Table of Contents

Foreword: Glenn D. Lowry, Director, MoMA
Introduction: Sean Anderson and Mabel Wilson
Preface: Robin D. G. Kelley
Scholar Essay: Christina Sharpe, "Black Gathering" 2000 words
Foundation Texts: Roberta Washington "Designing for Social Justice" 500 words
Justin Garrett Moore "Design for All of the Above" 500 words
Aruna d'Souza "Shack Stories" 500 words
Scholar Essay: Charles Davis, "Moving Beyond Repair" 2000 words
Architect Project: Emanuel Admassu, Atlanta, GA
Architect Project: J. Yolande Daniels, Los Angeles, CA
Foundation Texts: Audrey Petty, "Stories from Stateway Gardens" 500 words
Ifeoma Ebo, "Housing for Creative Urban Alchemy" 500 words
Scholar Essay: Tonya Foster, "Shotgun Houses" 2000 words
Architect Project: Felecia Davis, Pittsburgh, PA
Architect Project: Germane Barnes, Miami, FL
Scholar Essay: Dianne Harris, "Carceral Space and Domestic Space" 2000 words
Architect Project: Sekou Cooke, Syracuse, NY
Documentary Photo Essay David Hartt: Langston Terrace, Washington DC by Hilyard Robinson and Paul Revere Williams
Foundation Texts: Ariele Dionne-Krosnick "YMCA swimming pool" 500 words
Michelle Joan Wilkinson "Imagining East Harlem" 500 words Scholar Essays: Adrienne Brown "Reconstruction's Breadth" 2000 words
Milton S. F. Curry "Architecture Race Theory" 2000 words
Architect Project: Mario Gooden , Nashville, TN
Architect Project: V. Mitch McEwen, New Orleans, LA
Architect Project: Amanda Williams, St. Louis, MO
Foundation Texts: Carla Shedd, "Supply Side Criminomics" 500 words
Jennifer Newsom Carruthers "A Refusal of Border" 500 words
Scholar Essay: David Naguib Pellow, "Environmental Racism and the Carceral State" 2000 words
Architect Project: Walter Hood, Oakland, CA
Architect Project: Olalekan Jeyifous, New York, NY
Bibliography
Index and Credits

Promotional Information

An exploration of architecture, urbanism, Blackness and anti-Black racism in the United States. Featured projects and texts reimagine how individuals and communities have mobilised Black cultural spaces, forms, and practices as sites of imagination, liberation, resistance, and refusal

About the Author

Sean Anderson is Associate Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Mabel O. Wilson is the Nancy and George Rupp Professor in Architecture at Columbia University.

Reviews

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.--Editors "Surface"

Supplements [the exhibit's] propositions with texts by prominent scholars and critics that give the project an open feel and cross-disciplinary weave.--Siddhartha Mitter "New York Times"

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.--Sinclair Spratley "Hyperallergic"

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.--Jess Myers "Architect's Newspaper"

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.--Jay Cephas "Artforum"

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?--Michael Kimmelman "New York Times"

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.--Carolina Miranda "Los Angeles Times"

[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.--Sean Joyner "Archinect"

Heavy hitters of contemporary critical race discourse... An invitation to transform.--Jess Myers "Architect's Newspaper"

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."--Camille Okhio "Architectural Digest"