldo van Eyck in the Netherlands, Le Corbusier in France, Antonio Gaudí in Spain, and a few others. Each of these architects in their own ways had tried to manifest a more humane approach to architectural design than was seen in the mainstream.
Van Eyck and the Smithsons were leading members of Team 10, a social movement of younger architects who were breaking away from the Congrèes International d’Architecture Moderne (CAIM). They were rebelling against the faceless and soulless architecture that was springing up everywhere. They tried to introduce elements of humanism into their designs. Van Eyck, for example, installed mirrors at various levels and in unusual places in the Municipal Orphanage in Amsterdam to give the children opportunities to explore and make discoveries in their environment. I appreciated that he was inspired by indigenous building traditions in America and Africa, and I was intrigued by his idea that a city should function in a unified manner like a house and that a house should function in an expansive way like a tiny city.
Le Corbusier, who was the leading architect of the twentieth century, designed buildings that were spiritually moving, such as the chapel of Notre Dame du Haut (Our Lady of the Heights) on a hill above the village of Ronchamp. The thick curved walls and roof give the impression of a massive piece of sculpture. I also visited the building he designed for the convent of Saint Mary of La Tourette. It is much larger than the chapel and contains bedrooms, study halls, a library, dining hall, kitchen, and a church. His designs are very modern, but also draw on nature and on human needs. He took the symbols of modern life and incorporated them into his designs to create a new vocabulary of modern architecture that was used by many.
Antonio Gaudíi’s designs were clearly inspired by nature—organic forms that are curvilinear and flowing with lots of color and decoration, reflecting and responding to the human spirit in profound ways. I was grateful to spend time taking in the work of all these great architects who wanted to accommodate and address the needs of ordinary people while creating architectural innovations.
From the Studio to the Streets
The studio is a metaphor for the specialized training of the architect, including the physical environment in which he or she works. An inspiring studio space often features high ceilings and skylights and is shared by twelve to twenty students. Beautiful objects are located strategically throughout the space, such as plaster casts of Renaissance sculptures, Greek urns, and columns from European buildings, all intended to stimulate the muse.
The studio is led by a master architect who acts as a coach, giving frequent crits (short for critiques) at each student’s drafting table. The master architect also simulates the role of the client. Lectures and other coursework are subordinate to the studio experience. Students are given a design problem to work on for several months and spend most of their time in the studio at their drafting table. At the end of the semester, they present their work to a jury.
I call the real world where low-income families live “the streets.” The physical environment where poor people live, work, and play often reflects a lack of care. Liquor stores abound, but there are few places where you can get fresh food. Buildings are boarded up and covered with graffiti. Overflowing trash containers, unclaimed automobiles, abandoned refrigerators, and broken furniture are everywhere.
Toward the end of my experience at Columbia, the conflicts of the real world intruded on the curriculum. I experienced a clash of cultures between the architecture planning studio and the streets of the city. The studio emphasized thoughtful, creative problem solving in which the practitioner controls all the variables. In the streets, life was different. In 1967, the nation experienced violent, race-related civil insurrections. Significant areas in many cities had gone up in flames. In 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered. Upon learning of the assassination, I was enraged. Eventually, when I could no longer contain my emotions, I went out to join the crowds in the streets.
The Kerner Commission, appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate the causes of the riots, referred to the two Americas: rich white people and poor black people. Real-world, city-building processes are shaped by the conflicting interests of public officials, financial institutions, real estate developers, community groups, and civic organizations. Often, there is no single client or decision maker. African Americans and other communities of color find themselves at a disadvantage in dealing with more powerful groups in society, and the racism inherent in real-world dynamics tends to marginalize them even further.
It became clear to me that the city is shaped by the restless migrations of people and sometimes by forces for social change. The city was losing people and jobs to the suburbs. Inner-city decline and suburban sprawl went on unabated. The political landscape was turbulent. I found no one to talk to about these things during the years I was a student at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, situated in Avery Hall, an acropolis perched on Morningside Heights.
At that time, there were no African American architecture students in any of my classes, and only a handful in the school as a whole. Until 1968, when Max Bond joined the faculty, there were no African American members of the architecture teaching staff. No coursework discussed the legacy of racism in the built environment or explored prospects for community development to address structural inequality of opportunity.
In 1968, social change demonstrations came to Columbia. Protesting a bungled planning process to construct a gymnasium in a park shared by residents of Harlem, African American students and residents of Harlem occupied Hamilton Hall, the university administration building. In sympathy, white students occupied other campus buildings to protest the university’s complicity in the Vietnam War. The university was shut down for a month, and the president was fired. At one point, the black students occupying Hamilton Hall held a press conference and invited Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown to speak. I happened to be passing by and, when I stopped to speak with Stokely, I was swept into the building with the crowd and captured on film that was aired on the television newscasts. To tell the truth, I was not very excited about the protests, but I was glad that the gymnasium was not built on that poorly sited location. As I was older than most other students and had been working in civil rights campaigns for six years, protest movements were not new and exciting to me, and I was somewhat detached from the actions.
I focused on increasing the numbers of African American and Puerto Rican faculty members and students. We not only pressured the administration but also did outreach to the historically black colleges in the South. I made a recruiting journey, funded through Columbia’s School of Architecture, to several black colleges to let students know they were welcome to apply for admission. A significant number applied and were accepted. As a result of our efforts, Columbia is among the leading universities whose graduating African American architecture students became licensed architects.1
Experimental Professional Projects
While I was an architecture student, I had opportunities to undertake several professional projects. The projects were experimental in nature and helped broaden and deepen my understanding of architecture and the role that building design can play in meeting people’s needs.
The school was in disarray during those years since there was no permanent chairman of the architecture department. I managed my courses reasonably, but dropped out for a semester to complete a design/build of a Vermont artist residence. I also designed an odd triangle-plan house to the owners’ specifications in East Hampton, and designed and built another innovative vacation home for a family on Block Island with a team that included fellow students Mark Hawkins and James Piccone, with Karl Linn deftly altering the landscaping. I had long been interested in Buckminster Fuller’s thinking and work with geodesic domes, so I was excited when we bought two geodesic dome kits and erected them to form the new vacation home, converting some of the triangular panels into window openings.2 We connected the two domes via a boardwalk elevated five feet above ground.
In August of 1968, Jean and I used the money earned on the geodesic dome construction to travel to Cuba with a group of architects and planners organized by Chester Hartman. Chester became a lifelong colleague and friend—an urban planning professional with a commitment to social justice.3 On the visit, we documented the planning and architecture of revolutionary Cuba; ten years had passed since the ouster of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. The elegant architecture of the Cuban National Ballet School particularly impressed me with its gentle vaulted ceilings that spanned large spaces—an ancient Catalan technique. The ceiling structure was composed of four or five layers of thin brick tiles with staggered mortar joints. The building has recently been restored.
In the summer of 1966, Jean and I traveled to southeast Turkey for a three-month dig at the little town of Samsat with Nemrud Dagh Excavations, directed by archeologist Theresa Goell. It was a very small group with a small budget, but we appreciated the chance to be in a faraway place. My main duty was to survey. I bought a book on surveying just before departing New York and trained myself during the journey. We all had to wait a full month in Ankara before being granted permission to go to our site. Once a fortified city, Samsat had become a small village in the near-denuded landscape of Adıyaman Province on the banks of the upper Euphrates River. Theresa entertained us with stories about her youth as a Marxist–Leninist in the 1920s and 1930s and the irony of being lectured to about “standing up to capitalist pigs” by some Black Panthers she was renting an apartment to in New York.
Being in Samsat was quite an adventure. At the top of a high hill of layered construction (the former fortified castle) was fourteenth-century material; and nine feet down was Roman era. On one occasion, I nearly died of sunstroke when I worked sunup to midday in full sun at 120°F despite Theresa’s warning to quit by ten o’clock in the morning.
Later, Teresa disappeared for several weeks with a colleague to ride a traditional raft—with floatation provided by inflated sheepskins—on rapids in the Euphrates to demonstrate that it could have been done long ago. I was concerned because she had lost hearing years before and with it, a sense of balance. As she was unreachable during this absence and had left me in charge of the local digging crew (nearly all the able-bodied men of the village), we had to pray she knew what she was doing. Everywhere we wandered in the village, there were things created by people of the past—Roman stone sarcophagi used as water troughs, inscribed rocks built into house walls, and pot shards and coins underfoot. The excavation turned up fifty crates of finds—mostly pots—that ended up in the basement of a local museum.
During our time in Turkey, I felt no hostility toward me as a black man. They related to me primarily as an American.
My Experience at Columbia: A Mixed Bag
I decided early on to become an architect because it seemed to be mostly about art and beauty. Later, I found out that it was also about justice because the environment people grow up in largely determines their chances for success in life. My primary goal was to develop and learn how to use professional skills to improve the quality of life for African Americans living in cities. I wanted to learn how to plan, design, and construct buildings that would serve the needs of clients, fit into the fabric of the city, and improve the quality of life for people who lived in low-income communities of color. The defining challenge of my professional and political education during the 1960s was my quest to integrate the studio culture of architecture and urban planning with my experiences in the civil rights movement. I confronted the great challenge of fusing elitist architecture and urban planning methodologies with bottom-up direct action civil rights organizing strategies.
It became inescapably clear that our society is fractured primarily along lines of race and class, but also by gender, age, and differing perspectives about society’s relationship to the natural world. The lack of consideration within my profession of these realities and their implications weighed heavily upon me.
In my decision to be an architect, I had gradually, over the years, shifted my attention away from nature to artifacts made and arranged by human beings. In my quest for racial justice, I came to see the city in terms of black and white: the abandoned part being neighborhoods where black people lived and the sprawling part being the suburbs where the white people lived. I had inherited the legacy of oppression, and I struggled mightily against it.
The architect learns to picture a reality that does not yet exist and envision a possible design solution to a physical problem, including the necessary steps to make this design a reality. In my training, matters of political power or access to economic resources were not addressed. The curriculum centered on the design of individual buildings for individual or institutional clients with power and resources.
It eventually dawned on me that if I were to have any chance of achieving my modest original goals, my work needed to incorporate some path for addressing the societal fractures that made it so hard for people of color from low-income communities to shape their physical environments to reflect their highest aspirations. So, I determined to shape my education about building in two ways: by planning and designing physical structures for community use and by building and organizing institutions, networks, and strategies to overcome the legacy of racism and make social change possible.
The civil rights movement was about ensuring that politically marginalized populations could gain access to political and economic power and resources. As Martin Luther King Jr. (1964, 67) wrote in April 1963 in his letter from the Birmingham Jail:
Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has consciously refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.
Political Leadership in Architecture
In my final year at Columbia University, I grew interested in the urban design work being undertaken by Mayor John Lindsay’s administration in New York City. Our studio assignment was to produce designs for a new state office building in New York City. Civil rights leaders Wyatt Tee Walker and Bayard Rustin had visited New York State Governor Nelson Rockefeller and convinced him to move a portion of the state administrative functions into an office building in Harlem. The idea was to bring these services to a portion of the city that had not been well served, where new activity on the street could stimulate economic development. However, the project was very divisive. A small group of black students (I was the only one of us studying architecture) protested the intrusion of white people into Harlem and occupied the site, referring to it as Reclamation Site No. 1. Our studio masters seemed to have no awareness or understanding of the nature of the conflict. The situation frustrated me, and for my assignment, I chose an alternative site for an office building in the Bronx. In retrospect, I realize that the conflict could have been dealt with creatively if someone had employed conflict resolution strategies and helped the two groups listen respectfully and empathetically to each other’s point of view.
Paul Davidoff, an architect and lawyer, developed a theory of “advocacy planning” that became a national model during the second half of the 1960s. He argued that there is no such thing as the public interest. Projects are developed within settings in which various actors have conflicting goals. Advocacy planning asserts that disenfranchised communities have the right to professional help in developing plans that speak to their self-interest. Projects like the placing of state administration functions in a Harlem office building need to be vetted by all concerned parties—the older generation and the younger.
As a New York senator, Robert Kennedy brought together business and community leaders to found the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, the first community development corporation (CDC) in the nation. It had the power to acquire land and develop property for economic development and other purposes on behalf of the community. From that point on, CDCs became widespread, making it possible to apply the idea of advocacy planning to real projects.
In my final year at Columbia, I sought to resolve the conflict between the culture of the studio and the culture of the street through my thesis project. In 1968, the New York City Board of Estimate allocated $150,000 to plan a Harlem high school for three thousand students. This funding was to cover developing an educational concept, developing a building program, and selecting a site for the school.
I made this the focus of my thesis and developed a proposal for what I called the “Community-Controlled Harlem High School System.” Instead of locating the school in a campus-like setting, I proposed breaking it up into a series of small schools, each with a different focus, sited on a corridor threading through Harlem. These new examples of urban design would revitalize Harlem neighborhoods and provide facilities, laboratories, theaters, and athletic facilities that could be used by the community after school hours and on weekends. The school system would also have satellite facilities throughout the city in television studios, medical facilities, the financial district, and the airport to facilitate the students’ transition from high school to the world of work. Developing and writing the thesis helped shape my ideas about the value of creating institutions for community development.
Growing Interest in African Settlements
As I continued reading Lewis Mumford, Basil Davidson, and others, I began thinking about African settlements as a resource and model for modernity. Through Mumford’s books and essays, I had developed a deep appreciation for ordinary landscapes in addition to the more conventional focus on individual buildings as monuments. For three decades, Mumford had educated the public to think about the history of the built environment as a force shaping society. By then, he was writing a regular column on architecture called the Sky Line for New Yorker magazine.
My early interest in African settlements was an outgrowth of my desire to understand how African Americans came to live under such terrible conditions. Many writers had described those conditions, none more eloquently than James Baldwin. In his first published essay, “The Harlem Ghetto,” which was included in Notes from a Native Son, he wrote,
Harlem, physically at least, has changed very little in my parents’ lifetime, or in mine. Now as then the buildings are old and in desperate need of repair, the streets are crowded and dirty, there are too many human beings per square block. (Baldwin 1955, 57)
Yet, as a student of American architecture, I found within the classic literature of architecture and urban planning no mention of the disparity between white and black—neither explanation nor apology nor remedy. It was, as the song goes, “just one of those things.” I had set my sights on changing the conditions under which African Americans were forced to live. In order to do so, I would have to reach beyond conventional wisdom and begin at the beginning.
I wanted to know how we could gain better control over the environments in which we lived. I reasoned that a study of traditional African environmental design would provide a baseline from which to assess how our communities had become so alienated from the housing and neighborhoods where we lived. More importantly, we would be able to figure out what to do about it.
But where, exactly, was the beginning?
