Building up and Taking Down a Critical Design Pedagogy for the Deconstruction of the White Supremacist Imperialist Patriarchy

Home , Dorothy Mae Taylor, Michael Arad

building up and taking down a critical design pedagogy for the deconstruction of the White supremacist imperialist patriarchy

1 chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 “The appropriation and use of space are political acts.”

Pratibha Parma

“To build community requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination.”

bell hooks

“Our collective failure to notice and acknowledge how buildings are designed and used to support the social purposes they are meant to serve - including the maintenance of social inequality - guarantees that we will never do anything to change discriminatory design. When such an awareness does exist, discrimination can be redressed.”

Leslie Kanes Weisman

2 chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 on language

The words we use to talk about concepts reveal relationships of power, and can be used to perpetuate - or dismantle - systems of oppression.

Throughout this text, the words ‘Black’ and ‘White’ are capitalized to indicate the centrality of these perceived identites to our existence as humans in the world.

More critically, the words ‘Black’ and ‘White’, when applied as descriptors for people before recognition of their status as people, foreground racial characterization over individual humanity, serving to dehumanize the person. For this reason, I have chosen to, as much as possible, minimize my use of the terms ‘‘Black people’’ and ‘‘White people’’, favoring instead the terms “people called Black,” “people of color,” and ‘‘people who need to believe that they are White’’.

“People called Black” draws on Malcolm X’s phrase ‘the so- called American Negro’, used to highlight the construction of Blackness by people who needed to think they were White as a means of justifying enslavement (Davis, 2000). This phrase is used specifically when referring to people of African descent. It is used instead of the term ‘African American,’ which attempts to generalize and thus dissapate the experience of forced enslavement into the American narrative of immigration (Kendi, 2016).

“People of color,” a phrase derived from the term ‘Women of Color’ developed by Black feminists in the 1970s, can signify solidarity between groups oppressed by people who need to believe that they are White. It is used, where appropriate, to extend criticism of White supremacy in America beyond the experiences of people called Black, recognizing that its uncritical use can homogenize the unique ways in which White supremacy oppresses different groups (Janani, 2013).

“People who need to beleive that they are White” is a phrase used by Ta-Nehisi Coates, who derived it from the work of James Baldwin (Gordon, 2017). It emphasizes the artificiality of Whiteness and the denial of history and reality required to sustain the systems of White privilege and White supremacy.

Where possible, the conflict often called the Civil War is referred to as the “War for White ownership of Black people” (Trefousse, 1970).

Gratitude to Randy Hutchison for his insights on this issue.

3 chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 gratitude

Some of the many, many people whose efforts made this project what it is today. Thank you.

Ellen Loeb, Janis Daemmrich, Bob Daemmrich, Robin Daemmrich, Rebecca Batlan, Andrea Gratten, Janet Elbom, Miles Kruppa, David Freed, Megan Mattson, Tremaine Collins, Jepte Vergera, Shelia Henry, Reginald Terrell, Coach Diane Russo, Coach Brian Castilla, Coach Reginald Kyle, Coach Demo Odems, Dr. Stacia Crescenzi, Maricruz Aguayo Tabor, Ronny Risinger, Neil Lowenstern, Rebecca Foreman, Ismael Salgado, Jonas Owens, Rebecca Otten, Jordan Palefsky, Desiree Anderson, Derek Rankins, Lauren Holtzman, Ian Berude, Zak Davidson, Zoe Krulak-Palmer, Jamie Garuti, Emma Collin, Brandon Sinnott, Conor Brodnick, Jamie Joyce, Jack Curtis, Jon Dale, Joseph Colon, Lilith Winker-Schor, Noa Elliott, Jess Mathias, Paige Davis, Carly Bowman, Jordan Conway, John Ludlam, Javier Gonzales, Bryan Bradshaw, Carolyn Barber- Pierre, Reed Smith, Christian Ardenaux, Gavin West, Dr. Mirya Holman, Dr. Brian Brox, Dr. Carol McMichael Reese, Dan Pitera, Garnette Cadogan, Joel Pominville, Tracie Ashe, Freddie Dickinson, Vanessa Smith Torres, Keristen Edwards, Bradley Rubenstein, Kelsey Willis, Emily Parsons, Charles Jones, Errol Barron, Maurice Cox, Dr. Austin Allen, Matty Williams, Michael ‘Quess?’ Moore, Malcolm Suber, Angela Kinlaw, Corey Williams, Wayne Jones, Ashley Burns, Angela Kyle, Sharbreon Plummer, Gia M. Hamilton, Vera Warren-Williams, Wendy Redfield, Nick Marshall, Tracy Lea, Byron Mouton, Dean Kentaro Tsubaki, Dean Kenneth Schwartz.

Special thanks to Scott Ruff, my foremost architectural and professional mentor, out of whose office hours, spare moments, late nights in studio and ‘Gender, Space, and Architecture’ seminar course this project originated.

Recognition also to Derek Buckley, custodian of Richardson Memorial Hall, and Ms. Monica and Eshoe, Tulane Dining Services employees at the Drawing Board Cafe, whose labor enables the functioning of the Tulane School of Architecture.

4 INTRODUCTION chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 academic and professional advisors

Carol Bebelle, Founder Ashe’ Cultural Arts Center. New Orleans, LA

Randy Hutchison, Designer Wisznia Architecture+Development, New Orleans, LA

Bryan Lee Jr., Civic Design Director Arts Council of New Orleans

Jose Alvarez, Principal Eskew+Dumez+Ripple Architects, New Orleans, LA

Dasjon S. Jordan, Commercial Revitalization and Community Development Associate Broad Community Connections, New Orleans, LA

John Klingman, Favrot Professor Tulane School of Architecture, New Orleans, LA

Dr. Richard Campanella, Professor of Geography Tulane School of Architecture, New Orleans, LA

Suzanne J. Mobley, Community Engagement Manager Small City Center, New Orleans, LA

Maggie Hansen, Director Small City Center, New Orleans, LA

Shoshana Gordon, Program Assistant Small City Center, New Orleans, LA

Ben Smith, Adjunct Professor Tulane School of Architecture, New Orleans, LA

Dr. Amber N. Wiley, Professor of American Studies Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY

Justin Garrett Moore, Director Public Design Commission, New York, NY

Jennifer Reut, Senior Editor Landscape Architecture magazine, Washington, DC

Nathaniel Q. Belcher, Professor Penn State Stuckeman School of Architecture, State College, PA

Heidi Hickman, Educator New Orleans, LA

Sara Zewde, Designer Gustafson Guthrie Nichol, Seattle, WA

Scott L. Ruff, Professor Pratt Institute, New York, NY

5 INTRODUCTION chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 contents

3 on language

8 critical questions

12 ABSTRACT

13 THESIS STATEMENT // a political architecture

ANTITHESIS STATEMENT // apolitical architecture

15 annotated bibliography

21 bibliography

30 conceptual diagrams

33 conceptual case studies 34 carver bank 35 red location 36 places of remembrance 37 aschcrott brunnen 38 jewish museum berlin 39 arcus center for social justice leadership 40 national museum of african american history and culture 41 ghanaian national museum of slavery and freedom 42 constitutional court of south africa

43 ESSAY // an antiracist architecture 45 how does it feel to be the problem? the fallacy of white supremacy 46 the regulatory nature of architecture form follows descriptive representation 47 intersectionality and enforced silence 48 on ”black pathology” 49 listening for the silences 50 the construction of spatialized white supremacy 51 complexity and contradiction in american ideals 52 the war for white ownership of black people 53 reconstruction and retrenchment 54 a black architecture 56 revolution and counterrevolution // suprematism and anti-semitism 54 urban renewal // negro removal 58 integration as spatial intervention 59 new forms: black power architecture 61 jane jacobs meets stokely carmichael

6 INTRODUCTION chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 architecture against oppression 62 non-monumentality // form, void and memory 64 symbolic oppression and freedom in south africa 65 an american countermonument // the NMAAHC 66 the birth of a movement // #blacklivesmatter and #sayhername 67 charleston and the enduring significance of symbols of white supremacy 68 the battle in new orleans // #takeemdownNOLA

70 programmatic case studies 71 booker t washington high school for the performing and visual arts 72 union theological seminary 73 highlander folk school 74 shaw freedom house 75 paul laurence dunbar high school 76 idea store whitechapel 77 north atlanta high school 78 hunters point campus 79 south melbourne ferrars street primary school

80 PROGRAM // a freedom school of design 81 what is a freedom school? 85 freedom schools today NOMA louisiana’s project pipeline 87 social justice by design // design as protest 88 the freedom school of design 90 designing the client 93 who will use the FSD? 94 models for urban architecture education at the secondary level 96 designing a curriculum 98 program elements 100 programmatic diagrams

104 SITE // lee circle, new orleans, LA USA 106 site selection criteria 108 alternate site // congo square 109 alternate site // lafayette square 110 tivoli place // lee circle 111 site documentation 114 conceptual site diagrams 119 sankofa and social context in four dimensions 121 present conditions, 2017 122 limitations and opportunities

124 VEHICLE // the freedom school of design 125 critical questions 126 design proposal 145 presentation 148 praxis

7 INTRODUCTION chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 critical questions

"you're white, why do you care?"

A necessary means by which architecture will be held accountable for promoting racial justice through the deconstruction of White supremacy must be by the descriptive representation of people of color in the architectural profession itself. Not until there are more students, professors, theorists, and practitioners of color, and not until those people produce scholarship and built work (Fields, 1997), can White students, professors, theorists or practitioners, like myself, be truly held accountable in our work of antiracism.

Yet I cannot put the weight of deconstructing White supremacy entirely on people of color, who may struggle to survive, much less attain institutional power, in a world that set up to dehumanize, disenfranchise and ultimately destroy them. As a White male, I enjoy inherent privileges of access and legitimacy in the eyes of academia and other institutions which are not afforded to designers or scholars of color (Brainard, 2009).

I was born in Texas to a father whose father immigrated from Germany to Wisconsin in the 1930s and a mother whose Alsatian Jewish great-grandfather immigrated to Georgia in the 1870s. In America, I am White and receive the full privileges accorded that identity. I am a cisgendered, or non-transgendered, man, and though I am gay, I ‘pass’ for straight; thus, I can also receive the full privileges according accorded the most privileged identity in American society, that of the cisgendered heterosexual White man.

I can no more rid myself of these privileges than I can change the concentration of melanin in my skin. Nor can I dissasociate myself from the very real material benefits I have recieved as a result of political, economic and psychological manifestations of White supremacy. The system of White supremacy was constructed by people who needed to believe that they were White; it can and in fact must be deconstructed in part by people who have needed to believe that we are White, including myself.

As White man, I place myself in a precarious position by engaging in antiracist feminist criticism. But as Kim Anne Savelson, a White woman architect writing in Appendx 1, eloquently explains,

”I speak about a nonwhite social experience because I want to emphasize that a failure to grasp the relationship between racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, classism, and homophobia is a failure to understand the strategy of divide and conquer, which ultimately must be understood if any afflicted group wants to transform the system. In this sense, I do

8 INTRODUCTION chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 encounter racism as a problem, and not only because of the way it hurts people of color, although this would seem to be enough from an ethical standpoint.

Beyond and besides ethics, as a white woman I feel it is a mistake to think that my skin color is a ticket to subjecthood, for my whiteness does nothing to rescue me from my femaleness. Even when my whiteness does deliver the privileges it promises, these privileges come at a high price. On one level then, I experience racial hierarchy as a problem because I am a woman: I can see how my particular experience of oppression is intimately bound up with my being “white.”

Having access to privileges that women of color are denied does not mean that my race is not also a part of my disempowerment and exploitation, for it is. As Marilyn Frye puts it, white women are only de- ceiving themselves if they think that they “can escape the fate of being the women of the white men”. Furthermore, to the extent that white women delude themselves as to “where their privilege originates,” they stand in the way of feminist progress” (Savelson, 1997).

As a White gay man, I believe Savelson’s critique of feminism is just as applicable to the gay liberation movement. The stories, experiences and work of lesbians, trans people, and other members of the LGBTQ community are marginalized and ignored, particularly if they are also people of color. This marginalization not only deprives the movement of the asset of these people’s work, but it dehumanizes them in the same way straight people dehumanize me.

To paraphrase Marilyn Frye, gay White men have decieved themselves into thinking they can escape the fate of being straight White men’s fags. I will always be subordinate as long as such power inequi- ties exist. I will not be free of my oppression until every LGBTQ, Black, person of color and woman’s life matters as much as my straight-passing cisgendered White male life.

"why focus on black people?"

The experience of all people, worldwide, who are unwilling or unable to claim Whiteness has been that of struggle against oppression, violence and exploitation under political, economic and psychological systems of White supremacy. But in the context of the United States of America, the nation of which I am a citizen and in which I have lived my entire life, there is no freedom struggle as foundational or as mytholo- gized as that of Black people against White supremacy (Gordon, 2017).

As a Southerner by birth, heritage and by my residence in New Orleans, I am drawn to focus in my academic study and activist work on this issue. I am inspired by the examples of Southern White people who have resisted White supremacy and allied with Black people in antiracist

9 INTRODUCTION chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 work, including Anne McCarty Braden and Virginia Foster Durr (Brown, 2002). I hope to raise through my work not only my own consciousness but those of other White people.

"why won't you say 'all lives matter'?"

Black Lives Matter does not mean “White people’s lives do not matter.” It does not mean “Police officers’ lives do not matter.” It means, “There has, throughout history, been a devaluing of Black lives, a social, political and economic consensus that the lives of Black people matter less than the lives of other people. That devaluation cannot continue. Black people’s lives matter just as much as anyone else’s lives. Our social, political and economic systems, as well as the built environment which is produced by and produces those systems, need to change in order to reflect this fact.”

An effective device used to illustrate this point is the analogy of the ‘burning house’, illustrated in this popular online comic. It was drawn by comic strip artist Kris Straub, who posted it in December 2014 following the release on YouTube of video footage of the murder of Eric Garner by NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo, and subsequent nationwide protests.

comic: kris straub, chainsawsuit.com

10 INTRODUCTION chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 “Space and power are so tightly bound that changing one entails changing the other. Space can often be seen as the embodiment of power, power as the point of spatial differentiation.” David Delaney

11 chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 ABSTRACT Architecture is the embodiment and concretization of the structures of freedom, domination, capitalism, democracy, and other institutions that have an effect on people (West, 1997).

Among these institutions is the construct of race. Race is a classification system derived from the color of human skin, with economic and symbolic value attached relative to skin color on a continuum from ‘dark’ to ‘light’. This system was invented by Europeans in order to justify their enslavement of Africans. Within the Euro-American race construct, Black and other ‘colored’ bodies are ‘raced’, whereas White bodies are the default, the norm, and considered ‘raceless’ (Kendi, 2016).

Forms, spaces and places are also assigned racial classifications. The racialization ‘Black’ and ‘White’ forms, spaces and places are recognized explicitly by people called Black and indirectly by people who need to believe that they are White, even as they choose to obscure or ignore that recognition (Lipsitz, 2007); to enforce racelessness is, to author Toni Morrison, itself a racial act (Savelson, 1997).

This racialization of space can be seen in the designation of Congo Square as ‘Beauregard Square’ in 1893, honoring the memory of a Confederate general who fought for the continuation of the practice of slavery in the very year of the Plessy v. Ferguson decision’s enshrinement of the farcial doctrine of ‘separate but equal’. The site was a social and commercial gathering space for indigenous people before the founding of New Orleans (Walker, 2004) and became one of the foremost sites of African cultural expression in the Americas. Attempts to destroy the

Blackness of the space continued with the erection of a Beaux-Arts style Congo Square fence Municipal Auditorium used for White supremacist rallies on the site; and the fencing off of the square to hinder its free use by the people called Black who inhabit the Treme neighborhood today (Crutcher, 2010).

Such characterizations have profound effects on the lives of the people who inhabit, occupy and move through that space, reinforcing White privilege and White supremacy while continually degrading the economic and social value of Black life. The denial of access and opportunity enabled by the racialized characterization of space leads to death,

economic, social and literal, for people called Black in America, death as Protests against the murder visible in household wealth statistics as in videos of police murder (Elli- of Alton Sterling, Baton son, 1952; Patterson 1982; Rankine, 2014). Rouge, LA, july 2016

Whitney M. Young, Jr, in his speech to the 1968 convention of the AIA, castigated the profession for its ‘thunderous silence and callous in- difference to the cause of civil rights’. I repeat Young’s charge and add that the White-dominated discipline of architecture fails to consider or will- photo: http://www.bbc.com/news/ world-us-canada-36759711 fully ignores the capacity of the built environment to perpetuate systems photo: sara zewde

12 INTRODUCTION chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 of White privilege and White supremacy, thus implicating the discipline as an accessory in the deaths above enumerated. In the face of this impli- cation, architecture faces a crisis of moral and political legitimacy (West, 1997).

Through conversation with scholars, activists, artists, architects, educators and students, the author aims to raise consciousness of archi- Whitney M. Young, Jr, president of tecture and education’s roles in perpetuating White privilege and White the National Urban League, 1961-69 supremacy. The author aims to speculate on what a built environment encouraging opposition to and dismantling of these systems - an actively antiracist built environment - might look like.

The vehicle for this thesis is the Freedom School of Design, a public high school for architecture and design in New Orleans, Louisi- ana following the tenets of ‘freedom education’ employed by civil rights workers in Mississippi in the summer of 1964. The FSD will include a design-build residential component for a limited number of students and a variety of outdoor spaces of varying degrees of publicness and privacy, activity and passivity. The FSD will respond to the architectural object of the Robert E. Lee monument and to other manifestations of White supremacy in the built environment of its context. The design of its forms and spaces will balance the consideration of architecture’s ability to reinforce or dismantle political systems within a matrix of practicality and symbolism.

THESIS // a political architecture

Architectural form, theory and practice are complicit in the perpetuation of the political systems of White privilege and White supremacy, contributing to the economic, social and literal death of people called Black in America. This complicity undermines the legitmacy of the profession in a multiracial society.

An actively antiracist architectural pedagogy working to affirm, rather than demean, the value of Black lives must engage critically and creatively with the identity of the designer and with the presence of White supremacy in the built environment. POLITICUS CAPACITY TO REINFORCE Architects must acknowledge the capacity of design decisions to OR DISMANTLE POLITICAL SYSTEMS reinforce or dismantle political systems and balance that consideration with other determinants of form.

ANTITHESIS // apolitical architecture

http://sacobserver.com/2013/02/pbs-special-to- Architecture is an exercise in form and expression, and the en- feature-whitney-young-jr-the-power-broker/

13 INTRODUCTION chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 gagement of political agendas in design leads to a heavy-handed authoritarianism which should be avoided, and a decline in the quality of design work. It is not architects’ job to carry out political agendas.

This Antithesis is inspired by the response of Zaha Hadid Archi- tects principal Patrik Schumacher to the awarding of the 2016 Pritzker Prize to Alejandro Aravena: Patrik Schumacher

“The PC takeover of architecture is complete: Pritzker Prize mu- tates into a prize for humanitarian work. The role of the architect is now ‘to serve greater social and humanitarian needs’ and the new Laureate is hailed for ‘tackling the global housing crisis’ and for his concern for the underprivileged. Architecture loses its specific societal task and responsi- bility, architectural innovation is replaced by the demonstration of noble intentions and the discipline’s criteria of success and excellence dissolve in the vague do-good-feel-good pursuit of ‘social justice’. Alejandro Aravena/Elemental, I respect [what] Alejandro Aravena is doing and his ‘half a good Quinta Monroy, Iquique, Chile 2003 house’ developments are an intelligent response. However, this is not the frontier where architecture and urban design participate in advancing the next stage of our global high-density urban civilization. I would not object to this year’s choice half as much if this safe and comforting validation of humanitarian concern was not part of a wider trend in contemporary architecture that in my view signals an unfortunate confusion, bad conscience, lack of confidence, vitality and courage about the discipline’s own unique contribution to the world” (Schumacher, 2016).

It takes courage, conscience and confidence to speak against a system of oppression. It takes a considerable amount of architectural vitality to envision how this discipline can dismantle some of the foundational systems of our society. It takes a significant amount of faith in architecture to imagine it can contribute to the deconstruction of an oppressive system which underlies the very foundations of society. Heydar Aliev Center, Baku, Azerbaijan 2012 Zaha Hadid Architects Schumacher’s position represents his capitulation to the international neoliberal consensus which has provided him with a lucrative career designing objects of conspicous consumption for oligarchs and billionaires like repressive Azeri dictator Ilham Aliyev (Abbasov, 2014).

Even Aravena does not go far enough in thinking outside the box into which the global neoliberal consensus has put the discipline of architecture. Rather than stopping at building ‘half a good house’, we should be questioning the political and economic systems which deprive so many people of any house, and why so many of those people happen http://www.notey.com/blogs/patrik-schumacher http://www.archdaily.com/10775/quinta-mon- to be brown. The times demand not just ‘humanitarianism’ but activ- roy-elemental ism from architects, designers and planners. Out of the offices, into the http://www.archdaily.com/448774/heydar-ali- streets. yev-center-zaha-hadid-architects

14 INTRODUCTION chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 annotated bibliography

Hale, Jon. The Freedom Schools. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.

Beginning with the context of White supremacist response to the Civil Rights Movement, particularly the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka which led to the end of legalized Jim Crow segregation in public schools, Hale details the development of civil rights organizing in Mississippi in the 1950s and 1960s. His interviews and work focus on the experience of Black Mississippi students involved in the Movement, particularly in the 1964 Freedom Schools, as well as White Northerners who came to Missis- sippi as teachers during Freedom Summer. With a strong focus on how the Freedom School pedagogy empowered students to become the next generation working for civil, political and social rights for Black Ameri- cans, Hale’s account provides the cornerstone for my choice of program inspiration.

Delaney, David. Race, Place and the Law, 1836-1948. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998.

Framing his analysis with two cases of spatialized discrimination against Black people, under the system of chattel slavery in Louisiana and Mas- sachusetts in 1836 and in the legal segregation of a residential neighborhood in Washington, DC in 1948, Delaney draws connections between the use of space and its political implications (see also Parmar, pg. 2 of this work). The real and symbolic geographies of American cities and the broader American landscape are analyzed through a racial lens, as a part of “the wholly racialized [and gendered] world’ (Morrison, 1993). Del- aney extends his analysis behind the work of planners and policymakers into the legal realm, implicating all three branches of American government. Delaney’s analysis, while incorporating historical geography, does not focus on the agency of the designer in the process of built intervention.

Grimes, Katie M. ‘Breaking the body of Christ: the sacraments of initia- tion in a habitat of white supremacy.’ Unsolicited paper. Political Theolo- gy, 2015.

Grimes, a theologian, explores the construction of Blackness out of the differentiated African populations kidnapped and brought into the institution of chattel slavery by European colonizers, and the role of the Catholic Church in this dehumanizing process and its evolving manifestations. She examines the role of rituals and organizational systems of the Catholic Church as means of control over Black people, and as means of creation and reinforcement of Whiteness. This is relevant to my thesis

15 BIBLIOGRAPHY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 because I am examining the power of architecture, a regimented system here analagous to the Catholic Church, to uphold White supremacist norms in an effort to learn how best to dismantle them.

Van Houten, Christina. ‘bell hooks, Critical Regionalism and the Politics of Ecological Returns.’ Politics and Culture, online publication of the English Deparment, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY. 9 March 2014.

Van Houten discusses the concept of intersectional feminism and its ap- plications in the philosophical concept of critical regionalism. She sites noted Black feminist writers Audre Lorde and bell hooks within the discourse of critical regionalism, a subset of postmodernism in which place is foregrounded as an issue of importance. Architecture, as a realm of the philosophical world, has seen its own Postmodern and Critical Region- alist movements, to which the writings of hooks, Lorde and Van Houten can also be applied. Van Houten focuses particularly on hooks’ emphasis on democratic pluralism and locational intersectional feminism, two values I intend to hold throughout the course of my project.

Boddie, Elise C. “Racial Territoriality”. UCLA Law Review 58 2010, pp. 401-463

Using the Gretna police barricade of the Crescent City Connection bridge to keep Black people in New Orleans during the Katrina flood, Boddie asserts that urban spaces and places have racialized characters, whether or not the courts recognize this (which they generally do not). Boddie explores potential strategies of legal remedy to this situation, including precedent such as the Mount Laurel housing cases in New Jersey. Just about every aspect of Boddie’s argument is relevant to my thesis, and her use of an example in New Orleans is additionally helpful.

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015.

In one of the prominent published works of the Black Lives Matter era, journalist Coates reflects on the meaning and madness of being a Black male in America in the form of a letter to his young son. In his intensely personal narrative, Coates describes his years growing up in Baltimore, at Howard University (‘the Mecca’) in Washington, DC, and abroad in Par- is. Relevant to my thesis, Coates describes each of these places spatially as well as personally, employing metaphors of the built environment. One of these is the use of the endless variation in Parisian doors, and the assumed worlds behind them, to symbolize the boundless opportunity denied under the constraints of American racism. Coates sharply criticiz- es ‘the [American] Dream’ and ‘the Dreamers’, White Americans, em-

16 BIBLIOGRAPHY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 ploying to desrcibe them the label ‘those who need to believe that they are white’5.

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “The Case for Reparations.” The Atlantic, June 2015.

Coates’ much-referenced longform examination of the history of racialized oppression in America focuses on the theft of economic wealth from Black people, personalizing the story through interviews and extensive research. Coates cites other examples of reparations, including by the American government to compensate for imprisonment of Japanese Americans in internment camps during WWII and by German industrial corporations to Israel following the Holocaust. Relevant to my thesis, Coates focuses particularly on the exclusion of Black Americans from the housing market and their relegation to undesirable urban space through methods such as redlining and White terrorism, and the subsequent lack of access to intergenerational wealth created by the housing market. His ‘case for reparations’ is built on rectifying the economic effects of this denial of wealth.

hooks, bell. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. New York: Routledge, 2015.

Prominent feminist and antiracist writer hooks examines issues of identity, class, race, gender, power and privilege. Ideas about masculinity, femininity, Blackness and White supremacy are criticized and deconstructed. Relevant to my thesis, hooks examines how these issues play out in the academic setting of her experiences as a student at Stanford and as a professor at Yale, contexts similar to that in which I am com- pleting this project as a student at Tulane, another predominantly White institution of higher learning.

Lesley Naa Norle Nokko, ed. White Paper, Black Marks: Architecture, Race, Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000

Collected essays by a number of architects, artists and scholars examine the role of race in design in ways both examined and unexamined. Ruff (2002) “wishes the book were longer”, praising its contributors but opining that it merely “skims the surface” of many of its subjects. Nokko organizes the book by scale, simulating the magnifying effect of moving from the urban scale to the building and spaces within it. Essays examine racial/spatial configurations from Africa to South America, notably in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Relevant to my thesis, the smallest-scale investigations (“1:1”) examine race as a “lens to focus architectonic investigations” through artistic investigation of material qualities such as light, shadow and texture, and symbolic qualities like pattern and sacred

17 BIBLIOGRAPHY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 meaning.

“Letters From New Orleans: The Jazz Architectural Workshop.” ANY: Ar- chitecture New York, No. 16: Whiteness: White Forms, Forms of White- ness. New York: ANYONE Corporation, 1996.

This article collects observations from the participants of the Jazz Archi- tectural Workshop, a conference held at Tulane University on April 12-14, 1996. JAW was organized by Prof. Nathaniel Belcher of Tulane (now of Penn State), and it aimed to “bring together scholars, architects and activists in the interest of examining the political and pedagogical issues at stake in the self-conscious articulation of African-American architecture.” Ideas explored included the shallowness of the idea of ‘Afrocentric architecture’’; the view of Black politics as ‘the bull in the china shop’ of White academia and the problems with that view; the necessity of Black- ness as a prerequisite for the idea of Whiteness (“The African-American is necessary for the White American’s identity, as the ‘outsider’ who marks the border of what is not American, and yet the African-American is American’, Ralph Ellison quoted by Pat Morton), and the ability of the idea of an African-American architectural discourse to begin to unravel the “mutually constitutive relationship between racism and bodies of knowledge”, quoting Mabel Wilson. Relevant to my thesis, M. David Lee draws a link directly between architecture and its social and political context, highlighting the particular importance of that link to communities of color.

Massey, Douglas S. and Nancy A. Denton, “Segregation and the Making of the Underclass.” Excerpted from American Apartheid, 1993, in The Urban Sociology Reader, ed. Lin & Mele. New York: Routledge, 2005.

In their canonical study, Massey and Denton explore the particular nature of ‘hypersegregation’ of Black Americans into ghettos worse and more enduring than those inhabited by previous generations of Amer- ican underclasses, namely poor European immigrants. Relevant to my thesis, the authors highlight the importance of laws in creating this situation, and speculate on the intractability of White racism, opining at one point that ‘perhaps the only way to eliminate segregation would be for whites to learn how to get along with and not fear African Americans’, putting the onus of change on White people.

Muhammad, Kahlil Gibran. The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime and the Making of Modern Urban America. Cambridge: Harvard Univer- sity Press, 2011

Muhammad, the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black

18 BIBLIOGRAPHY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 Culture of the New York Public Library, examines the growth of cities in 19th and 20th century America and the role of racist ideas about Black people in shaping those cities. Focusing particularly on ‘accepted’ scien- tific theories about the lesser morals and intellect and greater capacity for criminality among Black Americans, Muhammad explores the role of White supremacy in regulating movement of Black people through urban space, in transit and housing, and in the creation of social policies which constructed modern ‘White Americans’ out of European poor and working-class immigrants while separating them from Blacks of the same social class. Relevant to my thesis, Muhammad examines the role of institutions of higher education and government in building White supremacy.

Schindler, Sarah. “Architectural Exclusion: Discrimination and Segrega- tion through Physical Design of the Built Environment.” Yale Law Journal 124 2015 pp. 1934-2023

Schindler examines how aspects of urban built form, including highways, urban renewal projects, one-way streets, walls and planning policies themselves, perpetuate segregation and disparate outcomes for people of color. She examines cases in which these situations have been legally challenged, noting that courts have tended to ignore or deempha- size the role of race in design decisions. Relevant to my thesis, Schindler asserts that race in fact plays a considerable role in many planning and design decisions, such as the construction of I-375 and Mies van der Ro- he’s Lafaytte Park on the former site of the Black Bottom neighborhood, the construction of I-10 over the neutral ground of Claiborne Avenue in New Orleans, and the construction of public-transit infrastructure serving White communities and neglecting communities of color in Los Angeles by the LA County Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Schindler asserts that American cities should pursue programs to ameliorate the effects of this situation, such as consent decrees (employed in the LACMTA case, and as a part of the rebuilding and repairing of out- dated infrastructure.

Walker, Daniel E. No More, No More: Slavery and Cultural Resistance in Havana and New Orleans. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.

Comparing the traditions of the El Dia de los Reyes (Day of the Kings) festival in Havana and Congo Square in New Orleans, Walker examines the strategies used by white supremacist colonialists to control and dominate enslaved and free people of color in the 17th and 18th centuries. Relevant to my thesis, Walker explores practices of African cultural expression/resistance that were permitted, including in the realms of music and dance, and their development into modern cultural practices

19 BIBLIOGRAPHY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 including jazz and Mardi Gras Indian traditions of music, performance and masking.

Whyte, William H. City: Rediscovering the Center. New York: Doubleday, 1988.

Journalist and social scientist Whyte examines the form and function of public spaces, both successful and unsuccessful. Whyte’s study primarily focuses on New York City, but also examines other major American cities (notably Minneapolis) and their deadening through the construction of urban megastructure systems over or under streets. Relevant to my thesis, Whyte examines what design elements, including benches and other landscape features as well as larger urban signifiers (after Lynch, The Image of the City) ‘work’ and which do not work to ensure people’s comfort in public spaces.

Whitehead, Colson. The Underground Railroad. New York: Doubleday, 2016.

In his critically acclaimed fictional work, Whitehead constructs the narrative of Cora, a young woman who escapes from enslavement in Georgia and heads north on the Underground Railroad. Whitehead’s railroad, however, is an actual underground train, and it conveys Cora and her companions to literally different ‘states’ of racialized oppression, terror and genocide in the Carolinas, Tennessee and Indiana. Relevant to my thesis, Whitehead explores powerful currents in the enduring narrative of slavery and freedom, including the Underground Railroad, the North, star navigation, safe havens, terror and death.

Wiebelhaus-Brahm, Eric. Truth Commissions and Transitional Societies: The impact of human rights on democracy. London: Routledge, 2010

Focusing on the model of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, Wie- belhaus-Brahm examines different ways in which this process of national healing after periods of unjust governance can take place. TRCs in South Africa following apartheid, Chile following the rule of dictator Augusto Pinochet, and in El Salvador after its military dictatorships are examined. Relevant to my thesis, potential and realized programs for a bureaucratic apparatus for the administration of ‘truth and justice’, including reparations programs and permanent institutions of the state to ensure justice, are explored, notably in the case of South Africa.

Wacquant, Loic J.D. and William Julius Wilson, “The Cost of Racial and Class Exclusion in the Inner City.” Excerpted from Annals of the Ameri-

20 BIBLIOGRAPHY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 can Academy of Political and Social Science, 1988, in in The Urban Sociol- ogy Reader, ed. Lin & Mele. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Leading social scientists Wilson and Wacquant describe the conditions of deindustrialization and hypersegregation which are responsible for creating ‘the new urban underclass’ (Massey and Denton). The authors explore the social and economic costs of this situation, and at the larger social inequality underlying it. Relevant to my thesis, study of the South Side of Chicago examines the link between the fields of architecture and development in the modern city and the displacement of people of color (gentrification), encapsulated in the observation of a South Side resi- dent, “They want to build buildings for the rich and not us poor people.”

Young, Jr., Whitney M. Beyond Racism: Building an Open Society. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969

National Urban League president Young diagnoses the afflictions of Black America and places their cause within the actions of White systems of oppression, prefiguring the later findings of scholars like Massey, Denton, Lacquant and Wilson. Young links the project of civil rights advocacy to the protest movement to end the war in Vietnam and Amer- ican imperialism more broadly, a prominent current in the 1960s. Rel- evant to my thesis, Young writes as the political consciousness of Black Americans moved from the nonviolent protest of the Civil Rights era to organized resistance against the systems of White supremacy, and the theorizing of new systems which could deconstruct it.

Young, Jr. Whitney M. “Keynote Address to the 1968 AIA Convention.” Delivered June 25, 1968 at Portland, Oregon.

In “the speech that rocked a profession”, National Urban League president Young castigated the general body of the AIA for failing to work to advance the cause of civil or human rights. Young works to define and illuminate the systemic nature of racism, and lays the gauntlet out for the overwhelmingly White architects assembled to begin solving the racism in themselves, not just in pathologized Black people. Relevant to my thesis, he notes the link between planning and design policies and disparate outcomes for Black Americans. Young makes specific policy prescriptions to ameliorate the underrepresentation of Black people in the field, and highlights the benefits of work of becoming “parents and human beings”.

bibliography

Abbasov, Shahin. ‘Azerbaijan counts human cost of architecture.’ The Guardian, 14 July

21 BIBLIOGRAPHY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 2014. Accessed online.

Adams, Jessica. Wounds of Returning: Race, Memory and Property on the Postslavery Plantation. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2007.

Robert M. Adelman and Christopher Mele, ed. Race, Space and Exclusion : Segregation and Beyond in Metropolitan America. New York: Routledge, 2015.

American Friends Service Committee. ‘Freedom schools teach history of race, racism, local racial justice organizing.’ Blog post, 2 Feb 2015.

Anthony, Kathryn. Diversity in Design. Bloomington: University of Illinois Press, 2001.

Anthony Lemon, ed. Homes Apart: South Africa’s Segregated Cities. Bloomington: Indi- ana University Press, 1991.

Badger, Anthony J. ‘Different Perspectives on the Civil Rights Movement.’ History Now. Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, Web page, 2016.

Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. New York: Dial, 1963

Baljak, Mark. ‘Hayball’s South Melbourne Vertical School Wins on an International Scale.’ Urban Melbourne, 21 Nov 2016. Accessed online.

Barton, Craig E. Sites of Memory: Perspectives on Architecture and Race. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2001

Bebelle, Carol. Personal interview. 18 November 2016

Billings, David. Deep Denial: The Persistence of White Supremacy in United States His- tory and Life. Rosselle, NJ: Crandall, Dostie & Douglass, 2016.

Brainard, Patricia Jones. “White Lies: A Critical Race Study of Power and Privilege.” Dissertations, National Louis University, April 2009.

Branch, Taylor. Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1965-1968.’ New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998.

Branley, Edward. ‘NOLA History: New Orleans, Robert E. Lee, and the Lost Cause.’ gonola.com, 3 Sept 2013

Brinkley, Douglas. “Unmasking Writers of the W.P.A.” The New York Times, 2 Aug 2003.

Brown, Cynthia Stokes. Refusing Racism: White Allies and the Struggle for Civil Rights. New York: Columbia Teachers College Press, 2002.

Carey, Bill. ‘Highlander Folk School.’ The Tennessee Magazine, Feb 2013

Carla Jackson Bell, ed. Space Unveiled: Invisible Cultures in the Design Studio. New York: Routledge, 2015

Campanella, Richard. Geographies of New Orleans: Urban Fabrics Before the Storm. Lafayette: UL Press, 2006.

Campanella, Richard. ‘How a Louisiana native brought stout, stone Romanesque architecture to America.’ Times-Picayune, 6 July 2016.

Caro, Robert. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.

22 BIBLIOGRAPHY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 Callott, Chris. “American City Planning.” Guest lecture, Tulane University History of Architecture class, 2014.

Cass, Michael. ‘Preservationists work to save Highlander Folk School.’ The Nashville Tennessean, 14 Aug 2013.

Charter High School for Art and Design. ‘Our Story.’ Web page, 2016.

Children’s Defense Fund. ‘CDF Freedom Schools Program: History.’ Washington, DC, 2016. Accessed online.

Clay, Grady. Close-Up: How to Read the American City. Chicago: The University of Chi- cago Press, 1973.

Clemens, Oliver, Jesko Fezer, and Sabine Horlitz, eds., ‘Community Design. Involve- ment and Architecture in the US since 1963’, Anarchitektur, 2008

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “Black Pathology and the Closing of the Progressive Mind.” The Atlantic, 21 March 2014.

Crenshaw, Kimberle. ‘Fill The Void. Lift Your Voice. Say Her Name.’ The African Ameri- can Policy Forum. Web page, 2016.

Crutcher, Michael E., Jr. Treme: Race and Space in a New Orleans Neighborhood. Ath- ens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2010

Curry, Milton S. F. ‘Emancipation Theory.’ Appendx 1, 1997. Accessed online.

Daniels, J. Yolande. “Black Bodies, Black Space: A Waiting Spectacle.” Anthologized in White Paper, Black Marks: Architecture, Race, Culture, Lesley Naa Nor Lokko, ed. Lon- don: Athlone Press, 2000.

Darity, William A. “Forty Acres and a Mule in the 21st Century.” Social Science Quarter- ly, Vol. 89, No. 3. Sep 2008.

Davis, Felecia. ‘(Un)Covering/(Re)Covering.’ Anthologized in White Paper, Black Marks: Architecture, Race, Culture, Lesley Naa Nor Lokko, ed. London: Athlone Press, 2000. de Caro, Frank. ‘Emerging New Orleans Mardi Gras Traditions: The St. Joan of Arc Pa- rade and the Red Beans Krewe, 2010’. Folklife in Louisiana: Louisiana’s Living Traditions. Louisiana Office of Cultural Development, 2010. Accessed online.

Design and Architecture Senior High. ‘About Us.’ Web page, 2016.

‘Design as Protest Workshop.’ Facebook event, 29 Nov 2016.

Devore, Donald E. Defying Jim Crow: African American Community Development and the Struggle for Racial Equality in New Orleans, 1900-1960. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2015.

Dickinson, Freddie. ‘Reflections following 2015 National Organization of Minority Ar- chitects National Conference in New Orleans.’ Blog post. CTA Group, 18 Nov 2015.

Dickinson, Freddie. ‘Project Pipeline Curriculum.’ Personal communication, 14 Jan 2016.

Dier, Chris. ‘The History Surrounding New Orleans’ Confederate Monuments.’ Blog

23 BIBLIOGRAPHY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 post, Yat Lagniappe, 22 Dec 2015.

Donadio, Rachel. “Le Corbusier’s Architecture and His Politics Are Revisited.” The New York Times 12 July 2015. Accessed online.

Douglas, Lake. Public Spaces, Private Gardens: A History of Designed Landscapes in New Orleans. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2011.

Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: McClurg, 1903.

“El Lissitzky.” Monoskop 21 September 2016. Accessed online.

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Random House, 1952

Emery, Kathy, Linda Reid Gold and Sylvia Braselman. Lessons from Freedom Summer: Ordinary People Building Extraordinary Movements. Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 2008.

Enwezor, Okwui.’Gestures of Affiliation.’ David Adjaye: Form/Heft/Material. New Hav- en: Yale University Press, 2016.

Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School. ‘About Us.’ Web page, 2016.

Feldman, Nina. ‘A Radical Design Movement is Growing in New Orleans.’ NextCity, 12 Oct 2015.

Fields, Darrel Wayne. ‘A Black Manifesto.’ Essay in Appendx 1, online publication, 1997.

Fields, Darrel Wayne. Architecture in Black. London: The Athlone Press, 2000.

Findley, Lisa. “Red and Gold: A Tale of Two Apartheid Museums.” Places Journal, Febru- ary 2011. Accessed online.

Fletcher, Kenneth R. ‘A Brief History of Pierre L’Enfant and Washington, DC.’ Smithso- nian Magazine, May 2008. Accessed online.

Foucault, Michel, trans. Alan Sheridan. Discipline and Punish. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977.

Frankenberg, Erica, Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, Jia Wang and Gary Orfield. ‘Choice With- out Equity: Charter School Segregation and the Need for Civil Rights Standards.’ Civil Rights Project, UCLA, 26 June 2012. Accessed online.

Franklin, V.P. “African Americans and Movements for Reparations: From Ex-Slave Pen- sions to the Reparations Superfund.” The Journal of African-American History, Vol. 97, No. 1-2, Winter-Spring 2012, pp. 1-12.

Frearson, Amy. ‘Vertical school’ in Melbourne named Future Project of the Year 2016.’ Dezeen, 18 November 2016. Accessed online.

Fusco, Liz. ‘Freedom Schools in Mississippi, 1964.’ Educationanddemocracy.org, San Francisco Freedom Schools, 2016.

Gill, James. Lords of Misrule: Mardi Gras and the Politics of Race in New Orleans. Ox- ford, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1997.

Goldberg, David Theo. ‘Spatial Rhetorics.’ Appendx 3, 1997. Accessed online.

24 BIBLIOGRAPHY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 Goldstein, Brian D. “”The Search for New Forms”: Black Power and the Making of the Postmodern City.’ Journal of American History, Sep 2016, pp. 375-400.

Gordon, Shoshana. Personal communication with the author, 7 February 2017.

Guinier, Lani. The Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Government. New York: Free Press, 1994.

Harris, Dianne. “Seeing the Invisible: Reexamining Race and Vernacular Architecture.” Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2006, ppl 96-105.

Highlander Research and Education Center, ‘Timeline.’ New Market, TN, 2012. Ac- cessed online.

Hogan, Liam. “Irish ‘slaves’: the convenient myth.” openDemocracy, 14 January 2015. Published online.

Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House, 1961.

Janani. ‘What’s wrong with the term ‘person of color’? Black Girl Dangerous, 20 March 2013. Blog post.

Jenkins, Jack. ‘How A New York Seminary Became A Hub for Eric Garner Protests.’ ThinkProgress, 7 Dec 2014. Published online.

Jordan, Coleman A. “Rizomorphics of Race and Space: Ghana’s Slave Castles and the Roots of African Diasporic Identity.” Journal of Architecture Education, Vol. 60, no. 4. May 2007.

Jordan, Dasjon. Personal communication. February 2017.

Kaminer, Ariel. ‘Free tuition at Cooper Union May Be Near End.’ The New York Times, 15 Feb 2013. Accessed online.

Kamsler, Brigette. ‘Construction and Evolution of Union Theological Seminary Cam- pus.’ The Burke Library, Columbia University Libraries, New York, NY. Accessed online.

Karst, James. ‘Lee Circle by another name, a monument’s true label: Our Times,’Times-Picayune, 28 June 2015.

Kendi, Ibram X. Stamped from the Beginning: A History of Racist Ideas in America.

Kennedy, Liam. Race and Urban Space in Contemporary American Culture. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2000.

King, Rev. Dr. Martin L. Letter from a Birmingham Jail, 16 April 1963. Accessed online.

Kinnamon, Kenneth. Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993. Accessed online.

Klingman, John P. Personal interview, 2 Dec 2016.

Lachloff, Irwin and Catherine C. Kahn. The Jewish Community of NEw Orleans. Mount Pleasant, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2005.

25 BIBLIOGRAPHY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 ‘Lafayette Square.’ The Cultural Landscape Foundation, 2016. Accessed online.

Larino, Jennifer. ‘The history of New Orleans’ Lee Circle’. The New Orleans Times-Pica- yune, 24 June 2014.

Lea, Tracy, Personal communication. 21 March 2017.

Lee, Bryan C., Jr. Personal interview. 3 Nov 2016.

Lefebvre, Henri, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith. The Production of Space. Maiden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992.

Leung, Vicky. ‘Lafayette Square.’ Media Nola database, Tulane University, 2012. Accessed online.

Lincoln, C. Eric and Lawrence M. Mamiya. The Black Church in the African American Experience. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990.

Lingenfelter, Jessie. ‘Project Pipeline camp mentors architecture students in New Orle- ans.’ The Times-Picayune, 1 Aug 2013. Accessed online.

Lipsitz, George. ‘The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race: Theorizing the Hidden Architecture of Landscape.’ Landscape Journal, Jan 2007.

Loeb, Carolyn and Andreas Luescher. The Design of Frontier Spaces: Control and Ambi- guity. New York: Routledge, 2015.

Lynd, Staughton. ‘The Freedom Schools: An Informal History.’ Against the Current, Vol 108, Jan-Feb 2004. Accessed online.

McGlone, Patti. ‘How the African American museum is raising the bar for black philanthropy. The Washington Post, 24 May 2016.

McNeill, Brian. ‘Hollywood celebrities’ unsung role in the civil rights movement.’ VCU News, 24 April 2015. Published online.

McNulty, Ed. ‘Mississippi Freedom Summer Project, Part 2.’ Blog post.Visual Parables, 11 July 2014.

Medley, Keith Weldon. Black Life in Old New Orleans. Gretna: Pelican Publishing Com- pany, 2014.

Messner, Matthew. ‘Milton S.F. Curry, associate dean at Taubman College, on race, class, public education and the future of architecture.’ Architects Newspaper, published online 10 February 2017.

Metcalfe, G.E. Great Britain and Ghana: Documents of Ghana History, 1807-1957. Accra: University of Ghana, 1964.

Miller, Dr. Paige Putnam. “Madam C.J. Walker Building.” USDI/NPS NRHP Registration Form. 4 June 1990.

Mitchell, Melvin L. The Crisis of the African-American Architect: Conflicting Cultures of Architecture and (Black) Power. New York: Writers Advantage, 2003.

Mobley, Suzanne. Written communcation. February 2017.

Moore, Leonard N. Black Rage in New Orleans: Police Brutality and African American

26 BIBLIOGRAPHY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 Activism from World War II to Hurricane Katrina. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2010.

Moore, Michael ‘Quess?’ “What’s Next?” Take Em Down NOLA, 23 March 2017.

Morrison, Toni. ‘Press release upon acceptance of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature.’ Helsinki: Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, 7 Oct 1993.

New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. ‘About NOCCA.’ Web page., 2016

Neely, Brooke and Michelle Samura. “Social geographies of race: connecting race and space.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 34, No. 11, Nov. 2011 pp. 1933-1952

Noble, Jonathan Alfred. African Identity in Post-Apartheid Public Architecture: White Skin, Black Masks. London: Ashgate, 2011.

NOMA Louisiana. ‘Mission - Project Pipeline.’ NOMA Lousiana Project Pipeline, 2016. Website.

Pacheco, Antonio. “AN talks to Gabrielle Bullock, global director of diversity at Per- kins+Will’, Architects Newspaper, 13 Oct 2016.

Price, Mark. ‘Future unclear for Charlotte staircases former slaves may have made.’ The Charlotte Observer, 24 February 2016. Accessed online.

Ohlheiser, Abby. ‘How Colin Kaepernick’s protest was felt at the African American Mu- seum’s opening.’ The Washington Post, 24 September 2016. Accessed online.

Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death. Boston: Harvard University Press, 1982.

Phillip, Abby. “Why Bree Newsome took down the Confederate flag in S.C. ‘I refuse to be ruled by fear.’ The Washington Post, 29 June 2015. Accessed online.

Pugh, Evelyn. ‘New Orleans City Council Adopted Monuments Ordinance.’ Press release, New Orleans City Council. 17 December 2015.

Quigley, Bill, quoted in ‘New Orleans’ residents on edge as Confederate monument removal looms.’ The Louisiana Weekly, 21 November 2016. Accessed online.

Radcliff, Michael. ‘Remembering Dorothy Mae Taylor: The First Lady of 1300 Perdido Street.’ The Louisiana Weekly, 14 June 2011. Accessed online.

Raeburn, Michael. Architecture of the Western World. Print: Rizzoli, New York, 1980. Print.

Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014.

Rasmussen, Daniel. American Uprising: The Untold Story of America’s Largest Slave Revolt. New York: Harper Collins, 2011.

Rice, Louis. ‘Occupied Space.’ Jonathan Mosley and Rachel Sara, ed., Architectural Design, Oct-Nov. 2013.

Roberts, Lindsey. ‘Pipeline Project Introduces Louisiana Students to Architecture.’ Ar- chitect, 16 August 2012. Accessed online.

Rosenfeld, Gavriel D. Building After Auschwitz: Jewish Architecture and the Memory of the Holocaust. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011.

27 BIBLIOGRAPHY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 Ruff, Scott. Personal interview. 23 August 2016

Ruff, Scott. “Review: White Papers, Black Marks: Architecture, Race, Culture.’ Journal of Architecture Education, Vol. 56, No. 1, Sep. 2002, p. 58

Rovner, Marc. Diversity in Giving: The Changing Face of American Philanthropy. Black- baud, 2015.

Savelson, Kim Anne. ‘The Places of Feminist Criticism: Gender, Race, Sexuality and Space.’ Essay in Appendx 1, online publication, 1997.

Severson, Kim. ‘A $147 Million Signal of Faith in Atlanta’s Public Schools.’ The New York Times, 6 August 2013. Accessed online.

Schorr, Daniel. “A New, ‘Post-Racial’ Political Era in America.” All Things Considered, National Public Radio, 28 January 2008.

Scott-Brown, Denise, Robert Venturi and Steven Izenour. Learning from Las Vegas. Second edition. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977.

Scroggin, Meredith. ‘‘Black Lives Matter began as a love letter to black people.’’ Odyssey, 28 March 2016. Published online.

Silver, James W. Mississippi: The Closed Society. Oxford, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 1964.

Solange feat. Master P. ‘Interlude: For Us By Us.’ A Seat at the Table, Columbia Records, 2016.

Stein, Pippa and Ruth Jacobsen. Sophiatown Speaks. Johannesburg: Junction Avenue Press, 1987.

Stephen, Curtis. ‘David Adjaye: Breaking Barriers and Building Community.’ The Crisis, Jan-Feb 2006. Accessed online.

Stock, Francine. ‘National American Bank (Lee Circle branch), 1952-54, razed 2007.’ Blog post in Regional Modernism: The New Orleans Archives, 25 Feb 2011.

Sturkey, William and Jon N. Hale. To Write in the Light of Freedom: The Newspapers of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Schools. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015.

Suber, Malcolm. “What’s Next?” Take Em Down NOLA, 23 March 2017.

Sullivan, Laura, Tatjana Meschede, Lars Deitrich, and Thomas Shapiro. “The Racial Wealth Gap.” Brandeis University Institute for Assets and Social Policy/Demos, 2016.

Take Em Down NOLA Coalition, “The Monuments’, 2016. Accessed online

Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. ‘What Is ArcPrep?’ Web page, 2017.

Tharoor, Ishaan. “US owes black people reparations for a history of ‘racial terrorism’, says UN panel,” The Washington Post 27 Sept 2016

The NET Charter High School. ‘Our Approach.’ Web page, 2017.

Thomas, Lynell. Desire and Disaster in New Orleans: Tourism, Race and Historical Memory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.

28 BIBLIOGRAPHY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 Toledano, Roulhac. New Orleans Architecture. Volume II: The American Sector. Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing, 1971.

West, Dr. Cornel. Race Matters. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993.

West, Dr. Cornel. ‘On Architecture.’ Lecture, compiled in Appendx 2, online publication, 1997.

West, Dr. Cornel and Steve McQueen. ‘Paul Robeson, Art and Politics.’ Lecture, Whit- ney Museum of American Art, 1 May 2016. Accessed online.

Wiley, Amber N. ‘A Model School for a Model City: Shaw Junior High School as a monument to planning reform.’ Compiled in Darrian-Smith, Kate and Julie Willis, Design- ing Schools: Space, Place and Pedagogy, New York: Routledge, 2017.

Wiley, Amber N. “History of Mesopotamia and the Middle East.” Lecture, Tulane Uni- versity History of Architecture class, 25 Sept 2013

Wiley, Amber N. ‘The Dunbar High School Dilemma: Architecture, Power and African American Cultural Heritage.’ Buildings and Landscapes, vol. 20, no. 1, Spring 2013.

Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migra- tion. New York: Random House, 2010.

Williams, Chad, Kidada E. Williams and Keisha N. Blain. Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism and Racial Violence. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2016.

Williams, Rhonda. The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles Against Urban Inequality. London: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Williamsburg High School for Architecture and Design. ‘About Us.’ Web page, 2016.

Wilson, Mabel O. ‘Other Monumentalities.’ Essay in David Adjaye: Form/Heft/Material. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016.

Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Second edition. London: Oxford University Press, 1966.

Wortman, Marc. Fighting the Shadow War. New York: Grove Press, 2016. Excerpted in Vanity Fair, April 2016.

Zewde, Sara. Theory, Place and Opportunity: Black Urbanism as a Design Strategy for the Potential Removal of the Claiborne Expressway in New Orleans. Masters’ thesis, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, MIT. Jun 2010.

29 BIBLIOGRAPHY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 conceptual diagrams

1) Our State (The Battle of Liberty Place)

2) ...... Alton Sterling

30 CONCEPT chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 3) The Beast of Ignorance

3) Total Control

31 CONCEPT chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 5) Perception

Black space in white with white space black; White space in black with black space white.

Black space in black with White space white, White space in white with Black space black.

32 CONCEPT chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 conceptual case studies

a critical design pedagogy for the deconstruction of white supremacy

33 CASE STUDY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 carver bank

North Omaha, NE, USA Theaster Gates/Rebuild Foundation in collaboration with U. of Kansas School of Architecture and Eldorado, Inc, 2013

Originating in a partnership between principals of community design firm eldorado and chicago-based conceptual artist/designer Theaster Gates, the Carver Bank occupies two historic buildings in the Lake Street business district of North Omaha. Like the historic Black business district of many american cities, the area suffered from the combined effects of racist disinvestment and urban renewal projects, including a nearby freeway, and the movement of middle-class Black families to the suburbs since the end of legal housing discrimination.

The project began as a ‘town hall’ envisioned in a series of community meetings organized by Gates, whose work through his Rebuild Project on the South Side Carver Bank building, above right, built 1913. Commercial building of Chicago has focused around similar at 2416 Lake St, left, built 1914, can be seen in 1963 photo below as a projects of reusing historic buildings in Nation of Islam mosque. Malcolm X, Civil rights activist and leader of communities of color as democratically the Nation of Islam, was born in North Omaha. accessible community spaces in projects such as the Listening and Archive Houses (2011) and the Stony Island Arts Bank (2015). The local artistic community was engaged, with funding secured through community and philanthropic organizations, notably the Bemis Center, Omaha’s contemporary arts museum. Through one of the meetings, local entrepreneur Patrice ‘Big Mama’ Barron, owner of a sandwich shop, was identified as a tenant for a planned commercial space.

Carver Bank functions as a community gathering space, with its two halls available for booking as meeting and event venues. In this way, it resembles Project Row Houses (1994), a Houston, TX adaptive-reuse project which began with Segregated Black community artist residence and display space and has of north omaha since expanded to include extensive social support programs, community shared workspaces, and community-developed and controlled affordable housing.

http://northomaha.blogspot.com/2016/07/a- short-history-of-north-omahas-24th.html

Town hall meeting https://rebuild-foundation.org/sites/

Indoor/outdoor performance http://www.bemiscenter.org/community_arts/ carver_bank.html

http://www.eldo.us/8423/the-el-dorado-studio-spring-semester/

https://leoadambiga.com/2012/12/05/carver- building-rebirthed-as-arts-culture-haven- Big Mama’s Sandwich Shop theaster-gates-rebuild-and-bemis-reimagine- Youth art exhibition opening north-omaha/ 34 CASE STUDY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 red location New Brighton Township, Port Elizabeth, Eastern Cape, South Africa Noero Wolff Architects, 2006

Red Location, so named for the rusted-red corrugated tin shacks typical of the housing in the district, began as a resettlement camp for Africans displaced by the Boer Wars in the early 20th century. It was the first Black township of the colonial British city of Port Elizabeth. As racial repression evolved into the post- WWII policy of total racialized social control known as apartheid, Red Location fostered a vibrant community and site of resistance.

Museum of Struggle, first built component of Red Location Precinct plan It was here that the African National Con- gress political organization, later a leader in the dismantling of the apartheid state, organized and won its first battles to unionize exploited Black workers. Many anti-apartheid activists and politicans, including Govan Mbeki and Raymond Mhlaba, came out of the township. Today, it remains a poor and working-class Rusted corrugated tin workers’ housing neighborhood, no less vibrant and newly empowered to write its own history.

Drawing on extensive study of the context, and on the work of theorist Andreas Huyssen, architects Jo Noero and Heinrich Wolff created a museum where the viewer particpates in, rather than consumes, the narratve. The Museum of Struggle holds 12 ‘memory boxes’, 6mx6mx12m high, which contain con- templative galleries displaying collections of artifacts, in no particular order or hierarchy. The Museum also contains an auditorium, library, offices, a memorial space, and an art gallery.

Factories owned by Western corporations: early sites of African labor organizing The Museum is the first component of the Red Location Cultural Precinct, currently under construction in phases. With this project, Noero Wolff intend Museum of to create a social and economic, as well Struggle as cultural and memorial, center for the historic neighborhood, all immediately Soccer field adjacent to the train station connecting Art & craft Red Location to Port Elizabeth. school

Performing arts venues http://www.archidatum.com/projects/red-loca- Art gallery Train station tion-museum-noero-and-wolff-architects/ http://www.noeroarchitects.com/red-location-cultural-precinct-competition-entry-draw- Housing ings/ https://placesjournal.org/article/red-and-gold- a-tale-of-two-apartheid-museums/

35 CASE STUDY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 places of rememberance

Bayerische Viertel, Berlin, Germany Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock, 1993

The Bayerische Viertel (Bavarian Quarter) of Berlin’s Schoneburg section was home to 16,000 German Jews in the Weimar Republic period, including Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt. As Jewish humanity was undermined by increas- ingly restrictive laws through the 1920s and 1930s, the neighborhood was one of those most affected. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the neighborhood (formerly in East Berlin) sought to commemorate this history.

Graphic artists Stih and Schnock designed and placed 80 signs around the neighborhood, each with a simple graphic element on one side which served as shorthand for the regulatory act written on the other side along with the date of its imposition. The signs are , in their cre- ators’ words, “a metaphor for of the daily deprivation of rights and humiliation, leading to deportions and mass murder of Jews during the Nazi era.

Prohibition against Jewish men must take the first Prohibition against the employ- Jewish veterinarians, name ‘Israel’; Jewish women must ment of Jewish musicians, April 4, 1936 take the first name ‘Sarah’ March 31, 1935 August 17, 1938 General prohibition of Jewish employment January 17, 1939

3 m

http://www.stih-schnock.de/remembrance. html.

http://chgs.umn.edu/museum/memorials/ remembrance/

36 CASE STUDY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 aschrott brunnen 1908 Rathausehrenhof, Kassel, Hesse, Germany Horst Hohiesel, 1985

Jewish entrepreneur Sigmund Aschrott donated a fountain, designed by city architect Karl Roth, in the town square of the central German city of Kassel in 1939 1908. The obelisk was destroyed by Nazi activists in 1939, with the base used as a flowerbed and as a fountain, without its obelisk, until 1987. Artist and scupltor Hohiesel, calling this a ‘symbol of mem- ories repressed, the desire to forget’ the victims of National Socialism, proposed casting a full-scale replica of Roth’s fountain and inverting it. Water flows from the outline of the circular basin into the 28-foot-deep inverse obelisk, noisily crashing down into dark nothingness.

1987 In Hohiesel’s words, “The form that Ger- mans destroyed between 1933 and 1945 can no longer be grasped, either mentally or physically. Instead of continuously searching for yet another explanation or interpretation of that which has been lost, I prefer facing the loss as a vanished form. A reflective listening into the void, into the negative of an irretrievable form, where the memory of that which has been lost resounds, is preferable to a mere numb endurance of the facts.’

Through its negativity, the Aschrottbrun- nen ‘‘serves to create a discourse among visitors, who engage in conversations about what the fountain is and what it means. The negative form, however, is still viewed as problematic by most viewers, who would prefer something “uplifting.’ Hoheisel has noted that the foundation can be reversed and made like the original form. However, he thinks this should only happen when there is a strong concensus about the meaning of the Holocaust for Germans.’’

Hohiesel & Knitt, ‘Aschrott Fountain, Kassel.’ http://www.knitz.net/index. php?Itemid=3&id=30&option=com_con- tent&task=view&lang=en.

http://www.zermahlenegeschichte. de/index.php?option=com_con- tent&task=view&id=30&Itemid=32

http://chgs.umn.edu/museum/memorials/ into nothingness hoheisel/fountain.html 37 CASE STUDY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 jewish museum berlin Berlin, Germany Studio Libeskind, 1999 The systematic murder of six million Jews and other “‘undesirables” by the Nazi German regime between 1941 and 1945 has been interpreted by some scholars as ‘a specific byproduct of Enlightenment rationality’, contrasted with “‘some of the best works of the human spirit [which spring from] irrationality” (Rosenfeld, 2011).

While remaining secretive about exactly how he incorporated them into his design process, Libeskind cites sources for the form of this project including lines drawn on a map of Berlin between homes of Libeskind’s building links prominent murdered Jews; an uncom- to its older neighbor via pleted opera by a German Jewish compos- underground passageway er; and a collection of Walter Benjamin short stories about Weimar-era Berlin. In acknowledging these influences, Libes- kind reveals how his building was shaped by the legacy of the Holocaust.

Designing in the politically contested climate of late-90s Berlin, in which conservative German political leaders were striving to ‘normalize’ Nazi atrocities, Libeskind strove to make a strong statement about the preservation of memory, ‘reconnecting... Berlin to its own eradicated memory’ and fighting ‘historical amnesia’.

Officially ‘the Jewish Department’ of the Berlin Museum, which is housed in a restored 18th century building next door, Libeskind’s building takes a ‘confrontational stance’ far from formally or materially nostalgic postmodernism. The building is organized around a number of voids, some of which can be entered but some of which cannot. These ” represent the missing cultural production of Jews murdered in the Holocaust, and the millions of their children who never came into being as a result of their murder.”

The building was much loved from the beginning, but many critics believed its angular spaces adapted awkwardly to serving as a museum, with some wondering if it could not have been left empty as an abstract Holocaust memorial. In any event, the success of the project solidified Libeskind’s identity as a Jewish architect, and led to numerous commissions for synagogues, Jewish schools and community centers, many of which similarly continue his ‘fight against forgetting.’

Central void (in black, http://libeskind.com/work/jewish-muse- above, and pictured, um-berlin/ right) http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/02/arts/ design/02conn.html 38 CASE STUDY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 arcus center for social justice leadership

Kalamazoo College, Kalamazoo, MI USA Studio Gang, 2014

The work of social justice organizing, as Jeanne Gang notes in an interview about her new classroom and conference center on the campus of Kalamazoo College, is traditionally done in ad hoc spaces. Home kitchens, basements, church sanctuaries, even beneath trees - all are spaces from which movements for liberation, rights and equity have drawn great strength. In designing a space for social justice organizing,

Gang and her firm incorporated many elements of these spaces, from a central ‘hearth’, to a contextually rooted wood masonry wall system, to expansive views of the surrounding vegetation. Gang carefully devised a plan allowing several groups of different sizes to occupy the Arcus Center simultaneously, and perhaps most remarkably, created within its complex curves a space devoid of axis or hierarchy beyond the centrality of the hearth.

Particular care is taken in the design of the Arcus Center’s circulation, both inside and outside the enclosure, to provide handicapped ramps fully integrated into the overall scheme.

Contextual transparency: town, gown and woods

Spatial Facade Cladding scale: scale detail wood masonry vs. traditional

http://studiogang.com/project/arcus-center-for-social-justice-leadership Non-axial Hearth Traditional axial circulation: circulation United States Capitol https://reason.kzoo.edu/csjl/

39 CASE STUDY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 national museum of african american history and culture The Mall, Washington, DC USA 17 degree slope of Corona panels Freelon Adjaye Bond, 2016 matches slope of Washington Monument obelisk The newest addition to the Smithsonian Institution, the official state museum of the American government, the NMAAHC opened in September 2016, the hundredth anniversary of the initial request of Black servicemembers for a ‘National Negro Memorial’ on the Mall in Washington, DC. Occupying the highly visible ‘knuckle’ between the White House -Jefferson Memorial N-S axis and the Capitol-Lincoln Memorial E-W axis, the museum is meant to be seen in the round. A filigreed screen covers the glass New box holding the modern culture galleries, Orleans Charleston offices and other support spaces, while the permanent collections - the largest display of Black historical artifacts in the country - is underground.

Ghanian-British architect Adjaye, already well-regarded for his Francis A. Greg- ory and William O. Lockridge Public Libraries in Washington, DC, won the competiton to design the NMAAHC alond with a consortium including two of America’s most notable architects of color, Phil Freelon and J. Max Bond, Jr. Freelon and Bond both had experience designing museums and other educational buildings for Black institutions.

‘Corona’ In their design, the architects eschewed the traditional Greco-Roman monumentality of the Mall for an African and African-American-inspired formal and language but maintained the scale and dignity befitting a project of national historical significance. The screen, or ‘corona’, draws inspiration from ironwork of enslaved craftsmen in Charleston, SC and New Orleans, LA, for which both cities are famed without any recognition of the role Black people played in its creation. In this and many other ways, the architects aim to shift the conversation Carved figure by Oluwe of Ise, Nigeria toward mainstream acceptance and use of references to African and African-Ameri- Audiovisual projection on Corona can design in American public buildings, highlighting the four-century presence, value, and vitality of Black life and culture in America.

https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/building

East porch https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/ and walkway over lifestyle/national-museum-of-african-ameri- Oculus turbulent pool symbolizing can-history-and-culture/guided-tour/ site of Middle Passage reflection http://www.adjaye.com/projects/civic-buildings/francis-gregory-neighborhood-library/

40 CASE STUDY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 ghanaian national museum of slavery and freedom

Cape Coast, Ghana New public park and plaza on Adjaye Associates, presently privatized land between Anticipated completion 2019 museum and beach Beginning in 1482, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Swedish, and British expeditions to what was then called the Gold Coast of West Africa (today Ghana) established a number of military outposts to protect the establishment of trade in the region. Enslaved Africans, who made up a significant proportion of the ‘goods’ moved through the castles in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, were kept in their dungeons between kidnapping and the journey across the ocean (Jordan, 2007).

Cape Coast Slave Castle was constructed by the Swedes in 1653, and captured by the British in 1664. The castle, like others including Osu (Christiansborg) Castle in Accra, were used as seats of government administration (Metcalfe, 1964); Osu Cas- tle remains the capitol building of Ghana today, while Cape Coast Castle served as the colonial administrative headquarters for the Cape Coast district.

The establishment of a National Museum of Slavery and Freedom by the Ghana- ian government is intended to serve as a symbol of closure for the descendants of enslaved Africans and of enslavers; inspire confrontation of racism and genocide worldwide; and reverse the negative psychological impact of the defama- tion of Africanness worldwide, among other goals (GNMOsaF). The museum is intended as a ‘sister museum’ to Adjaye’s wolof NMAAHC in Washington, DC (pg. 34). bambara hausa christ church cathedral mende yoruba The museum complex includes outdoor akan ibo public space, a conference center, and kongo a new district of hotels, residences and bakongo businesses to be developed by Strategic Urban Development Alliance, a Black mbundu American and African-owned Oakland, CA-based company (SUDA, Inc). cape coast castle cape coast slave castle

Ethnic groups enslaved and locations of slave castles on the coast of West Africa

Ghanaian granite panels contrast physically and symbolically with whitewashed bricks of slave castle, distinguish mu- https://abagond.wordpress.com/2010/05/21/ seum buildings from concrete the-transatlantic-slave-trade/ and plastered buildings of Cape Coast context http://www.gnmosaf.org/ https://theculturetrip.com/africa/ghana/articles/ghana-s-slave-castles-the-shocking-story- of-the-ghanaian-cape-coast/

http://www.sudallc.com/about-us/

41 CASE STUDY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 constitutional court of south africa constitution hill, johannesburg, gauteng, south africa urban solutions/omm design workshop, 1997

Following the fall of apartheid in 1994 and the engagement of the nation in an official bureaucratic process of truth and reconciliation, the new South African Constitution took effect in 1997. One institution mandated by its framers was a new Constitutional Court.

Johannesburg’s Old Fort jail complex, built in the 1890s, was used to imprison bricks of court chamber wall reused from waiting and torture members of the anticolonial room of awaiting trial block, old fort jail and antiapartheid movements. It was chosen as the site for the new Constitu- tional Court, with President Mandela decreeing it a “beacon of light, hope and celebration”, in parallel construction to the darkness and injustice of its previous incarnation.

The winning submission by OMM Design Workshop and Urban Solutions focuses on the role of its buildings in framing democratic urban space, noting the importance of one’s fundamental freedoms to sit, stand, chat, linger or plaza outside main foyer used for move on. “Grand dominant monuments public gathering and protest are only needed to represent victories of war, exclusivity in the face of a threat to an unpopular social system, economic or elite social power…’ the architects wrote. The design incorporates glass ‘towers of light’, which extend the profiles of stair towers of a now-demolished component of the prison.

Extensive use is made of handcrafted artistic elements considered as “integrated components” of the design, rather than applied afterward. These include ceramic tiles representing each of the 28 articles of the new Constitution, mosaic-covered ‘tree’ columns in the High Courtroom’s foyer, and a stainless-steel sunscreen over the windows to the ‘gallery wing’ of the building, a grand staircase in which a Light towers in context with Hillbrow skyscrapers rotating display of works by South African (above), and as structures attached to stair towers of artists are on display. now-demolished Awaiting Trial Block (below) The architects took care to ensure that the procurement process allowed for access by Black South Africans who would not enter a formal artistic competition like that used to produce the aforementioned elements; to this end, they collaborated with administrators from local arts organizations to source designs for carpet and light-fixture coverings.

http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/histori- Plaques explaining history of Awaiting Trial Block, cal-background-constitutional-court justification for its selective demolition, and manner http://urbanworks.co.za/constitution-hill/ of its reappropriation http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/trend- lines/16059/south-africa-s-courts-have-become-key-constitutional-defender 42 CASE STUDY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 an antiracist architecture

a critical design pedagogy for the deconstruction of white supremacy

43 ESSAY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 “[White supremacy] is, for this country, the monster in the mythology that you have to kill for the kingdom to be well. It’s always something you don’t want to do, and it’s always so much about confronting yourself that it’s tailor-made for you to fail dealing with it.

The question of your success is, can you confront it honestly, and do you have the energy to sustain an attack on it?”

Wynton Marsalis Jazz musician

44 chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 how does it feel to be the problem?

The Black American author Richard Wright, when asked in 1946 by a French journalist what he thought of “the Negro problem in the United States”, responded “There isn’t any Negro problem; there is only a White problem” (Kinnamon, 1993).

Wright’s tone was wry, but there was substance behind his sar- casm. The failure of the White-dominated field of architecture to design and implement just and equitable interventions in Black spaces is not due to biological or cultural deficiencies of Black people, but a result of the intentional exclusion of Black people from the fields of architecture and architectural theory, the White supremacist norms of architectural practice, and the White supremacist capitalist political-economic system which architectural practitioners serve (Lokko, 2000).

Designing a public-housing project, institutional complex, civic monument or cultural center to occupy an ostensibly ‘public’ space or replace a Black residential neighborhood may be viewed as a neutral or even positive intervention by a White architect or politician, but it may be nothing less and nothing more than an act of White supremacist state terrorism to the person whose generational family home is summarily razed, or who must walk daily past a monument to a ‘hero’ whose ‘valor’ was in the defense of a system founded upon their status as chattel.

the fallacy of white supremacy

White supremacy is a foundational norm of systems of political and social relations throughout the world (Christian, 2002), particularly in areas colonized by Europeans in which the social and economic system of chattel slavery was employed. White supremacy is premised on the fallacy that there is a hierachy of human value, and that the color of your skin can place you higher or lower in it than someone whose skin is a different color. This fallacy is reinforced by society’s institutions, because its perpetuation is advantageous to the maintenance of power by those who control these institutions (Bebelle, 2016).

Design, a tool of the powerful, has maintained the system of White supremacy during the era of legal slavery and after its abolition (Savelson, 1997). Architectural forms and spaces are regulatory ‘means’ regularly employed to reinforce the political ‘end’ of White supremacy, actively implicating the discipline of architecture in the perpetuation of racialized oppression (Lefebvre, 1992).

What does a design practice which can be employed by a White cisgender male architect to actively counter and dismantle the system of White supremacy and its intersectional oppressions, and the forms and

45 ESSAY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 spaces created through an application of an antiracist intersectional feminist architectural design practice, look like?

the regulatory nature of architecture

Architecture is an apparatus for creating and sustaining power relationships independent of the presence of the people who operate them (Foucault, 1975), its forms serving as mechanisms of social control (Goldberg, 1977).

Every intervention in the built environment is a means toward a political end (Neely and Samura, 2009). Those who control the process of spatial intervention, from policymakers to planners to architects, are political actors who hold beliefs about the world they would like to see their buildings create. Because of its symbolic capacity to affect the thoughts, emotions and actions of people within spaces, architecture is an effective strategy for articulating visions of the future and regulating human behavior for the fulfillment of those visions. One of the consis- tent ways to limit the economic and political rights of groups has been to constrain social reproduction by limiting access to space (Lefebvre).

Architects and planners employ spatial interventions as policymakers employ laws, to reinforce and regulate norms of human behavior (Schindler, 2015). Because the architect designs according to their knowledge of the world and individual understanding of it, knowledge of the architect’s identity can be instructive in an analysis of the power structures at work within an intervention (Fields, 1997), even if the relatively low public exposure of most architects outside the discipline itself ne- cessitates that built-environment inteventions also be considered from an objective perspective based on the success or failure of their designs (Klingman, 2016.)

The identity of the architect, as a gendered and raced human being, plays a foundational role in design of places and spaces, which are themselves raced and gendered (Boddie, 2010). However, care must be taken to avoid ‘overdetermining’ or stereotyping the architect as merely a reflection of percieved identity, and discounting the uniqueness of their individual thought (Curry, 1997).

form follows descriptive representation

The political-science term ‘descriptive representation’ expresses the idea that it takes policymakers who belong to certain communities to craft effective and just policy for the benefit of those communities. It has been recognized for decades that the presence of women and people of color in government to is a prerequisite for the effective representation

46 ESSAY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 of the interests of women and people of color (Guinier, 1994), and many designers of color recognize the limitations of identity in one’s ability to truly understand the perspectices of people belonging to other groups. For example, “an American, even an African American... would never fully comprehend the richness and power of [African patterns], not know- ing whether what was appropriated had a particular meaning, or perhaps no meaning, in its culture of origin... always being seen through the veil of [the designer’s] culture - [in this case,] American culture (Davis, 2000).

Architecture continues to ignore the need for descriptive representation, an ignorance it maintains at its own peril (Mitchell, 2003). It is estimated that women make up about 15% of the membership of the American Institute of Architects, while people of color as a whole make up about 9%, and African Americans are less than 2% of the field despite comprising over 30% of the population of states including Mississippi,

Louisiana, Georgia and Maryland, and over 50% of the population of The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ White, male many major cities, including New Orleans, Detroit, Baltimore and Wash- image of the architect ington, DC (Anthony, 2001).

Norms of architectural practice are determined by architecture’s practitioners; with demographics like these, it’s no wonder White male history and practice are the ‘mainstream’, while the work of women and designers of color is considered on the margins, if at all (Daniels, 2000). The proscribed presence of women and people of color in architecture is predetermined by socioeconomic access constraints, including the gender pay and intergenerational racial wealth gaps (Mobley, 2017). Ga- brielle Bullock of Perkins+Will Architects calls the lack of racial, ethnic and gender diversity “the most significant problem facing the profession” (Pacheco, 2016).

intersectionality and enforced silence

Powerful critics, including Denise Scott Brown and Whitney Young, have assailed the architectural profession’s lack of diversity. But when criticism of White male hegemony in architecture has been articulated from places of power into the ears of architects, it has often failed to incorporate intersectionality.

Intersectionality is the feminist analysis of how race, gender, class, sexual orientation and other identities create overlapping and interlock- ing systems of oppression, or an intersectional consideration of underrepresentation (hooks, 2015).

Scott Brown, in her call for the inclusion of women in the field in the introduction to the second edition of Learning from Las Vegas (Ven- turi and Scott Brown, 1977), does not mention the miniscule numbers of

47 ESSAY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 architects of color. Whitney Young in his speech to the AIA decries the field’s Whiteness but accepts its maleness (Young, 1968).

Subsequent designers and theorists of color including J. Yolande Daniels, Darrel Fields, Mabel O. Wilson, David Adjaye and Theaster Gates, and White architects engaged in projects addressing the effects of White supremacy, historical memory and social justice education like Jeanne Gang, Jo Noero and Daniel Libeskind lead the field in addressing past wrongs and articulating a vision for a just and equitable future.

But these designers, and their work, are miniscule fractions of the overwhelmingly White and male field. And their published work, including the digital journal Appendx, Fields’ Architecture in Black and a number of anthologies, fails to break into the mainstream of architectural discourse. This is a predictable effect of the publishing industry’s systemic marginalization of the voices of people of color (hooks, 2015), a ”silence enforced on the lips” of Black creatives, including architects. Fields’ proposed remedy, an increase in theory and built-work production by Black designers (Fields), is a part of the solution but cannot be considered its totality. White people created and perpetuate these systems, and people who need to think that they are White must work accountably alongside people called Black and other people of color (see ‘On Language’, pg. 3).

on "black pathology"

When largely White-male-designed urban renewal projects in communities of color across the country were deemed ‘failures’, from Pruitt-Igoe in 1978 to the Big Four in New Orleans in 2006, blame was laid on the Modernist movement which produced them (Jencks, 1977), on the planning policies and administration under which they were implemented (Bristol, 1991) and on the ‘pathologies’ of the Black and brown men, women and children who occupied them (Coates, 2014).

What if the ‘pathology’ is not in communities of color, but in the Whiteness of the architectural offices, academic institutions, practices, and history which produced the ideologies and designs themselves? What if the failures of these designs were themselves the result of systematic government disinvestment and decisions politically expedient for the maintenance of White supremacy?

What does it look like to dismantle White supremacy within architectural pedagogy? Within architectural practice?

What does it look like to design for the dismantling of White supremacy? How can this be done within the context of a White supremacist government, nation and civilization? photographs: wikimedia commons

48 ESSAY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 listening for the silences

In order to assess how contemporary design methodology rein- forces White supremacy, and in order to articulate an intersectional antiracist design methodology, we must first examine how architecture has been used as a tool for the reinforcement of oppressive political systems, critically interpreting the role of the raced and gendered architect as re- inforcer of these systems. We must examine the construction of spatialized White supremacy, through both architecture and policy, as a prerequisite for theorizing how architecture and policy must be intertwined in the deconstruction of it. To paraphrase Dr. Cornel West, we must never lose sight of what some of the silences are in the work of White architects and architectural theorists, especially as those silences relate to issues of class, gender, race, and power (West, 1997).

A typical Western architectural education begins with the works of authoritarian religious and political systems in ancient Mesopotamia. Through great works of fortification, like the walls of Babylon, and the imperial monument of Egypt, architecture was employed to inspire awe of power in subject populations and thereby sustain the rule of many by a few (Wiley, 2013). Even in Greece, the birthplace of both the word and the concept of ‘democracy’, the right to exercise power in government remained the province of non-enslaved males. Just because anybody could go watch debate in the Bouleterion of Athens (Raeburn, 1980) did not mean their opinion would be incorporated into the laws of the polis.

The Greek city-states sent colonizers out across the Mediterra- nean Sea in order to extend political, military and economic control over new territory. Their influence, combined with an already-flourishing Etruscan civilization on the Italian peninsula, gave rise to the first great European empire in Rome; the Romans, in turn, employed architecture and planning at an unprecedented scale as a means of colonial control (Mattingly, 2010). Male Roman military commanders directed the construction of roads and grid-planned castrum settlements in colonized territory across Europe and North Africa. Roman imperial city planning

became, through the Laws of the Indies, the model for Spanish, French Auction of enslaved people, St Louis Hotel, and American cities including New Orleans’ Vieux Carre (Callott, 2014). New Orleans

A constant throughout the development of Western civilization, from the Mesopotamians to the Egyptians, the Greeks and Romans, through the Middle Ages and into the era of European exploration and colonization, was the presence of chattel slavery and its use in the construction of built works. Chattel slavery, as distinct from indentured servitude, is the permanent status of human beings as property who can be bought or sold (Hogan, 2015). Children born to people held as chattel slaves are also enslaved, and there is a long history of chattel slavery by illustration: nola.com

49 ESSAY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 ‘race’; the Jews in ancient Egypt were enslaved in this way.

The term ‘slave’ is derived from Slav, an Eastern European ethnic group whose enslavement by Western Europeans in the latter half of the first millennium CE was prolific enough to permanently mark the language. The identification of slave status with skin color was a later development. Africans of varying skin colors had interacted with Europeans for centuries through trade with the aforementioned empires; empires from Mali to Zimbabwe had themselves practiced slavery in various forms (Kendi).

In the early 15th century, expeditions of Portuguese to the coast of western Africa marked the beginning of European economic expan- sionism in Africa and the Americas. The Portuguese, Spanish, Danes, Swedes, British, and French established trading outposts on the West Af- rican coasts in the 16th century, just as their emerging plantation systems in the Americas began to require vast numbers of inexpensive laborers to produce sugar, indigo and coffee. Trade castles on the coast of West Afri- ca became slave castles, expanded to imprison hundreds of African men, women and children kidnapped from their homes (Jordan, 2007). This new slave economy necessitated the building of slave ships in Liverpool and of slave docks in Rio de Janiero, but it also required the construction of a philosophical and psychological system of White supremacy which suffused these built environments.

This system of White supremacy was necessary in order to as- suage the consciences of the Europeans profiting off the system. Their system of morality could not condone such atrocities against other humans, but if the Africans weren’t humans, the same rules did not apply (Kendi). It followed that Europeans’ design of spaces for African occupation resembled their design for animals, with ‘pens’ and cages to hold as many bodies as possible at minimal cost (Jordan). Slave pen, Stone Town, Zanzibar, Tanzania

the construction of spatialized white supremacy

The subsequent establishment and flourishing of the Atlantic slave trade took place concurrently with the birth and development of the practice of architecture as we know it today (Fields, 2000). The formalization and professionalization of architecture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, established to serve the ends of the French absolutist monar- chy in the 17th century, arose out of the same Enlightenment intellectual milieu as the emerging discipline of ‘racial classification’ promulgated by Francois Bernier, Johann Freidrich Blumenbach and other ‘scientists’ who produced ‘objective’ bases for White supremacy (Kendi). photograph: http://www.goeringo.com/ exploring-unfreedom-africas-and-ameri- The Black Atlantic is a space of hybridization in which African cas-shared-past-2/ and European cultural practices interact to create new, creolized forms. drawing: untildarwin.blogspot.com 50 ESSAY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 From the construction of slave castles on African shores in the 15th century, to the building and outfitting of slave ships in Europe, to the planning and construction of rice, cotton and sugarcane plantations in the Americas and the Caribbean, architecture was integral in the control of enslaved populations at every stage (Jordan). But there was always resistance.

To paraphrase Kim Anne Savelson, Europeans created a ‘room’ for African people in the Americas, designed according to a racist and sexist blueprint, and locked from the inside. Yet it is historically inaccurate to present the history of Africans in the Americas as merely a history of vic- timization. People called Black have fashioned keys with which to leave this room (Savelson). Architecture and decorative arts are among these Black Indian, Central City, New Orleans keys, means of expression through which Black people have maintained their history and culture.

The Creole cottage and shotgun typologies of New Orleans de- scended from traditional Yoruba homes in West Africa transported through the Black Atlantic to the Carribean and the American South (Campanella, 2006). Enslaved craftsmen, employed as blacksmiths for the purpose of decorating European colonists’ buildings in Charleston and New Orleans, employed knowledge of metallurgic arts learned in Cottage, Port-au-Prince, Haiti; shotgun, New Africa (Wilson, 2016). Orleans

Musical, dance, language, culinary and craft traditions from Africa also survived the holocaust of the Middle Passage, flourishing in subaltern spaces across the black Caribbean from Dia de los Reyes in Havana to Congo Square in New Orleans (Walker, 2004). In New Orle- ans as elsewhere in the plantation world, the spaces permitted people of color were at the rear of the settlement, on the worst-drained and most disease-prone land behind the ‘big house’ occupied by the European colonizers.

The Black space of the backswamp, difficult and treacherous as it may have been, could also be a space of relative freedom, where enslaved people could cultivate their own crops, religion and culture away from

the prying eyes of their masters (Jordan). It was also an space for plotting Ashland Plantation, Ascension Parish, LA rebellion, and often the direction of escape (Rasmussen, 2011). ‘quarters’ for enslaved people at right

complexity and contradiction in american ideals

The creation of the United States from the former British colonies on the eastern coast of North America was a moment of unreconciled tension between democratic ideals and authoritarianism, between White supremacy and radical equality. As Pierre Charles L’Enfant adapted the photograph by the author Versailles gardens designed by Andre Le Notre for the authoritarian photographs: dell upton

Louis XVI to the capital of the new republic at Washington, DC (Fletch- map: state of louisiana

51 ESSAY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 er, 2008), slaveholders James Madison and Thomas Jefferson wrote a Declaration of Independence and Constitution claiming “all men are created Equal”. While some of America’s founders, including Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton, sympathized with the growing aboli- tionist movement, very few actually believed African Americans to be the civil, political and social equals of European Americans. Antiracists who believed in and acted for the cause of unconditional equality between blacks and whites, including Sarah and Angelina Grimke, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and John Brown, were far outside the political mainstream (Kendi, 2016).

As the new nation developed a coherent identity and institutions to perpetuate it, the primacy given European Whiteness over other racial identities could be read through its architecture. Indiana Congressman Robert Dale Owen proposed that the Smithsonian Institution, one of the most important of these, employ a Norman Revival style derived from the Romanesque and early Gothic of France and England, “a purer development of structure and form.”

Owen argued that style should be rooted in a race of people in a particular place at a particular time, and linked emergent American architecture to ideals of “truth” and ‘beauty” while calling the Egyptian revival style, also popular in his era, “indolent”, or lazy. (Wilson, 2016)

It was ‘indolent’ enslaved Africans who, of course, built not only James Construction of the Smithsonian ‘Castle’, Renwick’s Romanesque Smithsonian Castle but also James Hoban’s 1850 White House and Thomas U. Walter’s Capitol.

The language of Greek and Roman classicism came to dominate the American cultural, political and architectural scene, appealing to the democratic ideals of the era of Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay. This tendency was visible not only in the former English colonies on the East Coast but across the Americanizing West. The Capitol emulated the Pan- theon in Rome; the St. Charles Hotel, one of New Orleans’ architectural landmarks in the antebellum era, emulated the Capitol, communicating the American identity of the city’s business community (Campanella). Writing on the question of style in the Friends of the Cabildo’s landmark preservationist guide to New Orleans’ built environment, prominent 20th century New Orleans architect Samuel Wilson, Jr. opined,

“After all, these civilized Greeks and Romans were also slave-holding societies, virtual proof that a city could hardly have a civilized existence without a few black slaves and a garnishing of white temples” (Toledano, 1971).

the war for white ownership of black people photograph: smithsonian institution Though many since have tried to deny it, the intended perpetu- photograph: conwayconfidential.com

52 ESSAY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 ation of slavery was, in the words of its Vice President, Alexander Ste- phens, the “cornerstone” of the Confederacy (Trefousse, 1970). Though abolition was not an initial goal of President Abraham Lincoln, radical activists like Douglass, Tubman and Congressman Thaddeus Stevens prevailed upon the President and Congress to put the full force of the Union behind the cause of abolition and civil and political rights for African Americans, expressed in the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation and the three Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution. By 1870, Americans called Black were considered under federal law to be human beings on equal standing with Americans who needed to think they were White, un unprecedented and largely unanticipated development which sent shock waves through American society (Kendi).

Unsuprisingly, even before the end of the War for White Owner- ship of Black People its symbolic legacy was already under contestation through built-environment intervention in public space. Major General Benjamin Butler, the military governor in charge of New Orleans after its capture in 1862, inscribed upon the pedestal of the Andrew Jackson equestrian statue in front of St. Louis Cathedral a reappropriated declaration of Jackson’s, “The Union must and shall be preserved!” (Campan- ella).

One pro-Union, and thus contextually anti-White-supremacist, inscription on a monument – which itself commemorates a White supremacist, slaveowner and perpetrator of genocide against Native Amer- icans (Take Em Down NOLA, 2016) – had little impact compared to multitudes of new streets, buildings and public spaces commemorating White supremacists.

These symbols were part and parcel of a wave of White supremacist terrorist violence and renewed legal oppression which intensified after the end of Reconstruction and the removal of Union troops from the South in 1876. Though many promises of that period, including guarantees of equal justice under law and the right to the franchise, went unfulfilled, it was a proposed spatial and economic intervention program – the guarantee to each freedman of ‘forty acres and a mule’ under General William Tecumseh Sherman’s Field Order No. 15 – that entered the popular imagination as the tangible debt owed by the American government to its formerly enslaved citizens (Darity, 2008). The importance of this spatial intervention was both in its symbolic value, as land that would have been owned and controlled by Americans called Black, and economic, as land whose value would have allowed Americans called Black to begin amassing intergenerational wealth (Mobley).

The federal government agency charged with the implementation of this and other redistributive programs, the Freedmen’s Bureau, was sabotaged and eventually destroyed by the Southern ‘Redeemers’ (Du Bois, 1903). Thus, the nation was set on its path of construcing through cartoon: www.thomasnast.com

53 ESSAY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 selective government support of people who needed to be called White and government neglect of people called Black a racial wealth gap man- ifested today in the posession by the average Black American family of 1/10 the wealth posessed by the average White American family (Sullivan et al., 2016).

reconstruction and retrenchment

The system of White supremacy which arose after the end of Reconstruction was harsher than that which had come before, precisely because the system of chattel slavery which had legally dehumanized President Andrew Johnson ‘kicks out’ the Freedmen’s Bureau Black people no longer existed to regulate them (Woodward, 1966). Ar- (Thomas Nast, 1866) chitecture and other spatial interventions were used as means of behav- ioral regulation concurrently with legal regulation under the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ established by the 1893 decision of the Supreme Court in the New Orleans-based Plessy v. Ferguson case, and extralegal White terrorism by the KKK and other vigilantes intensified.

Under Jim Crow laws, separate entrances were designated for people who needed to think they were White and the people they called Black. to any public building or accommodation. Black people were barred from using ‘Whites-only’ public libraries, churches, schools and stores, with inferior facilities or sometimes nothing at all provided instead. The year after the Plessy decision, which had originated from antiracist activism based in New Orleans’ Treme neighborhood (Crutch- er, 2010), Congo Square was renamed for Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard and two blocks of homes and businesses in the neighboring Treme were demolished for the construction of a new municipal auditorium in 1930 at the encouragement of the New Orleans chapter of the AIA (AIA New Orleans, 2016).

A sixty-foot Doric column commemorating General Robert E. Lee was erected in 1884 at the former Tivoli Circle, across the street from the newly constructed whites-only public Carnegie and private Howard Libraries. At the foot of Canal Street, the Crescent City White League in 1891 put up a monument commemorating those whites killed in its 1874 coup attempt against the integrated Reconstruction government (Take Em Down NOLA), in which a dozen officers, both White and Black, of the integrated Metropolitan Police were murdered. The White League monument is the only monument in the United States to the murder of policemen (Moore, 2017).

a black architecture

In the face of terror, Black ingenuity persisted and thrived, in architecture as more recognized fields like music and literature. The first

54 ESSAY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 architecture school for Black students was established at the Hampton Institute in Virginia in 1871, followed by Tuskegee in 1892 and Florida A&M in 1910 (Ockman 2012).

Students of color including Julian Abele and Vertner Woodson Tandy integrated Northern architecture schools in the 1890s. Tandy, the first registered Black architect in New York State, designed the Villa Lewaro in Irvington, NY for Madam C.J. Walker, America’s first Black female millionaire. Walker, born in Delta, LA in 1868 to formerly enslaved parents, built her hair-products business from a home enterprise to a multinational corporation with 23,000 affiliated distributors. She desired a dignified approach for the servants’ quarters at her mansion, built alongside those of the Morgans and the Rockefellers in the Hudson Valley.

Unlike those families’ dark, turreted castles, set far back on their lots, Tandy designed for Walker a red-tile-roofed Mediterranean villa sited close to the street, its idiosyncrasy communicating the anomalous presence of a Black woman in a rarefied enclave of Whiteness (Lowry, 1998). Servants’ quarters were bright and dignified, employing the latest in mechanical conveniences and including a library and recreation room for the employees’ use in their free time.

For the Walker Theater Building, developed as the headquarters of her company in Indianapolis in 1927, Walker employed local White architects Rubush and Hunter to design a Black artistic haven, a place of Black employment, and a social and cultural center for a Black community barred from White-owned theaters or relegated to inferior positions within them. The Walker Theater’s Art Deco terra cotta features ‘African’ motifs including spears, shields, monkeys, lions and sphinxes (Miller, 1990). Within these exoticized, ‘White’ concepts of African iconography (Mobley) can be read a lack of familiarity with the design cultures of Africa, a condition perhaps ascribable to the Whiteness and Eurocentric design background of the architects. It would take the Pan-African, Civil Rights, Black Power, Black Consciousness and Black Arts movements before such African cultural idioms as Asante adinkra would reemerge in American architecture.

Adinkra comprise a pictoral language still used in West Africa. The symbols were a part of the decorative vocabulary of enslaved crafts-

men, who carved them into wood and sculpted them into metalwork Sankofa adinkra, African Burial Ground created across the American South during and after enslavement (Price, National Monument, New York, NY USA 2011). In the late 20th century in America, adrinkra again became part of a language used to commemorate Black oppression and resistance, though for the first time in such a formal and explicit manner as allowed photograph: aleliabundles.org by public monuments. They often appear in projects by Black American photograph: theafricanamericanclarioncall. architects at sites of symbolic and spiritual significance. wordpress.com photograph: general services administration

55 ESSAY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 In Rodney Leon, AIA, NOMA’s 2007 African Burial Ground Me- morial in Lower Manhattan, a Sankofa adinkra appears alongside a memorial inscription in English. The coated aluminum screen panels of Freelon Adjaye Bond’s 2016 National Museum of African American His- tory and Culture in Washington, DC are abstractions of adinkra designs found in ironwork of the Carolinas and Louisiana (Wilson, 2016).

White-conceptualized “African’ motifs were mainstays of the architectural language of Black uplift, employed by Tandy and George W. Foster in their ‘Negro Buildings’ for the National Emancipation Exhibi- tion in 1913 and subsequent expositions. This project, commissioned by famed Black sociologist, author and activist W.E.B. Du Bois, intended to promote racial equality through display of Black achievement alongside and equal to the achievements of other groups. Through their use of African idioms, the designers challenged the Eurocentric vision of both architectural history and political reality, presenting a ‘counterarchive’ through which an antiracist history in opposition to the norm of White supremacy could be read (Wilson).

revolution and counterrevolution // suprematism and anti-semitism

The emergent Modernist movement in Soviet Russia and Weimar Germany shared Du Bois and Tandy’s goals for the rewriting of history and the remaking of society through art and architecture. El Lissitzky, the Russian Suprematist artist and architect, posited through his concept of ‘goal-oriented creation’ that design could be used to facilitate the liberation of fellow Jews and Socialist workers (Monoskop, 2016) who had long been oppressed in manners similar to people of color in the United States. Lissitzky’s influence in Europe was significant in the work of the Bauhaus and De Stijl movements, to whose discourses he contributed his Hitler’s office, Reich Chancellery, Berlin own utopian ideals of revolutionary socialist equality.

Articulating a utopian architectural vision tied to the exercise of political power is a dangerous proposition, as the viability of the utopia is tied to the intentions of those who exercise the power. The largely male and Eurocentric milieu of Modernism, like the Enlightenment before it, contributed to authoritarian and repressive counterrevolutions which employed its architectural ideas to their own ends. Predominantly White male planners and designers from the United States to Nazi Germany to colonial Africa employed Modernism’s formal, stylistic and planning Lobby, 190 South Lasalle, Chicago, IL USA strategies to advance agendas of repression in both the personal and political spheres.

Philip Johnson, the individual responsible for defining the Mod- photograph: history.co.uk ernist movement as ‘the International Style’ through his 1932 MoMA photograph: tishman speyer

56 ESSAY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 exhibition and accompanying book, was an avowed believer in the Ni- etzschean notion of the ’uebermensch’ as an analogue to the architectural tradition of the master builder. Enamored of Nazism, which operated within the same intellectual framework, Johnson sought to promote the rise of Fascism in the United States and supported – literally, as the designer of a speaking platform modeled on Hitler’s at Nuremburg – anti-Semitic radio preacher Father Charles Coughlin. Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect, opined in a 1978 interview that Johnson, by virtue of his understanding of “fine materials, size and space,” would make a fine state architect “for a new Fuehrer, should he appear tomorrow” (Wortman, 2016).

Le Corbusier, one of Modernism’s most revered architects, carried on a similar flirtation with far-right political elements in France from the 1920s to the 1940s (Donadio, 2015). His enthusiasm for the destruction and rebuilding in a new image of the old Europe, visible in his ‘tabula rasa’ Plan Voisin scheme for the center of Paris, bears a definite symbolic if not stylistic resemblance to Speer and Hitler’s plan for the reconstruction of Berlin into Germania, the capital of the Thousand-Year Reich, while his 1933 ‘Plan Obus’ for Algiers can be read as an imperialist assertion of White European power and dominance over brown Africans (Loeb and Luescher, 2015).

urban renewal // negro removal

Demolition and reconstruction on the Corbusier-Speer model came to America as urban renewal beginning with the construction of the first housing projects as a part of the New Deal federal social programs in the 1930s (Bingham and Kirkpatrick, 1975). Planned, designed and administered almost entirely by White men, these spatial interventions flattened communities of color from Miami’s Overtown to San Francisco’s Hayes Valley, Treme to the South Bronx.

Many of these neighborhoods, particularly in Northern cities, had developed as a result of the Great Migration of the 1920s-1960s (Wilk- erson, 2010). The undesirable nature of the neighborhoods allowed to become Black communities had led to their abandonment by those who needed to think themselves White, and in the name of ‘renewing’ or ‘re- claiming’ the American city, they engaged in a practice not surprisingly referred to by activists as ”Negro removal” (Williams, 2005), and ”White men’s highways through Black men’s bedrooms” (Zewde, 2010).

Responses by people who needed to think that they were White

included restrictive racial covenants to prohibit people of color from buying homes in ‘White neighborhoods’ beginning in the 1890s; redlining to keep people of color from accessing federally backed mortgage funding in these neighborhoods under the Federal Housing Act of 1937 photograph: bidoun.org

57 ESSAY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 (Coates, 2015); and in case those tactics failed, the use of terrorism like that employed against Bill and Daisy Myers, the first Black family to move into one of William Levitt’s eponymous Levittown suburbs in 1957 (Harris, 2006). The centrality of Levittowns to the myth of idyllic postwar American suburbia, and the violence which met people called Black who attempted to live there, demonstrates the exclusivity of that idyll to people who needed to think that they were White.

The maintenance of racial-spatial ‘purity’ in was further facilitated by the destruction of racially mixed neighborhoods for urban-renewal schemes. Probably the most explicit example of urban renewal for this reason can be found in Sophiatown, Johannesburg, South Africa, where the White supremacist government systematically destroyed a race-mixed and mixed-race community which had been a hotbed of anti-apartheid political organizing (Stein and Jacobsen, 1987).

integration as spatial intervention

Racial purity is a spatial proposition. If Black people stay out of spaces claimed by people who need to think they are White, then the segregated society functions according to plan. Bill and Daisy Myers challenged racial segregation in precisely the same manner as Rosa Parks had two years before them: by occupying space designated as White and refusing to give it up, even under threat of arrest or extrajudicial violence (Harris). This is as visible in popular culture as it is in architecture, design or activism: the title of director Jordan Peele’s 2017 horror film about a Black man held hostage by a White family on their suburban estate is Get Out, a phrase implying racialized territoriality and the defense of such.

In the November/December 2013 issue of Architectural Design, entitled ‘The Archtitecture of Transgression’, spatial occupation is presented as a protest strategy providing for a uniquely assertive critique of the system operating within that space (Rice, 2013). Such protest promotes the basic human right of existence in space, critiquing the law prohibiting one’s presence in that space on the basis of race as unjust, and thus unworthy of being followed, as prescribed in Letter from a Birmingham Jail (King, 1963). Spatial occupation would be used throughout course of the Civil Rights Movement, as protests undermined state and local laws establishing spatial segregation in public accomodations, workplaces and housing.

Marchers refuse to yield their existence in Spatialized integration protests included sit-ins at Whites-only space, Birmingham, AL 1963 department store lunch counters; kneel-ins at White churches; swim-ins at Whites-only pools and beaches; and marches in which demonstrators occupied the public spaces of streets and sidewalks. Transmitted nation- poster: IMP Awards

wide through the mass media, these tactics forced a federal government photograph: pambazuka news

58 ESSAY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 operating under the foundational assumption that ‘all men are created equal’ and the 14th Amendment’s prescription that all are entitled to ‘equal protection of the laws’ to make good on these statements.

Passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 have been ascribed by historians to national popular reaction to images of marchers faced with dogs, firehoses and teargas in Birming- ham and Selma (Branch, 1998), testifying to the resonance of such spatial intervention and the effectiveness of its use as protest strategy.

new forms: black power architecture

The victories of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s created a new Black middle class, secured physical safety and the protection of the law for ordinary Black Americans, dismantled legal segregation, elimi- nated overt racism in southern politics, empowered Black officeholders across the nation, and changed forever the day-to-day interactions between the races (Badger, 2016).

But the Movement did not bring social or economic equity, or an end to random and often deadly police violence against Black people. Frustration with the continuation of these oppressive conditions, the escalation of the Vietnam War, the assasinations of Malcolm X in 1965 and Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968 led to increasing demands for radical systemic change. King’s Poor People’s Campaign, along with the programs of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and works including sociologist Michael Harrington’s The Other America had begun to turn the nation’s attention to the problem of systemic poverty, but the escalation of the Vietnam War had drained resources and energy away from government efforts to redistribute wealth, power and access to the political process (Branch).

These demands and the frustration at the government’s indiffer- ence to them were particuarly evident within SNCC under the leadership of Stokely Carmichael. SNCC ejected its White members in 1966, instructing them to organize against racism within their own White communities and allow for Black self-determination and empowerment (Billings, 2016). This emerging political consciousness came to be called Black Power. Carmichael’s speech in Greenwood, MS, after the shooting of revered activist James Meredith during a protest on June 16, 1966, pro- Stokely Carmichael, 1966 vides insight into the Black Power movement’s motivations:

“This is the twenty-seventh time I have been arrested and I ain’t going to jail no more! The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin’ us is to take over. What we gonna start sayin’ now is Black Power!” (Branch).

59 ESSAY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton’s 1967 manifesto, Black Pow- er: The Politics of Liberation in America, urged Black Americans to take control of their communities, reshaping the social political institutions that served them. They titled their final chapter ‘The Search for New Forms,’ a choice of words apt for its allusion to the fundamentally spatial origins and ambitions of Black Power.

In contrast to the prevailing view among people who needed to think they were White, Carmichael and Hamilton proposed that the Black people of Harlem, Watts and Chicago’s South Side were not the cause of the urban crisis, but its solution. The work of J. Max Bond, Jr., the first Black director of the Architect’s Renewal Committee in Harlem (ARCH), is instructive of the aims of Black Power in architecture, and of the tensions which arose when the White-dominated field of architecture met the militant Black context of Harlem of the late 1960s (Gold- stein, 2016).

Harlem, like communities of color around the country, had been decimated by White-instigated urban renewal. In an early effort at design for social justice, White architect C. Richard Hatch established ARCH on Lenox Avenue in 1964. However, with the rise of Black Power. Hatch understood that his White identity made his position untenable and resigned his directorship in the summer of 1967. A similar shift to Black leadership occured in Washington, DC’s architecture community the following year, when city contracts including that for Dunbar High School (see pg. 66) were awarded to Black architects in the wake of MLK’s assasination, subsequent civil unrest and Black Power activism in that city (Wiley, 2017).

ARCH’s model of community-based design advocacy was developed by Hatch and others on the organization’s predominantly White initial staff. (Goldstein). This model would spread across the nation in subsequent years, particularly among students and the academic community, who created community design workshops at Yale, Pratt, North Carolina State, the University of Washington and the University of De- \ troit-Mercy in the late 1960s (Clemens et al., 2008) Like these programs, the Small City Center at Tulane traces its pedagodical lineage, and racial power dynamic, to the pre-Black Power, White-controlled ARCH.

To Black architects at ARCH like Kenneth Simmons, and Black Power movement leaders in Harlem, such White-led advocacy was pa- ternalistic at best, and failed to reflect the new political reality of Black empowerment. The Harvard-educated Bond had been working in Gha- na for the administration of President Kwame Nkrumah, the first Black leader of an African nation liberated from colonial rule.

Immediately upon his installation as director, Bond doubled the

60 ESSAY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 size of ARCH’s board, adding eight prominent Harlem activists. Newly confrontational tactics, including the threat of civil unrest in response to a planning decision averse to neighborhood residents’ interests, illustrated a more direct and immediate means for achieving community control and spatial agency.

The architectural production of Black Power was far more than just the negative power to reject planning decisions. The Black Power architecture and urban design aesthetic, developed in the same milieu as the broader Black Arts movement then flourishing in Harlem and elsewhere, ”preserved the street-side dynamism Black Power adherents empahsized as [Harlem’s] defining feature” (Goldstein). ARCH rendering of 125th street, harlem, 1968, showing vibrant of street life

jane jacobs meets stokely carmichael

Black Power architects championed a diversity of uses, in opposition to the ‘maximum-land-utilization blockbusters’ of the ‘Sixth Avenue stoneland’ of Midtown Manhattan and the housing projects (Goldstein). In this manner Black Power urban theory concurred with that of Jane Jacobs, who decried ‘the great blight of dullness’ and even cited Harlem housing projects as examples of Modernism’s failures in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs, 1961). Like Jacobs, Bond sought to “retain and reproduce the vernacular character’ he saw as conducive to vibrant street life. Unlike Jacobs, Black Power designers made space for elements of urban life deemed undesirable by White norms, such as street preachers and drunks, alongside and interacting with business owners and families with children. They disagreed with Jacobs’ assertion that ‘unslumming’ or economic upscaling of residents was a prerequisite for neighborhood improvement. A community could flourish by housing and serving its existing residents, ”no matter how poor they may be” (Goldstein), a philosophy reflective of Black class-integrated settlement patterns which had long been enforced by segregation (Zewde).

ARCH, under both Hatch and Bond, stood starkly in opposition to the Modernist agenda of urban renwal; by virtue of their social activism, they took this stance not merely on formal grounds, but as opponents of the “Negro removal’ aspect of such intervention. Bond’s close linkage of physical form with social ideal (Goldstein) continues to suffuse the work of those who link architecture with goals of social justice today.

architecture against oppression

rendering: journal of american history Since the pushback against expanded Black freedom in Ameri- can society began with the administration of Richard Nixon in 1968, the

61 ESSAY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 global rise of the neoliberal agenda and the deconstruction of welfare states throughout the Western world have resulted in disparate suffering by people of color prevented from attaining or concentrating wealth in the manner of White people (Sullivan et al.).

However, the work of the feminist, civil rights and decolonization movements has continued. Though severely hindered by the assasination of MLK in 1968, the Poor People’s Campaign continued to agitate for improvements in communities of color and White communities from the Mississippi Delta to Appalachia to Chicago. From these roots grew organizing efforts like Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition and Presidential campaigns in the 1980s, through which a coherent opposition to the de- structive policies of President Ronald Reagan were articulated (Mobley).

The 1980s and 1990s saw new attempts to grapple with the historical memory of oppressive systems like Nazi Germany, the South Afri- can apartheid state and repressive Latin American dictatorships. These movements led to an unprecedented realization of architecture’s capacity to promote healing and progressive social change. Within the Unit- ed States, particularly the South, memorializing of the Black freedom struggle took a much more tenuous path constrained by White norms of respectability and representation (Upton, 2015).

With the exception of a few interventions, like the monuments erected at Birmingham, Alabama’s Kelly Ingram Park in 1992, the Af- rican Burial Ground National Moument in New York City unveiled in 2007, and the National Museum of African Amerian History and Culture opened in Washington, DC in 2016, the most significant architectural markers of resistance to racialized oppression are outside the United States.

Wherever they are located, architectural interventions which 1908 confront histories and present conditions of oppression must hold in balance the need to consider the past and present conditions of oppression in a manner appropriate to the site of the intervention, and the need to oppose through the form, style, and program of the intervention the present conditions of oppression toward the end of a more just and equi- 1939 table world.

non-monumentality // form, void and memory

The intention of Germans to deal with the legacy of the murder of eight million Jews and other ‘undesirables’ in the Holocaust have taken form in a number of monuments and memorials. Though some are conventional plaques or cenotaphs, the incomprehensibility of the scale of Nazis’ genocide has motivated a number of innovative artistic and 1987 architectural responses, some of which can be termed ‘non-monuments’.

62 ESSAY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 Among these are the Aschrott Brunnen in Kassel, a 28-foot void piercing into the ground in the inverse form of a monument funded by a prominent Jewish citizen in 1908. Artist Horst Hohiesel calls his work “a negative of irretrievable form, where the memory of that which has been lost resounds.”

In Hamburg-Harburg, Jochen and Esther Shalev-Gerz’ 1986 Monument against Fascism and War was a 12-meter-tall lead coated square column, which was lowered into the ground eight times until it disappeared completely and covered by a plaque reading, “In the end it is only we ourselves who can stand up against injustice.” At each lowering, a new segment of the column was made accessible to passers-by, who were invited to write their names on its surface using provided steel styluses. Over 70,000 left their own names, the names of others, and other in- scriptions.

More traditionally ‘monumental’ are Daniel Libeskind’s 2001 Jewish Museum Berlin and Peter Eisenman’s 2004 Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Libeskind’s museum, a landmark of the De- constructivist movement, is laid out along an angular promenade cutting back and forth across a void symbolic of the lost Jewish cultural production sustained as a result of the Holocaust. Eisenman’s memorial consists of 2,711 roughly casket-sized concrete slabs of varying sizes in a grid on an undulating surface of gray brick. It occupies a site in the center of Berlin, adjacent to the Brandenburg Gate and the Tiergarten, and the site of the American Embassy before World War II.

Though the Holocaust is nearly universally recognized to have been a stain on the face of humanity, the Vietnam War in America is – and was, especially in 1980 when Maya Lin won the competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC – a site of contested collective memory. Lin’s winning entry into the anonymous competition was groundbreaking in its abstraction, and in its simultaneous personal- ization and narrativization of the war through the listing of the name of every dead service member, by date of death, on its black granite surface. Thousands of memorials since Lin’s have borrowed its formal elements, but few have equaled its raw emotional power.

One memorial which has managed to do this is Michael Arad, Peter Walker and Davis Brody Bond’s 9/11 Memorial, opened in 2011 on the former site of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. The lineage is clear – the name of every victim of the terror- photocollage: jochen gerz ist attack is inscribed on a surface, grouped according to the offices in which they worked. The power of the memorial comes from the user’s photograph: wikimedia commons experience of the contrast between the bucolic park with areas of bench, plan: alex martin, architect grass, and tree planting in rigid horizontal bands and the vast waterfall drawing: wikimedia commons basins marking the outlines of the towers. At the bottom of the basins, as photograph 911memorial.org

63 ESSAY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 in the Aschrott Brunnen, water spills infinitely down into a void, out of the viewer’s comprehension. symbolic oppression and freedom in south africa

The transformation of a site of terror or oppression into one of productive engagement with the present and future is recurrent in several successful responses to the legacy of apartheid and the challenges of multiracial democracy in South Africa. Following the fall of apartheid in 1994 and the engagement of the nation in an official bureaucratic process of ‘truth and reconciliation’ of immense symbolic importance (Weibel- haus-Brahm, 2010), the new South African Constitution took effect in 1997. One institution mandated by its framers was a new Constitutional Court, which would supersede the apartheid-era Appeals Court which had previously been the nation’s highest legal authority.

Johannesburg’s Old Fort jail complex, built in the 1890s, was used to imprison and torture members of the anticolonial and antiapartheid movements including Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu, Lilian Ngoyi, Ruth First and Joe Slovo. It was chosen as the site for the new Constitutional Court, with President Mandela calling it a “beacon of light, hope and celebration”, in parallel construction to the darkness and injustice of its previous incarnation. Beginning with its logo, which discarded the old coat-of-arms and familiar iconography of columns and Lady Justice for a symbolic group of mixed black and white human figures beneath the spreading branches of a tree, design was used to differentiate the new institution from the old.

The winning submission in the design competition, by OMM Design Workshop and Urban Solutions, focuses on the role of its buildings in framing democratic urban space, noting the importance of one’s fundamental freedoms to sit, stand, chat, linger or move on. “Grand dominant monuments are only needed to represent victories of war, exclusivity in the face of a threat to an unpopular social system, economic or elite social power…’ the architects wrote. As built, the design incorporates glass ‘towers of light’, which extend the profiles of vertical circulation towers of a now-demolished component of the prison.

Extensive use is made of handcrafted artistic elements considered as “integrated components” of the design, rather than applied afterward. These include ceramic tiles representing each of the 28 articles of the new Constitution, mosaic-covered ‘tree’ columns in the High Court- room’s foyer, and a stainless-steel sunscreen over the windows to the ‘gallery wing’ of the building, a grand staircase in which a rotating display of works by South African artists are on display. The architects took care to ensure that the procurement process allowed for access by Black South logo: constitutional court of south africa Africans who would not enter a formal artistic competition like that used

64 ESSAY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 to produce the aforementioned elements. To this end, they collaborated with administrators from local arts organizations to source designs for carpet and light-fixture coverings (Noble, 2011).

Jo Noero and Heinrich Wolff’s Red Location Museum, a part of the planned Red Location Cultural District in the Black township of New Brighton, outside Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape region of South Africa, is a bird of a different feather. Whereas museums are often colonizing institutions, displaying the products of Blackness and other exoticized cultures for the benefit of those who need to think they are White (Ruff, 2016), the Red Location Museum of Struggle presents ‘memory boxes’ which memorialize the form of the vernacular housing of the impoverished township district in an abstract artistic manner. The museum includes an archive and assembly hall, and the full ‘Cultural District’, once complete, will include social housing, a soccer field, an arts & crafts school and performing arts venues, integrated in scale with the surrounding dwellings (Findley, 2011).

an american countermonument // the NMAAHC

The election of Barack Obama as the 44th president and first Black president of the United States ushered in what many, primarily White Americans believed might be a ‘postracial era’ in America (Schorr, 2008), in which race was irrelevant to the lives of the nation’s citizens. While this was not grounded in reality, Obama’s presidency was highly symbolic of Black humanity, value and achievement, and among his actual accomplishments was overseeing the competition for and construction of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture on the Mall in Washington, DC. Envisioned for over 100 years, the NMAAHC’s institutional mandate emphasizes its permanent collection as a national repository for objects of significance to Black history and as an institution for the promotion of present Black cultural and artistic achievement (Wilson).

The winning proposal for the NMAAHC was led by Tanzani- an-Ghanian-British architect David Adjaye, whose theoretical and built work have elevated African and diasporic architectural style, forms and motifs to the forefront of international architectural practice (Enwezor & Ryan 2016). Adjaye collaborated with Philip Freelon and J. Max Bond, two of the most prominent African American architects of the present day. The Freelon Adjaye Bond group prevailed over five other finalists,

ranging from ‘starchitects’ like Diller Scofidio and Foster+Partners as well as DC-based, Black-run firm Devrouax & Purnell.

The museum incorporates a number of formal and stylistic elements referencing African and African-American design, as well as to the traditionally ‘American’ monumentality of its site, the National Mall.

65 ESSAY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 Like the work of Tandy and Du Bois, Freelon, Adjaye and Bond present a monumental countermonument, situating Blackness finally at the center, yet uniquely distinct from, the mainstream of American architecture and civic culture (Wilson 2016).

the birth of a movement // #blacklivesmatter and #sayhername

One of the dangers of the election of Barack Obama or the completion of the NMAAHC, historic milestones for people called Black in America, is complacency among those who advocate against White supremacy. This complacency allows White supremacists to get away with saying ”racism is over” or ”we live in a race-neutral society”. Such statements act as a cover for the continuation of White supremacy. These can range from the election of a White supremacist President to the demolition of a neighborhood for a new highway (Mobley).

One needs only a Twitter account to know that American racism is not ”over”. If it were, Trayvon Martin would not be dead. Nor would Oscar Grant, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Jordan Davis, Eric Garner, San- dra Bland, Bettie Jones, Laquan McDonald, Freddie Gray, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Keith Scott, Terence Crutcher, Tyre King, Eric Harris or hundreds of other victims of police violence, or the thousands of victims of street violence caught at the intersection of the criminalization of Blackness, discrimination in employment, and the necessities of putting food on the table (Muhammad, 2011).

In response to the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin in February, 2012, Oakland, CA-based activist Alicia Garza posted ‘A Love Letter to Black People’ on Facebook. Garza intended her post as ‘a simple recognition that a man had killed a child and had gotten away with it’, included the phrase, ‘Black lives matter.’ Fellow activists Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors read and responded to ‘A Love Letter to Black People’, and the three co-founded Black Lives Matter soon after. Their organization is now one of many, including BYP 100 and the Movement for Black Lives, which organize against White supremacy under the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter (Scroggin, 2016).

Dismayed by the focus of the media narrative surrounding Black Lives Matter on the murder of Black men and boys, and on heterosexual Black people, activists began using the hashtag #SayHerName to highlight police violence against Black women, girls, queer and trans people. This movement came to national media prominence in the summer of 2015 when Sandra Bland, a Black woman arrested for a minor traffic infraction in Waller County, Texas, died under suspicious circumstances while imprisoned. The consideration of Say Her Name alongside and photograph: ABC News as integral to Black Lives Matter is an example of an intersectional ap- photograph: CNN

66 chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 proach to organzing for the benefit of a broader community (Crenshaw, 2016).

charleston and the enduring significance of white supremacist symbols

Physical symbols play an important role in people’s everyday lives, communicating the priorities of the society in which they live (Lefeb- vre). Following the murders of Cynthia Hurd, Tywanza Sanders, Susie Jackson, Daniel Simmons Sr., Ethel Lance, Sharonda Singleton, DePayne Middleton-Doctor, Myra Thompson and the Rev. Clementa Pinckney by White supremacist terrorist Dylann Roof during a Bible study session at their church, the historic Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal, in Charleston, South Carolina on June 17, 2015.

The nation was horrified at an attack on Black sacred space, reminiscent of the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, AL by Thomas Blanton, Robert Cherry, Herman Cash and Robert Chambliss. This attack, which killed four little girls on their way to Sunday school - Cynthia Wesley, Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair and Carole Robertson - was a nadir of the 1960s civil rights movement, but also instrumental to raising popular support for passage of the Civil and Voting Rights Acts (Branch).

Several days later, journalists discovered Facebook photos in which Roof flaunted the Confederate battle flag alongside that of the apartheid state of Southern Rhodesia. Commentators noted that this same Confederate flag and adorned monuments to Confederate soldiers and generals in the same city where the murders had been committed. A Confederate flag also flew outside the South Carolina State Capitol in Columbia, where Rev. Pinckney had served as a state senator prior to being murdered.

The Charleston massacre sparked an unprecedented debate arose across America - particularly in Southern cities located in states of the former Confederacy, but also in Northern cities, which have their own histories and present realities of White supremacy - over the spatialized legacy of White supremacy (Williams et al, 2016.). Campaigns for the renaming of public and private facilities or the removal of statues arose in New Haven, CT, New York City, Boston, Chicago, Louisville, KY and New Orleans, as well as internationally in Cape Town and London.

The first symbol of spatialized White supremacy fell outside the State Capitol. The Confederate battle flag had flown above a monument commemorating the War for White ownership of Black people at that location since 1965, when openly White supremacist legislators enshrined its presence in law as a political statement against the Civil Rights Move- photograph: USA Today

67 chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 ment and the federal government’s attack on segregation (Williams et al). In order to remove the flag in 2015, that 1965 law had to be repealed.

During the legislative debate, which recieved national television coverage, the flag was cut down by Black filmmaker and activist Bree Newsome. As she was arrested for this act, Newsome told the press,

“A white man had just entered a black church and massacred people as they prayed. He had assassinated a civil rights leader. This was not a page in a textbook I was reading nor an inscription on a monument I was visiting. This was now. This was real. This was—this is—still happening.” (Phillip, 2015).

The flag was replaced within hours, but a week and a half later, after the repeal of the law, it was formally removed to a display in South Carolina’s military museum (Williams et al.)

the battle in new orleans // #takeemdownNOLA

The movement to oppose White supremacy through activism focused around monuments in New Orleans began with the McDonogh Day protest in 1954. In this act of civil disobedience, Black organizers and educators boycotted the laying of flowers by schoolchildren at the bust in Lafayette Square of New Orleans public school benefacor John McDonogh, the largest individual slaveowner in New Orleans’ history (Suber, 2017).

In the 1980s and 1990s, longtime organizers Leon Waters and Malcolm Suber turned the focus of their activism to symbols of White supremacy in New Orleans, successfully advocating for the renaming of 27 public schools named for slaveowners, Confederates and other White supremacists. Suber and Waters also worked successfully toward the passage of a City Council ordinance which laid out legal justification for the removal of monuments to ‘racial supremacy’ in the city (Moore, 2017). In a pitched legal (and occasionally physical) battle against White supe- macist David Duke and his supporters, activists successfully advocated for the movement of the Crescent City White League monument from the neutral ground of Canal Street to a less visible location nearby (Gill, 1997).

The murders of Eric Garner, Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin motivated young people in New Orleans to pick up this fight again in the early 2010s. Among this new generation was teacher and poet Michael ‘Quess?’ Moore, who worked alongside experienced activists Angela Kinlaw and Suber to form an activist coalition called ‘Take Em Down NOLA’ [TEDN] in 2015 following the Charleston massacre. The name was derived from hashtags which appeared surrounding Bree Newsome’s intervention on the Confederate flag in Columbia, SC, including ‘#Ta- 68 chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 keThemDown’ and ‘#TakeEmAllDown’.

TEDN’s early actions included Confederate flag burnings on the steps of the Lee monument at Lee Circle, inspired by artist John Simms’ work ‘ 13 Flags’. Growing alongside and drawing strength from Black Youth Project [BYP] 100 NOLA, the local branch of the organizing arm of the Black Lives Matter movement, TEDN scaled up its actions and engagement with the political process to demanding the city act to remove publicly owned monuments to White supremacy.

TEDN was aided in this effort by New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s declaration followint the Charleston shootings that he would like to see four monuments removed: the Crescent City White League obelisk near the foot of Canal Street in the CBD, the P.G.T. Beauregard equestrian statue on Esplanade Avenue in front of City Park, the Jeffer- son Davis statue on Canal Street at Jeff Davis Boulevard, and the Robert E. Lee statue at Lee Circle (Moore).

Following intensive organizing effort, the New Orleans City Council voted 6-1 in on December 17, 2015 to adopt Ordinance 31,082, mandating the removal of the four monuments (Pugh, 2015), the last of which served as the site of a protest against the murder of Alton Sterling in July 2016 attended by the author.

In January 2016, the local chapter of the Sons of Confederate filed an injunction to prevent the mnuments’ removal. The SCV is backed, explicitly or implicitly, by many White people posessing generational wealth and entrenched political influence in the city of New Orleans. Though TEDN won several judgments during 2016, the case was ap- pealed several times, going as far as the U.S. Fifth Circuit - one step below the Supreme Court (Moore).

On March 6, 2017, Fifth Circuit Court Judge Carl Barbier ruled that the city has the legal standing to remove the four monuments (Quigley, 2017.) The following day, Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s office re- leased a request for proposals for a contractor to intervene on the four in the following manner: remove the Lee statue from the top of its column, leaving the column, and storing the statue; remove the Davis statue from its pedestal, leaving the pedestal in place, and storing the statue; remove the Beauregard statue and its pedestal; salvaging the granite pedestal and storing the statue; remove the White League monument in its entirety. photograph: john ludlam 69 chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 programmatic case studies

// on the reinforcement and deconstruction of spatialized white supremacy

70 CASE STUDY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 booker t washington high school for the performing and visual arts Dallas, Texas, USA Allied Works Architects, 2008

Following the proibition against segregated schools in the United States under the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, many Courtyard perfor- people who needed to think they were mance space slopes White pulled their children out of down to stage, with public schools, particularly in large provision for night cities (Coates). As a strategy to retain lighting White students, and to create genuinely integrated schools in accord with the Supreme Court ruling, city districts developed ‘magnet’ programs for specific disciplines like liberal arts, science, and the performing and visual arts. Magnet schools were often located at formerly all- Black campuses, particularly in Southern cities.

Dallas, Texas’ magnet performing and visual arts high school was located at the formerly all-Black Booker T. Washington High School on the edge of the city’s downtown, in a formerly Black neighborhood decimated by freeway construction used as a tactic of urban Monumental entrance to new, larger theater compares in scale to renewal/Negro removal. By the early surrounding venues of dallas arts district 2000s, the original 1922 building by noted Dallas architects Lang & Winchell needed expansion. Portland, OR-based Brad Cloepfil and his firm, Allied Works Architects, won a competition to design the new school. Smaller performance space Allied Works’ scheme is focused on a fits within courtyard performance space, around preserved 1922 which the new building wraps with lang & winchell classrooms off of a double-loaded building concourse corridor. The main performing arts spaces are located adjacent to a break in the wrapped building, allowing controlled access to the courtyard and exposing the large windows of the 1922 building’s gym space (now one of the performance spaces) to sunlight.

The 118,000 SF building holds studios for dance, theater, music, technical education, visual art design and display, costume design; 25 standard classrooms; four performance venues; and a multimedia center.

http://www.alliedworks.com/projects/booker- t-washington-high-school/

http://www.archdaily.com/117149/booker-t- washington-high-school-for-the-performing- and-visual-arts-allied-works-architecture

71 CASE STUDY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 union theological seminary Manhattan, New York City, NY USA Allen & Collens, 1910-1928

Founded in 1836 and originally located in Lower Manhattan, the Union Theological Seminary was originally affiliated with the Presbyterian Church. Since the mid- 19th century, Union has been a center of progressive theology. It is considered the birthplace of Black liberation theology James Memorial Chapel as: and Womanist theology, among other (top left) art gallery, theological movements. (above) space of worship, (left) dramatic venue Declaring itself independent of the Pres- byterian Church in 1893, the Seminary moved to a new location on the edge of Morningside Park in Harlem in the 1900s. Its new buildings, in the Collegiate Gothic style also employed at Ivy League campuses like Princeton and Yale around the same time, were completed between 1910 and 1928 (Kamsler). The buildings range betwen 4 and 7 stories and have a gross floor area of 176,800 SF, on a lot of 90,000 SF.

The compex includes two monumental memorial towers, James and Brown; a seven-story dormitory; a six-story classroom building; and foodservice and administrative facilities, as well as a chapel and a library. These elements are arranged around a central courtyard in a rectangular Manhattan block.

In 1928 the seminary affilated with Co- lumbia University, located three blocks away, and has intermittently shared its classrooms and dormitory space with that institution. In order to increase its housing capacity, it purchased an apartment building a couple of blocks away,as well as a small hotel to accomodate visitors and scholars working at the campus.

In the 21st century, Union has hosted noted racial justice theorists and activists including Dr. Cornel West and Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow. It James Tower Refectory (foodservice) Knox Hall (classroom) was recognized as a center for the organization of protests in the wake of the police murder of Eric Garner on December 4, 2014 (Jenkins, 2014). Hastings Hall (residence) James Memorial Chapel

Bonhoeffer Tower Cloister https://utsnyc.edu/

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/15/nyregion/ as-union-theological-seminary-plans-to-sell- air-rights-some-see-a-moral-quandary.html Burke Library President’s House https://utsnyc.edu/wp-content/up- loads/2016/01/Landmarked-UTS-buildings-pic- tures.pdf Terrace Administration Building Brown Tower 72 CASE STUDY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 highlander folk school Monteagle, Tennessee, USA Myles Falls Horton, 1932-1959

Born to a poor White family in the mountains of western Tennessee, Myles Falls Horton attended Union Theological Seminary, where he studied under the famed ethicist and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Horton worked as a labor activist in Appalachian coal-mining country during the Great Depression. (Emery et al., 2008) In 1932 Horton, White minister James Dombrowski of New Orleans and Main building, 1933 Same building, 1950s Black educator Don West of Georgia purchased a property near the town of Monteagle, near Chattanooga, from a college professor.

Horton and his fellow activists built several cabins and other additional buildings around the property to fulfill various educational programs. These structures were in a vernacular style and of wood and concrete blocks. First playing host to other organizers in the labor movement, Highlander’s focus shifted towards Myles Horton (r) at library, 1954 Same building, 2013 MLK speaks in library, 1957 antiracist civil rights activism in the early 1950s, with buildings including the library built as programs expanded (Cass, 2013).

Cabin Also in the early 1950s, Georgia educator Septima Clark worked with South Caro- Cabin lina activist Esau Jenkins to develop the Sea Islands Citizenship Schools program. This educational and voter-registration initiative was replicated across the South Cabin by the Southern Christian Leadership Cabin Office and Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and became darkroom Barn Cabin the basis for the Mississippi Council of Federated Organizations’ Freedom Library Schools in 1954 (Emery et al.) Cabin In this era, the presence of noted civil Horton family home rights activists like Dr. Martin Luther Main building Cabinn Community building Cabin King, Jr at Highlander attracted attention from authorities in Tennessee, who looked for excuses to shut down the school. In 1959, the authorities finally caught up with Horton, expropriating the property and forcing Highlander to move to the nearby town of New Market, TN, where it remains today. Many of the original Highlander buildings still remain on the Monteagle property, though in an unrestored state (Carey, 2013).

http://www.uawregion8.net/Activ- ist-HOF/M-Horton.htm

http://www.grundycountyherald.com/tpt-presentation-at-toms-place/

http://branchesandrain.blogspot.com/2012/07/ remembering-cold-war-in-south.html

https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=K8Qzq2tEEtc interracial recreation, 1957 (above) billboard displayed across south of martin http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/local/ luther king, jr at 1957 highlander event story/2014/nov/23/monteagles-storied-high- (right) lander-folk-school-deemed/275284/ 73 CASE STUDY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 shaw freedom house

Shaw, Mississippi USA Architect unknown, approx. 1930

The vast majority of Freedom Schools were located in borrowed and reappropriated spaces. These included church sanctuaries, basements, and social halls; Black schools; stores and restaurants owned by members of the Black community; and in a few cases, formerly abandoned buildings. Location Main street, White neighborhood, Shaw was determined by concerns of necessity, convenience for students, and safety from violent White supremacist reprisal (Hale).

In many instances, Freedom Schools served as community centers and local organizing offices for COFO and MFDP Unpaved dirt street in Black neighborhood, Shaw organizers. Many occupied vernacular wood-frame or brick buildings chosen for their adaptability, minimal operating cost, and nondescript appearance. Some Contextual vernacular houses, Black neighborhood, Shaw were current or former homes in Black communities, often called ‘Freedom Houses.’

Library A typical Freedom House was that in Bedroom Shaw, which was documented by White volunteer Ed McNulty upon his arrival Shaw there on August 6, 1964: Kitchen ”The Freedom House itself [had] stood vacant for some time, but has been fixed up rather well. A crude sign outside Living room Communication center announces this as the Freedom House, “Everyone welcome.” The porch is screened in. The living room has four or five large bookshelves jammed full.

The walls are covered with posters and slogans – “One Man, One Vote,” “We Shall Overcome” – as well as notices of the various classes & meetings. From the ceiling hung a couple dozen-paper chains made by the children in crafts. The office, Classroom/ or communications room houses the gathering space telephone (obtained after much delay), typewriters, the mimeograph machine and office supplies. Screen porch The third room of the Freedom House is the library containing well over 1000 books. Many of them are old textbooks & ex-library books, but there are also many dealing with Negro history & civil rights. So far most of the users seem to be children” (McNulty, 2014).

http://www.readthespirit.com/visual-par- COFO worker in communication center, Shaw Class in similar meridian, MS Freedom House ables/mississippi-freedom-summer-project-1964-part-2/

74 CASE STUDY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 paul laurence dunbar high school Washington, DC USA Bryant & Bryant, 1971 Demolished 2012

With its first predecessor established in 1862, Washington, DC’s Dunbar High School claims the title of America’s oldest Black educational institution. Through- out Reconstruction and the era of Jim Crow segregation, the school and its 1916 Dunbar High School, Snowden buildings represented Black excellence in Ashford, architect; demolished the face of oppression, drawing students 1977 from across the nation who would to on to excel in academic, professional and political careers.

By the late 1960s, Dunbar had outgrown its 1916 building, capably designed by DC’S White municipal architect. The emergence of architectural Modernism, political climate following the 1968 riots, and the nascent Black Power movement demanded an innovative political and architectural response to this problem on the part of DC Public Schools. Bryant & Bryant, graduates of Howard University’s architecture school, were granted the Ramp between floors, 1977 Dunbar commission, and set out to design a ‘for- tress for the mind’, Brutalist in style but humanist in its approach to educating the student (Wiley, 2013).

Whereas traditional school designs double-loaded circulation on corridors stacked atop one another, Bryant and Bryant devised a complex scheme of half-floors connected by ramps, which accomodated flexible open-plan learning environments adaptable to each teacher’s conception of changing student needs. Synthesizing their earlier work at Wood- son and Shaw Junior High Schools, also in DC, the architects sought to separate the vertical space into ‘houses’, an urban adaptation of a suburban postwar trend in school design.

Map of damage from April, 1968 Though the building’s innovative design riots following assasination of was appreciated by its students, some MLK (above); comparison of 1977 teachers failed to embrace the promise Dunbar corridor with 1963 Yale of the open plan, and over the years new Art & Architecture Building, Paul walls and other modifications - and the Rudolph, architect (right) underfunding endemic to urban school systems - marred the 1977 Dunbar building. In 2013, it was demolished and replaced by a glass, steel and brick contemporary structure, designed by Perkins Eastman in partnership with Moody 2013 Dunbar, Perkins Nolan, a Black-owned firm based in Ohio. Eastman Moody Nolan, architects (far left); 2013 Dunbar and football field http://www.perkinseastman.com/proj- which replaced 1977 ect_3405944_dunbar_high_school Dunbar (left) https://www.bdcnetwork.com/dcs-dunbar- high-school-worlds-highest-scoring-leed- school-earns-91-base-credits

75 CASE STUDY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 idea store whitechapel

Tower Hamlets, London, England UK David Adjaye, 2004

The borough of Tower Hamlets, directly adjacent to the global financial nerve center of the City of London, has long been home to significant populations of impoverished and working-class London- ers. In the latter half of the 20th century, it became an immigrant enclave, home to significant populations of East Asians and Africans (Enwezor).

In an effort to better serve these populations in the 21st century, the local government reorganized its library system in the early 2000s. It commissioned noted architects, including Adjaye, to design these projects in a departure from the norm of government value engineering (Stephen, 2006).

The 11,200 SF Idea Store Whitechapel stands adjacent to a bustling public market, a siting intended to make the acquisition of knowledge more accessible to the people of the neighborhood. In addition to the usual library program of bookshelves, work tables and computer stations, the Idea Store contains a number of classrooms of various types, including dance studios, multimedia production, visual arts and music studios. The ground floor contains retail spaces opening onto the market; entry to the building is via an escalator off the market’s sidewalk up to the second floor, a strategy borrowed from retail design and intended to emphasize the accessibility of the building.

The entry sequence, the building’s name, the exterior glazing evocative of striped awnings on the market sheds, as well as the entirely glazed facade of the class- Entry sequence from street market: ‘mediation between the mar- rooms and other spaces on the upper ketplace of materialism and the marketplace of ideas’ (Enwezor) floors all communicate the Idea Store’s democratic accessibility, a value espoused by Adjaye throughout his public projects (Enwezor & Ryan, 2016).

skin

http://www.adjaye.com/projects/civic-buildings/idea-store-whitechapel-road/

https://www.theguardian.com/artandde- sign/2004/jul/11/art2

https://www.ideastore.co.uk/learning-perform- escalator ing-arts-dance-facilities 76 CASE STUDY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 north atlanta high school

Buckhead, Atlanta, GA USA Cooper Carry, 2013

Typical of an American city in the latter half of the 20th century, Atlanta saw the relocation of corporate offices to large, verdant suburban campuses. Many are in the Buckhead neighborhood, the city’s Site of classroom tower spanning spring-fed lake ‘second center’ and one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the South. In 2011, IBM Brutalist lobby (above); new football sta- vacated its corporate campus here, and dium and night lighting scheme (below) the Atlanta Public Schools (APS) bought its former building for a bargain price with the intention of converting it into a state-of-the-art flagship public high school (Severson, 2013).

In a city and region in which White parents still go to considerable extents to avoid sending their children to schools with Black children, and where Black parents of means often also aspire to send their children to private schools, the sym- Color usage aids wayfinding, bol of a high-quality public school was of fosters ‘academy’ identity zones considerable importance for Atlanta ad- in classroom tower ministrators. A strategy of colored night lighting was used to differentiate the building from other office buildings, and illustrate APS’ goal to create a ‘rainbow’ of races and cultures.

The architects, Atlanta-based school and public building specialists Cooper Carry, designed a relatively conventional two-story wing with performing arts, and athletic facilities. The IBM office tower was reused for classrooms, organized into ‘academies’ by grade and separated by floor, a strategy recalling that used Students in the classroom tower by Bryant & Bryant in their 1977 vertical (below, right) design for Dunbar High School (Wiley, 2013). Administration, a digital media production center and a cafeteria are located at the tower’s base.

The extensive grounds of the former corporate campus were graded for athletic use as football and baseball practice fields, and as a football stadium with a 400m track.

Outdoor common area of cooper carry’s new performing arts and athletic wing (elevation below, left)

h http://www.coopercarry.com/project/new- north-atlanta-high-school/

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/07/education/a-147-million-signal-of-faith-in-atlantas- public-schools.html

http://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/7291-north-atlanta-high-school

77 CASE STUDY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 hunters point campus Long Island City. Queens New York, NY USA FXFOWLE, 2013 The Hunters Point urban development project of the 2010s created a new neighborhood of residential high- and mid-ris- es on the waterfront of Long Island City, Queens. In order to serve this community, and to create an asset for surrounding preexisting neighborhoods unsettled by the rapidity and scale of change, the New York City Board of Education commissioned prominent New York firm FXFOWLE to design a 145,000 GSF campus for multiple schools to be located at a prominent waterfront location within Fifth floor terrace with view of midtown manhattan Hunters Point, across the East River from Midtown Manhattan.

FXFOWLE chose to build on the entirety of the flag-shaped site. A double-loaded classroom corridor makes up the ‘pole’, while the ‘flag’ holds the larger program components. On the first floor, are located the lobby, locker rooms, administrative office and double-height gymnasium; on the third and fourth, the auditorium; and on the fifth, two cafeterias and a rooftop terrace overlooking the river.

On the third and fourth floors, the auditorium is surrounded by spacious hall- ways, which open into classrooms with 90% glazed walls overlooking the athletic River-facing facades overlooking athletic fields fields and the river. From the exterior, significant portions of the program can be read through the elevation, including the gymnasium, the banks of classrooms, and the public spaces overlooking the fifth-floor terrace.

The campus is occupied by a middle school, a high school and a specialized magnet school, which occupy their own distinct learning environments while sharing the strategically placed common spaces. First/second floor gymnasium

Third/fourth floor auditorium

http://www.fxfowle.com/projects/18/hunters-point-campus/

http://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/7289-hunter-s-point-campus 78 CASE STUDY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 south melbourne ferrars street primary school

Melbourne, Victoria, Australia Hayball, anticipated completion 2017

The South Melbourne Urban Renewal Area is projected to house up to 80,000 residents on land presently used for industrial purposes to the south-west of the Melbourne CBD. The South Melbourne Primary School is intended to serve as a Atrium and classroom facade from park/plaza Atrium and nontraditional learning areas highly visible asset for this community during its early development, providing a 525-student school, multi-purpose community rooms, park space and outdoor sport courts.

The South Melbourne Ferrars Street Primary School is organized around a central, park-facing atrium extending through all five stories. Within this space, attached to the circulation bridges connecting classrooms on either side, are seating areas, creating opportunities for learning outside the traditional classroom environment (Baljak, 2016).

The proposal is considered a model for the integration of community facilities with a traditional educational program, as well as the effective siting of these programs for optimal use by pedestrians, cyclists and public-transit commuters. This approach is reminiscent of that aspired to by Bryant & Bryant at Shaw Junior High School in Washington, DC Movement diagram showing modes of access and program following the 1968 riots, where the new school was envisioned as part of an ‘education park’ (Wiley, 2017), and in the East Harlem Triangle plan envisioned by ARCH and Black neighborhood activists in 1967 (Goldstein, 2016).

Hayball’s scheme was awarded the top prize in the Education-Future Projects category at the 2016 World Architecture Festival in Berlin, with completion anticipated in late 2017 (Frearson, 2016).

Aerial view showing park/plaza and rooftop terrace

Primary elevation and public park/plaza

https://urban.melbourne/design/2016/11/21/ hayballs-south-melbourne-vertical-school-wins-international-scale

https://www.dezeen.com/2016/11/18/hayball-south-melbourne-primary-school-vertical-school-world-architecture-festival-future-project-year-2015/

http://www.hayball.com.au/projects/ Section through classrooms, nontraditional atrium learning areas south-melbourne-primary-school/ 79 CASE STUDY chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 a freedom school of design

// on the reinforcement and deconstruction of spatialized white supremacy

80 PROGRAM chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 what is a freedom school?

In a raced and gendered society in which value is assigned to human lives based on race and gender classifications, institutions of power will reproduce racism and sexism through every means at their disposal (Morrison, 1993). One of the most effective is through the system of public education (Sturkey and Hale, 2015).

Civil rights activists working in Mississippi in the early 1960s devised a radicalally egalitarian, democratic solution to the problem memorably termed by pioneering historian Carter G. Woodson as ‘the mis-education of the Negro”. This work was begun by a coalition of White and Black educators, voter-registration workers, men and women of the church, and student activists who convened under the auspices of the Council of Federated Organizations in Jackson to develop a plan for the intensification of voter registration in towns across the state of Missisippi in the summer of 1964. Organizer Charles Cobb was the first to propose what would become the Freedom School program (Hale, 2016).

As inspiration for the task before them, these organizers drew on the success of earlier grassroots citizenship education by such institutions as the Highlander Folk School (Carey, 2013) and the Black church (Lin- coln and Mamiya, 1990). They were supported by longtime activist Ella Baker, whose organizing talent had originally brought the student founders of SNCC together after the Greensboro, NC lunch-counter sit-ins in April 1960. Baker’s strong belief in the value of democratic participation and Brazilian educator Paulo Freire’s theories of critical pedagogy provided intellectual foundations for Black activists Bob Moses and Fannie Lou Hamer of Mississippi, educator Septima Clark of Virginia, and White history professors Howard Zinn and Staughton Lynd of Spelman College in Atlanta as they planned what would become the Freedom Schools (Emery et al, 2008).

In the face of Mississippi’s reputation as ‘a closed society’ (Silver, 1964) prepared to defend White supremacy with deadly violence, and the reality of that violence as witnessed in the murders of activists including Herbert Lee, Medgar Evers, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and dozens more that year alone, hundreds of Black and White civil rights workers from across the state and the nation came for ‘Free- dom Summer’ (Hale).

Volunteer Arthur Reese (standing), a While voter registration was seen as the primary objective of school principal from Detroit and Freedom School administrator in Hattiesburg, with Freedom Summer, a radical democratic education program developed students by Mississippi-based Black organizer Charlie Cobb, called the Freedom Schools, occupied the energies of over 300 workers. These young men and women, most of whom were White students or educators from colleges in map: keepinghistoryalive.com the North and West, facilitated summer programs for children and young adults in towns across the state (Hale). The question of whether to solicit herbert randall photograph: PBS.org

81 PROGRAM chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 and employ White people as teachers in the Freedom Schools was a con- tentious one, much debated by the Mississippi-based Black organizers. These organizers saw the danger of White people who had not critically confronted their internalized racial superiority simply reproducing White supremacy through interactions with their Black students who were themsevles coping with a lifetime of internalized racial inferiority.

The eventual decision to employ White teachers was made to capture the media attention which Black Mississippi organizers knew the presence of the children of America’s White liberal elites in Mississippi would elicit,the corresponding protection against violence they hoped that would entail. Other benefits seen included the financial resources the volunteers would bring with them and their ability, afforded by their families’ wealth, to work for minimal or no pay. This consideration, particularly, was of considerable importance to the cash-strapped COFO organization (Sturkey and Hale).

Benefits of this strategy for the White workers were realized almost immediately, as Northern Senators and Representatives recieved calls from worried parents which in turn translated to national scrutiny on potential violence against their children. Black Mississippians who organized with them, as well as those who hosted them and attended the schools remained frighteningly vulnerable (Hale).

The worst fears of both Black and White civil rights workers were realized when Black Meridian native James Chaney and White New Yorkers Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were abducted and murdered by the Ku Klux Klan near Philadelphia, MS on June 21, 1964, as the training camp for Freedom Summer workers commenced at West- ern Women’s College in Oxford, OH. Organizers almost immediately assumed Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner dead, though their bodies would not be discovered until August 4. Despite this, the Freedom Schools and Freedom Democratic Party projects proceeded as planned (Sturkey and Hale). Many, particularly Black organizers and activists, pointed out that this incident attracted more attention than other murders that summer because two of the victims were White.

The employment of the White students as teachers in the Freedom Schools allowed for a greater scale of program than might otherwise have been possible. Over 50 Freedom Schools operated simultaneously, with SNCC field secretary Sandy Lehigh (standing, seven in the city of Hattiesburg alone (Sturkley and Hale). Two board- second from left) with students in sanctuary ing schools, offering more intensive curriculum to students with an eye of Pure Light Baptist Church, Hattiesburg toward the rapid development of more Mississippi-based teachers and organizers, were also planned, though never implemented (Hale).

In contrast to the top-down pedagogy of most American schools, Freedom School students directed the fields of study and inquiry, with the planned curriculum available to teachers as support but not formal- photograph: Mississippi Historical Society

82 PROGRAM chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 ly directing their action (Emery et al.) The schools developed a prolific reach beyond their classrooms, which were found in church basements, sanctuaries, existing Black schoolhouses, homes, businesses and other appropriated spaces.

Organizers preferred that the schools blend into the community to protect against violent White reprisal (Sturkey and Hale). Because of this necessity for camoflauge, the short time period from the program’s conception to its implentation and its minimal budget (Hale), and the architectural profession’s lack of interest in the civil rights movement (Young), Freedom Schools did not utilize formal architectural strategies as tools for advancing their work.

Teachers slept in the homes of local Black families who volun- teered to house them, a situation which - like most practical aspects of the Schools - was liable to incite physical violence and economic recrim- inations by local White supremacist terrorists and community leaders, particularly against the Black families. Bombings destroyed several buildings used as Freedom Schools, including a Baptist church in McComb; though it took some convincing local residents, a new home was found within days (Hale). The disused Meridian Baptist Theological Seminary became the largest Freedom School, housing over 100 students on some Flyer advertising a Freedom School days. Most saw between 5 and 30 students daily. operating in a Detroit church, 1964

Dozens of newspapers were produced by students, who distribut- ed them in their communities. Taken together, the Freedom School newspapers increased the number of pro-integration media outlets in the state of Mississippi by more than half. Students chronicled their daily lives, their hopes and dreams, their thoughts about the Schools, the programs of the Freedom Summer and the Civil Rights Movement more broadly. Arts education was particularly emphasized, with students creating visual and performance art like murals and plays . Of particular note was the singing of ‘freedom songs’ like ‘We Shall Not Be Moved’ and ‘Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around’ which, easy to spread and nearly impossible for the authorities to censor or suppress, were integral to the shared identity of the Movement (Emery et al.)

freedom school pedagogy

Daily instruction at a Freedom School proceeded through the asking of questions. In the recollection of COFO coordinator Liz Fusco,

“These were questions which kept being asked through the summer, in connection with the kids’ interest in their Freedom School teachers, in connection with Negro History, in connection with African culture, in connection even with the academic subjects, as well as in connection with the study of flyer: www.findingeliza.com

83 PROGRAM chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 the realities of Mississippi in the light of Nazi Germany, 1935. The so-called “Citizenship Curriculum” set up two sets of questions.

The primary set was:

1. Why are we (teachers and students) in Freedom Schools?

2. What is the Freedom Movement? SNCC secretary Sandy Lehigh teaches Freedom School students about the MFDP 3. What alternatives does the Freedom Movement offer us?

What was called the secondary set of questions, but what seemed to me the more important, because more personal, set was:

1. what does the majority culture have that we want?

2. what does the majority culture have that we don’t want?

3. what do we have that we want to keep?

The answering of these questions, and the continual raising of them in many contexts, may be said perhaps to be what the Freedom Schools were about. This was so because in order to answer anything out of what these questions suggest, it is necessary for the student to confront the question of who he is, and what his world is like, and how he fits into it or is alienat- ed from it.” Fannie Lou Hamer testifies before the Democratic National Convention Teachers used the Freedom School spaces at night for meetings Credentials Committee, 1964 of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party [MFDP], a parallel to the segregated regular Democratic organization in the state. The MFDP ‘organized around’ the problem of registrars barring Black voters, as mock elections on the local and state level were held to familiarize Black Mississippians - blocked by Jim Crow laws from democratic participation since the 1890s - with the voting process.

At the end of the summer, a Freedom Schools convention was held in the state capitol of Jackson, where students of the Schools came together with teachers and organizers to process the work which had been done. The local organizers of the MFDP also convened to elect delegates and to strategize. In Jackson organizers including Bob Moses formally launched the ‘Mississippi Challenge’, in which the MFDP delegates trav- Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School, the Bronx, NY eled to the national Democratic convention in Atlantic City. There, in a highly visible protest which captured the nation’s attention, they contest- photograph: mississippi historical society ed the credentials of the ‘regular’ delegates on the grounds that segrega- photograph: canadian broadcasting tion ran counter to American ideals, ultimately failing in their mission corporation to be seated but forcing the political establishment to reckon with the photograph: new york city board of movement’s power (Emery et al.) education 84 PROGRAM chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 freedom schools today

Though the Mississippi Freedom Schools were not continued the next summer, their lessons were adopted into the Civil Rights and antiracist organizing movements, and Freedom School pedagogy is alive and well today. A trademark on the term ‘Freedom School’ is held by the Children’s Defense Fund, an organization founded by Jackson, Missis- sippi-born lawyer Marian Wright Edelman - the first Black woman ad- mitted to the Mississippi State Bar - in 1973 which advocates for quality education and institutional outcomes with a focus on children of color. CDF Freedom Schools can be found in cities across America (Children’s Defense Fund, 2012), while organizations including the Quaker American Friends Service Committee run antiracism-focused Freedom Schools, often combining that name with the name of a noted local activist(Amer- ican Friends Service Committee, 2015).

In some instances the Freedom School concept has been adapted into a formal school, as at the Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School in the Bronx, NY. Run in a partnership between the New York City Board of Education and the Children’s Aid Society, a private charity, FLHFHS focuses on the development of critical thinking, research and analytic skills,” with students creating two portfolios - one in 9th-10th and another in 11th-12th grades - demonstrating their creative ability in response to projects posed in each class (FLHFS). This deviation from the norm of ‘teaching to the test’ is demonstrative of the Freedom Schools’ student-based critical pedagogy as adapted to a standard 4-year high school education.

NOMA louisiana's project pipeline

In 2006, the National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA) initiated its Project Pipeline mentorship program. Project Pipeline’s goal is to increase the exposure of students to the field of architecture who belong to underrepresented groups, including women and people of color, and to position them at the intake of the ‘talent pipeline’ leading to employment as architects (Roberts, 2012).

NOMA’s New Orleans-based chapter, NOMA Louisiana, has participated in Project Pipeline since 2012. Under the leadership of program director and NOMA Louisiana vice president Bryan C. Lee Jr, Project Pipeline in New Orleans consists of two programs. These are:

1) a four-day program with one or multiple sessions during the summer, lasting from a Thursday to a Sunday, at a centralized location, and logos: NOMA

85 PROGRAM chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 2) a year-long or semester-long mentoring program which connects students in high schools across the city with architects, intern architects, students and other design professionals, in collaboration with teachers at the students’ schools and located at their school campus.

To Lee, the goals of each are,

“are not to create 100 architects a year [but to encourage students] to recognize how they can impact their community. We say that architecture is the hardware to the software of life, so if you are able to provide the hardware that can sustain all of the programs that run within your society then you are going to have a better overall program and community” (Lingen- felter, 2013).

Project Pipeline’s interdisciplinary pedagogical approach combines introductions to architecture, urban design, landscape architecture, and urban planning (Lee, 2016). Volunteer coordinator Vanessa Smith-Torres speaks to the role of the program in raising student consciousness of fields previously considered inaccessible or not considered at all:

“So many people don’t understand what design can do for their communities. Students don’t always know what architecture is exactly, so they never pursue it as an option. We just want to give them that option and show how different types of design affect your world and your experience” (Lin- genfelter).

As run by NOMA Louisiana, Project Pipeline’s curriculum implicitly and explicitly engages students as potential social justice activists. The program’s mission statement reads,

“Our mission is to empower young people to affect change in their community through design. Using the city as the classroom, and connecting young people to real world architects and planners, we foster the next generation of design professionals, civic leaders, and changemakers. We advocate for fellowship, equity, and excellence in design” (NOMA Louisi- ana, 2016).

The curriculum of the 2016 Project Pipeline high school mentoring program engaged students in critical questioning exercises including defining social justice and learning about and discussing the experiences of Syrian refugees (Dickinson, 2016). The 2016 summer camp continued these themes, but added an exercise exploring the spatial conditions of street protest against the police murder of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, ongoing the same weekend as the camp (Lee).

NOMA Lousiana’s Project Pipeline program intentionally engages photograph: NOMA louisiana

86 PROGRAM chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 both White students and students of color. 2016 high school partners for the semester-long program ranged from McGehee, an all-girls, predominantly White private high school in the Garden District of New Orleans, to St. Augustine, an all-boys Black Catholic high school in the Seventh Ward, to Sci Academy at Abramson, a predominantly Black and Vietnam- ese-American public charter high school in New Orleans East (Dickinson).

The program has been honored with numerous awards across all levels of the architectural profession. These include the AIA Diversity Recognition Award, after its first year of operation in 2013; the Diversity Achievement Award of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architec- ture, a 2015 Presidential Citation by the AIA Louisiana, and the awarding of Chapter of the Year to NOMA Louisiana in 2014 (NOMA Louisiana). The author was a volunteer at the 2014 and 2016 Project Pipeline summer camps, and a mentor to two Sci Academy at Abramson students in the spring semester of 2016.

social justice by design // design as protest

NOMA Louisiana’s slogan, ‘Social Justice by Design,’ communicates the organization’s goals of promoting ”greater dialouge on issues of social justice, civic engagement and better communities” through design work (NOMA Louisiana). A number of individuals and organizations in New Orleans, including NOMA Louisiana, share these goals, and have organized social-justice-focused built-environment interventions.

These include Take Em Down NOLA, which with support from NOMA Lousiana has projected photographs illustrating the brutality of slavery and the nature of racialized oppression in the 21st century, including passages from Michelle Alexander’s book on the criminal justice system, The New Jim Crow, on the column of the Robert E. Lee monument during the White Linen night arts gala; Blights Out, which organizes dramatic and musical performances seeking, in the words of organizer Imani Jacqueline Brown, to use abandoned houses as ”vessels” for artistic production rather than ”voids” in the built environment; and Ecohybridity, a five-movement Black opera organized by artist Kai Barrow which used sites around Katrina-damaged neighborhoods of the city to dramatize the continuing effects of the disaster and responses to it on New Orleans’ Black Blights Out in the Treme (top) and Ecohy- community and Black individuals within that community. Such interven- bridity in the Lower 9th Ward, New Orleans tions seek to further the cause of ‘design justice’(Feldman, 2015). (bottom)

Design justice is a movement drawing inspiration from the built-environment intervention inherent in many forms of social justice protest (Lee). In the years since the emergence of Black Lives Matter, design justice has entered the conversation nationwide as a new form of political engage- photographs: NextCity

87 PROGRAM chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 ment for architects. New Orleans has been a center of the design justice movement, hosting the NOMA national conference in 2015, an indication of NOMA Louisiana’s national leadership in promoting its principles (Feldman).

The 2015 NOMA national conference held in New Orleans, ‘RISE: Social Justice by Design’, included a one-day community workshop for its Day of Service entitled ‘Design as Protest’. Design as Protest, sponsored by the AIA New Orleans Center for Design and Next City magazine, ”asked participants to consider and explore how acts of protest contain opportunities for architects, artists, and activists to collaborate on issues around social justice.” At the AIA New Orleans Center for Design on Lee Circle,

“groups of poets, architects, journalists, and various other civic-minded professionals discussed issues at the cross-section of urban societies. De- sign responses among the teams focused on solutions around the impacts of gentrification, mass incarceration, education, and public interest design in public spaces. There was a definite energy in the room as activists out- lined principles, artists explored visual statements, and architects encour- aged placemaking” (Dickinson, 2015).

Materials produced in the 2015 Design as Proposals produced by these groups were archived by NOMA Protest workshop Louisiana, which hosted a follow-up workshop for further development of the proposals in October 2016 (Alvarez, 2016). In November 2016, NOMA Louisiana hosted a second Design as Protest Workshop at the AIA Center on Lee Circle, which engaged community members in producing a proposal responding to the threat posed by the election of Donald Trump to the human rights of women, people of color, immigrants and religious minorities in America (Design as Protest Workshop, 2016); a further series of workshops was coordinated in more than 15 cities across the United States to coincide with Inauguration Day, 2017. The author was in attendance at both the 2016 and 2017 workshops, and participated in projects engaging issues including voter disenfranchisment, mass incarceration and police violence.

the freedom school of design

I desire to work toward the end of deconstructing White supremacy in the United States. I believe that one way to effectively achieve this is through education. I do not believe that anyone is born thinking that other people are greater or lesser than them because of the color of their skin. I believe we are taught how to hate, how to feel superior or inferior to others, and that the only way to bring about equality between people of all races, genders, sexual orientations and other variations of identity is to teach them the values of justice and equity. photograph: Freddie Dickinson, CTA Group

88 PROGRAM chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 Since every built intervention carries with it the value system of the society which produced it, and American society is and has always been a White supremacist society, architecture in America cannot be considered independent of its capacity to reproduce racialized power structures. However, the power to shape society inherent in the practice of architecture can be used toward the end of deconstructing White supremacy through radically democratic antiracist education, just as it can be used to uphold White supremacy through 60-foot columns and memorial halls dedicated to the Lost Cause of the right of Americans who need to think that they are White to own people called Black (Branley, 2013).

Architecture, as a mechanism for the control of space, shapes the society which occupies that space (Lefebvre). Architects produce the forms, spaces, places which reinforce societal structures of domination, oppression, democracy and freedom (West). And every architect in America, as a result of the system of credentialed education, must graduate from an architecture school, meaning that within design education lies the site of potential intevention for the deconstruction of White supremacy in the American built environment.

Like architecture itself, institutions of architectural education are not politically neutral. In his introduction to Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Richard Shaull asserts that education can follow one of two regimes:

1. education as an instrument used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and to enforce conformity, or

2. education as “the practice of freedom”, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to par- ticpate in the transformation of the world.”

The latter regime is self-reinforcing, as students in a properly administered school for freedom will apply processes of critical thinking to the school itself, preventing the calcification of dogmas. The Missis- sippi Freedom Schools practiced this self-reinforcement, applying critical questioning and protest strategies learned in the Freedom Schools to the Mississippi Student Union, which organized student protests against Jim Crow both within and outside of public schools statewide in the fall of 1964 and spring of 1965. Students applied the lessons of the Freedom Schools to their lives long past the summer of 1964, turning college campuses into sites of protest. Freedom School students acting on the lessons of that summer entered and shaped society in the 1960s and 1970s, the era of Black Power. Many remain engaged politically engaged today, 53 years later (Hale).

89 PROGRAM chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 “Demanding much more than the right to attend school, Black students of the late 1960s demanded to be included in the decision-making processes that controlled institutions.” (Hale).

The Freedom School of Design (FSD) will introduce students to the power of architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning and urban design for social justice. Building on the precedent of programs like NOMA Louisiana’s Project Pipeline and Design as Protest, the FSD will utilize the critical pedagogy of the Freedom Schools with a focus on their performing, visual and language arts components.

Unlike most schools of architecture, which follow Shaull’s first regime by implicitly or explicitly perpetuating the White supremacist, male-dominated status quo of the discipline (Fields, 1997), the FSD will follow Shaull’s second regime, teaching design as a tactic for the practice of freedom. Though graduates of the FSD may continue on to postsecondary education in architecture or other fields, they will carry the critical questioning learned in freedom education with them, enabling sub- version and reconstruction of further systems of White supremacy.

An adaptation of the Freedom School questions to address White supremacy in the built environment:

1. Why are we (teachers and students) in the Freedom School of Design?

2. What is just and equitable design?

3. What alternatives does just and equitable design offer us?

4. What does the majority design culture have that we want?

5. What does the majority design culture have that we don’t want?

6. What do we have that we want to keep?

designing the client

Independent cultural and higher-education institutions are often created and sustained through substantial capital bequests, which estab- lish endowments invested in financial products like stocks and bonds. These, necessarily, require the presence of people of considerable wealth who are willing to donate a large sum of money for no purpose other than philanthropic goodwill. A number of private universities, including Stan- ford and Vanderbilt, have been established in this manner. photographs: cooper union

90 PROGRAM chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City was established in 1859 by industrialist Peter Cooper on the radically progressive and egalitarian belief that a quality technical education should be available, at no cost, to anyone regardless of age, gender, race, or religion or social status (Kaminer, 2013). Today the Cooper Union hosts one of the world’s foremost schools of architecture, as well as social science, engineering and art programs, charging $20,000/year tuition to those who can afford it but offering scholarships to those who cannot.

Over its long history, the Cooper Union has stayed true to the ideals of its founder in advancing progressive social policy. Its Great Hall was the venue for a landmark speech by then-candidate Abraham Lincoln asserting the federal government’s right to regulate slavery in February, 1860. That same room, in which dozens of Presidents and and heads of state have spoken, hosts meetings of the New York City Rent Control Board.

The success of fundraising for projects like the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington, DC illustrates that an institution or nonprofit could raise funds from philanthropic sources for the construction and operation of a building with a proudly antiracist agenda. Thus, it is realistic to imagine that the Freedom School of Design could be constructed and sustained through philanthropic fundraising.

There is ample precedent for the support of organizations with explicitly antiracist goals through philanthropic fundraising. The Civ- il Rights Movement of the 1960s raised most of its money for activist projects and legal defense through philanthropic appeals, primarily to individuals and corporations, as have groups like the NAACP, the Urban League and the United Negro College Fund for over a century (Branch). The National Museum of African American History and Culture has used its status as an architectural icon to motivate fundraising from outside the normal pool of donors, ‘raising the bar’ for Black philanthropy through successful appeals to Black churches (McGlone, 2016).

Contesting the perception of philanthropy as a pursuit desirable Beyonce (center) and backup dancers raise fist only to wealthy Whites, new research indicates that potential donors of in Black Power salute during performance of color are often not solicited, but will give as generously or more so than ‘Formation’, 2016 Super Bowl halftime show Whites particularly to causes focused on combating historical inequali- ties (Rovner, 2015).

Since the birth of the modern entertainment industry prominent entertainers, both Black and White, have employed their fame as a tool of political and financial advocacy for antiracist causes. These have included Paul Robeson, Josephine Baker (West and McQueen, 2016), Harry Bela- fonte, Sammy Davis, Jr., Dick Gregory, Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor and Jane Fonda (McNeill, 2015). Musicians, particularly Black musicians, screenshot: infostormer.com

91 PROGRAM chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 too numerous to count have fought White supremacy through their work, including Mahalia Jackson (Branch), Kanye West, and Beyonce and Sol- ange Knowles.

Television mogul Oprah Winfrey, America’s only Black female billionaire, has supported numerous philanthropic efforts in education, including the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in Meyerton, Solange, 2016 near Johannesburg, South Africa. Winfrey also contributed substantially to the NMAAHC, and with her international stature and connections, could be an indespensible contributor to the FSD.

With family roots in New Orleans, vocal pro-Black, feminist political views, the Knowles sisters will be ideal contributors to the FSD. Beyonce is an acknowledged global superstar with a net worth estimated at $465 million. Solange’s record label, fashion and design house, Saint Heron, promotes pro-Black visual and performance artists with sched- uled performances, artists’ talks, panels, and parties in New Orleans and Tommie Smith and John Carlos, 1968 other cities. Her demonstrated interest in design could manifest in support for the FSD, whether financial or artistic.

American athletes have also taken advantage of their cultural prominence to advocate for antiracism. Sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos, by raising their gloved fists during the national anthem at their 1968 Olympic medal ceremony, became instant symbols for the cause of Black power in that tumultous year. Boxer Muhammad Ali and basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who converted to Islam, both spoke out LeBron James , 2012 forcefully against injustice toward people called Black in America.

During protests over the police chokehold murder of Eric Garner in December 2014, dozens of basketball players including global stars Kobe Bryant, LeBron James and Derrick Rose publicly supported the Black Lives Matter movement by wearing ‘I Can’t Breathe’ T-shirts during warmups. Colin Kaepernick (right) and Eric Reid, 2016 Most visibly, Colin Kaepernick, the biracial quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, has made a provocative poltitical statement by taking a knee instead of standing during the national anthem. Kapernick uses the stance, traditionally used by football players to recognize solidarity with an injured player on the field, to call attention to the suffering of Ameri- cans of color at the hands of police. Kaepernick has inspired thousands, Black and White, at all levels of American sports life, from high-school cheerleaders to college band members to players on the women’s national soccer team, to follow his lead in making a statement for the humanity of people of color. During the playing of the national anthem at the open- photograph: Daily Mail ing ceremony for the NMAAHC, some on the National Mall took a knee (Ohlheiser, 2016). photograph: Sports Illustrated photograph: fox news

A lineage can be traced from the walk-outs and sit-ins organized photograph: bleacherreport.com

92 PROGRAM chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 by Freedom School-educated Mississippi students in their public schools to the ‘kneel-ins’ conducted by thousands of high-school students nationwide as a result of Kaepernick’s protest. With high visibility to young people nationwide and a global media presence afforded by the prominence of his position as an NFL quarterback, Kaepernick will make a valuable donor, fundraiser or spokesman for the FSD.

The National Organization of Minority Architects, founded as the Coalition of Black Architects in 1971, intends to advocate for the development and advancement of architects of color in America (Mitchell, 2003). Because of the FSD’s lineage in the programs of the National Organiza- tion of Minority Architects and the AIA New Orleans, a degree of engagement by both the New Orleans/Louisiana chapters and the national office of these influential organization can be assumed. Affiliation or collaboration with NOMA, the AIA and their philanthropic partners, including prominent global and regional architecture firms, could be a strategy for building the school's donor base and professional network.

who will use the FSD?

Like other modern Freedom Schools such as the Fannie Lou Ham- er Freedom High School in the Bronx, the FSD will operate as a collabo- rative partnership (FLHFHS, 2016). This partnership will be between the Orleans Parish School Board and the Freedom School of Design organization. It will charge no attendance, subsidizing its operations through philanthropic support from the AIA, NOMA and other leaders in the field of design cognizant of the benefits to the discipline of architecture and to the larger society which substantive inclusion of people of color, particularly people called Black, will bring. It will maintain institutional ties with the architecture schools at Tulane University, Louisiana State University, Louisiana Tech University, and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, in the interest of enrolling its graduates in their architecture & design programs and keeping their design talent in Louisiana.

The FSD will not be a charter school, in recognition of the lack of transparency and misplaced educational priorities which have charac- terized charter schools in New Orleans and nationwide. As the FLHFHS and other programs demonstrate, there are ways to run innovative public schools without utilizing the neoliberal charter school model, character- ized as “a civil rights failure’ which has systematically denied resources and quality education to students with special needs and students of color (Frankenberg et al).

This failure was by design, as charter schools were originated and popularized by neoliberal economist Milton Friedman as a potential solution to the ‘problem’ of the ‘undue infringement’ of the federal govern-

93 PROGRAM chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 ment on the local schools of people who needed to think that they were White following the Brown v. Board of Education desegregation order in 1954 (Erickson, 2011).

Everyday users of the FSD will be children, teenagers and young adults of K-12 school age, the educators who teach them, and the support staff who cook for the students and teachers and clean the building. Both within and outside of regular school hours, people of all ages will use the building to attend lectures and performances, displays of design work, and to access the library/media center.

About 30 boarding students will be housed in the FSD’s residential component, living and learning in an intensive program similar to that envisioned by the 1964 Freedom School planners (Hale). The majority of students will attend classes and programming at the FSD in addition to or in coordination with their standard school classes.

This model has been successfully demonstrated by the New Or- leans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA), a state-funded pre-professional training center founded by local artists, educators, business leaders and activists in 1973. NOCCA offers instruction in culinary arts, dance, film- making & audio production classical, jazz, and vocal music, drama, musical theatre, theatre design, visual arts, and creative writing (NOCCA). FSD’s arts programs will seek to build on NOCCA’s established success, providing a geographically central and transit accessible alternative to its Bywater-based campus.

The FSD and NOCCA will collaborate on programming, and may develop a healthy and productive academic and professional rivalry. But the FSD’s particular focus on design for intervention in the built environment, as opposed to NOCCA’s focus on the creative arts, will allow each institution to maintain its own niche.

Another precedent for the work of the FSD is The NET Charter High School, located only a few blocks away from the site on O.C. Ha- ley Boulevard. The NET incorporates small class sizes, between 5 and 15 students; individual learning plans, and extensive support for students whose circumstances make graduation within the traditional 4 years difficult or impossible (The NET). Individual learning plans at the FSD will take the form of design portfolios incorporating work from a broad spectrum of disciplines including creative writing, poetry, playwriting, journalism, music, scuplture, painting and drawing as tools for percieving and visualizing design justice n the built enviornment.

models for urban architecture education at the secondary level logos: NOCCA, The NET

94 PROGRAM chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 Philadelphia’s Charter High School for Architecture and Design (CHAD), founded in 1999 by the Philadelphia chapter of the AIA and supported by that city’s architecture community, serves 550 students at a location blocks from Independence Hall in Center City Philadelphia. CHAD seeks specifically

“to provide a safe, academically sound, and stimulating high school for urban minority students; and given the very low percentage of licensed African American architects in the United States, to prepare African Amer- ican students, especially, for collegiate study and training in the fields of architecture and design” (CHAD).

In Miami, Florida, the Design and Architecture Senior High School (DASH) is a public magnet school offering programs in architecture, industrial design, fashion design, graphic design, film and entertainment technology (DASH). Brooklyn, NY’s Williamsburg High School for Arts and Design (WHSAD) “offers students a unique and engaging four- year course sequence with a focus in architectural drafting, design principles, and historic preservation.” WHSAD students have the opportunity to earn a Career & Technical Education certification, as well as up to six college credits through their school’s Early College High School program (WHSAD).

In Detroit, the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Ar- chitecture and Urban Planning runs the Michigan Architecture Prepara- tory Program, or ArcPrep, in partnership with students in Detroit Pub- lic Schools. Program director Milton S.F. Curry describes the program, begun in 2014, as offering

“‘smaller class sizes, intense student-teacher interaction, [focused around] iterative design-based projects that incorporate applied geometry and visual arts. These ‘studio’ projects are infused with lessons on social movements and the relationships between the visual histories of social movements and the space of the city - the integration of humanistic thought, social issues of concern to them and their families, and the study of architecture.”

Curry, a Black American architect educated at Cornell University and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, notes that “students in our program are not acutely aware of the history of race and class that per- vades the city of Detroit’, and that they “are interested in narratives of people like them who have started their own business or charted a non- linear path from high school to a seat in an architecture firm doing what logo: CHAD they love and what they are passionate about.” Curry decries “[a] methodology of public education that has shifted from a focus on high perfor- photograph: architect magazine mance and pathways to college to an acceptance of society’s conception photograph: Taubman College of Archi- tecture and Urban Planning, University of of poor and working class and minority students as irreperably damaged” Michigan

95 PROGRAM chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 (Messner, 2017)

As described by the University of Michigan, ArcPrep is a one-semester college-level coure curriculum on architecture, urbanism and design-related fields. Students meet three hours a day, five days a week over the course of a semester, for high school credit. The program has three major components:

“1) Architecture studio, a college - level course for high-school credit focused on architecture and including robust assignments in mathematics and visual art,

2) Career Exposure Module (CEM): career-focused exposure to professional architecture and design practices, the places of work, and direct engagement with practictioners,

3) Career Counseling Module (CCM): individual and collective career counseling including workshops on postsecondary education, financing college and producing an effective application essay and portfolio.’

Classes are located at the Michigan Research Studio, a 3,700 SF space on Woodward Avenue in Midtown Detroit, accomodating teaching, job shad- owingm, and other activities that promote exposure to architecture and design-related career paths’” (Taubman College, 2017).

designing a curriculum

The FSD will offer high-school credit and professional certification programs in partnership with local public institutions like Delgado Community College and Southern University-New Orleans. Such a partnership will offer a more affordable path to college for local students who cannot afford an extensive private education, and help to improve public perception of these often-ignored schools (Bebelle, 2016).

The FSD’s critical pedagogy will set it apart from these institutions, most of which are fairly traditional in their approach to education. An FSD education will seek to prepare students to encounter subsequent educational institutions and workplaces critically, challenging their status quos toward the end of deconstructing the White supremacist structures embedded in them.

As at the early Cooper Union (Kaminer), an cohort of older students, mostly in their 20s and 30s, who may hold jobs during the day, will attend night classes. The janitorial, foodservice and support staff will also use the building during the day and at this time. Support spaces for these users will be designed and outfitted to the same standards of quality as any other spaces in the FSD, a position reflective of the value of these peo-

96 PROGRAM chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 ple’s lives. Those who work in these positions are often Black and brown women, whose lives are treated as expendable even as their underpaid labor enables the orderly function of American business and institutional life at all levels.

The Freedom School of Design will continue both the traditions of freedom schooling descending from civil-rights activism and the prag- matic night-school educational model, employed at many modern colleges and universities including the Southern University School of Law, which once occupied the old Temple Sinai within the boundaries of the site (Lachloff and Kahn, 2005), and at other Black-focused educational institutions in the nearby Dryades Street corridor, like the Dryades YMCA School of Commerce (Medley, 2015).

The curriculum of the Freedom School of Design, educating students ages 14-19, will include:

1st year: Introductory design studio. Incorporating mathematics and visual art, including representational methods of photography, writing, musical and dramatic performance. Taught in FSD and in ‘Mobile Class- rooms’ at discretion of students and teachers. Theoretical sites.

2nd year: Mapping-based studio. Incorporating critical history and theory, sociology and anthropology. Taught in FSD and in ‘Mobile Classroom’ at discretion of students and teachers. Sites chosen by students around New Orleans area.

3rd year: Community-engaged ‘Urban Studio’ modeled on work of Small City Center, Auburn Rural Studio. Primary challenge: production of affordable housing (on Auburn 20K House model).

4th year: Option studios in music, drama, visual and sculptural arts, research, graphic, landscape and urban design.

Based on the strength of the portfolios they compile in the first three years, students can apply to colleges in their 4th year. If they so choose, they can apply for deferred admission, and remain at the FSD for a fifth year. Fifth year is not required; nor is attending college, though both are strongly reccomended.

5th year: Culminating project. Can be done individually or in groups. Final presentation is of portfolio compiled from previous years’ work, supporting ‘thesis’ project.

To support this curriculum, the program of the Freedom School of Design will include:

97 chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 - teaching rooms for discussion and design of architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning and urban design. These rooms are intentionally not ‘classrooms’, because the FSD’s pedagogy questions the hierarchy of teachers and classes as traditionally concieved. - workshop, studio, practice, display and performance spaces for the visual, performing and dramatic arts - physical recreation space for students at the school (football/soccer field, basketball/volleyball court) - a library and multimedia center for students and the broader public - administrative space for the planning of educational programs - a residential facility for a limited number of students, faculty and visiting scholars - outdoor space of a courtyard or quadrangle typology - outdoor space of a public, civic plaza typology

program elements

The program of the Freedom School of Design will be comprised of an educational institution of approximately 135,000 GSF, a residential facility of approximately 14,000 SF, and two types of outdoor spaces: a largely enclosed series of courtyards of approximately 15,000 SF, and an unenclosed public plaza of approximately 100,000 SF.

The Freedom School of Design will include:

- 10 design studios (@ 3,000 SF each, total 30,000 SF)

- 25 teaching/learning rooms (@ 700 SF each, total 17,500 SF)

- 5 art studio classrooms and workshops (@ 900 SF each, total 4,500 SF)

- 5 music studio/rehearsal rooms (@ 1,000 SF each, total 5,000 SF)

- 4 dance studios (@ 2,000 SF each, total 8,000 SF)

- 1 basketball/volleyball court (@ 7,000 SF)

- Wood and metal shop, including outdoor work space (@ 7,000 SF)

- Locker rooms (@ 1,000 SF)

- 30 teacher offices (@ 200 SF each)

- A large auditorium with support spaces (@ 15,000 SF)

- A black box theater with support spaces (@ 6,000 SF)

98 chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 - An art gallery (@ 2,500 SF)

- A multimedia (books, computers, audio and visual) library (@ 20,000 SF)

- Radio, film and television production studios (@ 10,000 SF)

- Food service, kitchen and other support spaces (@ 8,000 SF)

- Administrative and counseling offices and conference rooms (@ 4,000 SF)

- Janitorial support spaces (@ 2,000 SF)

- 200 studio apartments for faculty, students and visitors (@ 350 SF, total 70,000 SF)

- Common areas and support spaces for apartments (10,000 SF)

- A courtyard/quadrangle with outdoor performance space and seating (@ 10,000 SF)

- A public plaza (@ 100,000 SF)

The total space of the school program (exclusive of the last two elements, which are unconvered outdoor space, and of circulation) is 145,400 NSF. The space of the residential program is 15,600.

145,400+15,600 = 166,000

The entire program will require approximately 165,000 SF.

These program allocations were arrived at through study of a program diagram of Allied Works’ Booker T. Washington High School and of plans for the residential component of the Union Theological Seminary.

99 chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 programmatic diagrams

Quantitative Site Analysis

16,000 SF (2 floors @ 8,000 SF) 106,000 SF 88,400 SF 60,000 SF (5 floors @ 1,200 SF)

53, 700 SF

1937 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map

100 PROGRAM chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 Potential Sectional and Plan Programmatic Relationships

Union Theological Highlander Folk School Seminary

Production Production Media Private Learning & Gathering outdoor Teaching Learning & Public outdoor teaching Administrative Housing Housing

Administrative

Occupation of Programmatic Components by Time

Housing

Visiting school Sleep classes

Lunch hour Dinner Morning classes

School

12 AM 4 818 1242PM 4 8 12

Night classes

Awakening

101 PROGRAM chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 Overall Site Program Adjacencies

public outdoor school

private outdoor residential

music, drama & dance School Program Adjacencies

service drawing, painting, gathering sculpture

workshop

library design studio

digital administration & technology teacher support & media classroom

102 PROGRAM chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 Program Continuums

design studio

service workshop public outdoor gathering drawing, painting, residential classroom sculpture music, drama private administration & & dance teacher support digital outdoor technology library & media

Private Public

design music, studio drama classroom & dance residential service public outdoor gathering workshop drawing, painting, digital sculpture technology administration & library & media teacher support private outdoor

Dark Light

Pedagogical Program

critical theory design practicality impracticality tearing down building up white supremacy antiracist equity

design freedom as protest political

repression

design studio

103 PROGRAM chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 lee circle, new orleans, LA USA a critical pedagogy for the deconstruction of white supremacy

104 SITE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 “When we talk about symbols, we are talking about representations of a system.”

Angela Kinlaw organizer, Take Em Down NOLA

105 chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 site selection criteria

Geographically, I have chosen to locate this intervention in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. As I live here, this simplifies the process of site visits and allows for a greater engagement with the process of the project than would be possible with the site in another location.

New Orleans is an appropriate place for this intervention as the base for the domestic slave trade after 1820 (Mobley) and as a city which profits daily from selling tourists romanticized narratives of antebellum life and myths of a harmonious multiracial past. These fictive narratives, sold to predominantly White tourists as ‘food, hospitality and fun,’ are supported by the underpaid labor of Black people in the city’s service industry (Thomas, 2014). Many of these people travel through the space of Lee Circle on a daily basis on their commutes to jobs in the French Quar- ter, CBD and Warehouse District via the St. Charles Avenue streetcar.

In an American city, particularly in a Southern city, any site home to prominent government and civic institutions will tend to carry these legacies due to the White supremacist nature of state power (Schindler, 2015). In New Orleans, there are several sites which fulfill the above criteria, including Lafayette Square, Jackson Square, and the selected site, Tivoli Place/Lee Circle. Another site, “Beauregard’ or Congo Square, does fulfill the criteria but is disqualified by its symbolic importance as a site of African Diasporic identity, which renders it less appropriate than others as a site for an intervention intended to confront and dismantle White supremacy.

The location of this intervention in New Orleans, a city of the American South, is not intended as a statement on the particular history of New Orleans or the South with regard to the history of White supremacy in America. Every city in America, North and South, East and West, has been a site of White supremacy, as a location of Native genocide, the slave trade, Jim Crow, racialized social, economic and political repression and exclusion, mass incarceration or police violence. I do recognize that the South has a symbolic meaning as ‘the racist part of America’, even if this perception is grounded in an avoidance of White supremacy elsewhere in America (Delaney, 1998).

Practically, an educational institution oriented toward the broad public would be most appropriately sited in a dense urban context, where it is accessible to a large number of people. Located adjacent to the Pon- tchartrain Expressway, the FSD is conveniently located for car access. Since it is the goal of the School to reach students regardless of economic status, location along or near mass-transit lines is also a priority. The St. Charles streetcar provides a direct connection to Uptown and a link to buses traveling to the predominantly Black neighborhoods of Gentilly, New Orleans East, the Ninth Ward and on the Westbank via the Canal cartoon: matt davies, newsday

106 SITE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 Street end of the streetcar line.

Urbanistically, the intervention combines a variety of programmatic components including educational, performance, display, production, and residential, integrated through complex plan and sectional relationships. This resulted in a compex of midrise buildings, 2-4 stories in height, comparable to building heights found in the surrounding ‘So- Ho’-style neighborhood of warehouses converted into housing, art galleries, production, performance and display spaces (Jacobs, 1961).

Symbolically, an intervention seeking to deconstruct White supremacy should be sited in a place where the built-environment legacy of White supremacy is palpable. This vehicle will seek to architecturally confront and deconstruct the White supremacist built enviornment of its site, necessitating the presence of one or more monuments and other buildings emblematic of White supremacy and the exclusion of Black- ness as a canvas for the architectural intervention. In an effort to expand the reach of the intervention to the broader city, location at a site with axial relationships to other sites or neighborhoods associated with White supremacy and the exclusion of Blackness is also desired (see ‘Conceptual Diagrams’).

Architecturally, the intervention seeks to combine adaptive reuse of existing symbolically weighted buildings and monuments with new construction, collaging the parts into a whole through a progressive, contemporary and environmentally sensitive idiom. Thus, the desired site must combine both presently cleared land and vacant or underutilized historic buildings available for reuse.

Ultimately, Lee Circle is the best choice of site for this intervention. It fulfills the geographical, practial, urbanistic, symbolic and architectural criteria above enumerated.

107 SITE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 alternate site // congo square

Treme New Orleans, LA USA

Before the settlement of New Orleans by White people, the space that is now Con- go Square served as a gathering and trading ground for Native American tribes. As Europeans settled the present-day Vieux Carre, the site developed into a center of cultural, social and economic exchange serving the indigenous and enslaved Fenced-off, often empty, Congo Square, 2016 African populations of the city. Here, enslaved Africans and free people of color could conduct themselves somewhat outside the control of the colonial authorities, sustaining musical, dance and other creative tradition expressive of bonds to Africa and the Afro-Carribean.

Under American control, more restrictive enforcement on enslaved Africans and free people of color curtailed many of the traditions of Congo Square. By the late 19th century, the space was a modernized Municipal Auditorium, 1930 public park, though it retained its African name. This changed in 1893, when the square was renamed for General P.G.T. Beauregard, the Creole general who served with distinction in the defense of slavery during the War for White Ownership of Black People . The square was renamed the same year the Supreme Court formall established the doctrine of separate but equal in Plessy v. Ferguson, which began as a civil rights case orga- Ruby Bridges integrates Frantz Elementary, 14 Nov 1960 Rally at Municipal Auditorium, 15 Nov 1960 nized by Creole activists of color in the Treme community surrounding the park.

The 1927 City Beautiful plan for constructing a civic center in the rear of the French Quarter and the front of Treme, necessitating the demolition of at least 16 blocks of historic fabric, guided the placement of the Municipal Auditorium on two blocks overlooking ‘Beauregard Square’; the AIA New Orleans proudly recounts its role in this decision on its website today.

Though the civic center was built on top Treme, 1920 Harland Bartholemew Associates plan, 1927 of another, even poorer neighborhood, the back-a-town of Black Storyville, in the 1950s, the 1927 plan did motivate the demolition of a further 14 blocks for a planned cultural center, which evolved into today’s fenced-off and largely inaccessible Armstrong Park.

http://www.aaregistry.org/historic_events/ view/congo-square-soul-new-orleans

Use of Armstrong Park by tourists, 2016 https://www.aianeworleans.org/history/ Goodstein, Ethel S.A Tale of Two Civic Centers: A New CIty Hall for New Orleans, a New Urban- Treme, 2016 ism for ‘Dixie’, Journal of the 84th Meeting of the ACSA, 1996

108 SITE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 alternate site // lafayette square

Central Business District New Orleans, LA USA

Originally platted as ‘Place Publique’, or ‘Public Square’, at the center of the Gravier plantation subdivision in 1788, this space became the center of Anglo- phone life in late-French and Spanish colonial New Orleans, and was renamed for the French American Revolutionary War hero the Marquis de Lafayette in 1824. During the era of New Orleans’ Gallier Hall, New division into three separate municipali- Orleans’ second city ties constituted along ethnic lines from hall, designed 1845 1836 to 1852, the square was the seat of by James Gallier, Jr the First, Anglo-American, municipality’s (above); early (right) government. and late (above right) 19th century views Upon reunification a new city hall, Gallier of Lafayette Square, Hall, was constructed for on Lafayette featuring Gallier Hall Square, symbolizing the victory of the and two versions of Anglo-Americans over the Creoles in First Presbyterian the war for political power (Campan- Church , presided over ella). Key institutions of antebellum by White supremacist Anglo-American New Orleans, like the Rev. Benjamin Palmer First Presbyterian Church and the Irish Catholic church, St. Patrick’s, surrounded the square. They were constructed in Gre- Hale Boggs US co-Roman and Gothic Revival styles, all Courthouse and intellectually associated with the cultural Federal Building, supremacy of Europeans (Wilson). built 1972 Explicit White supremacist imagery came to the square in 1900, when a statue of one of slavery’s key political defenders, Kentucky Senator Henry Clay, was moved to the square from the corner of Canal and Royal. This statue had been erected at that location in 1860 (Branley), as a Monument to White suprem- political statement by prominent slave- acist slaveowner Henry Clay, holding New Orleanians. In the Square’s as erected in canal st neutral center, facing Gallier Hall, the Clay ground, 1860 (above left), monument directly addressed the seat of federal moved to Lafayette Square for municipal power, as it does today. courthouses streetcar expansion in 1900; Henry Clay monument, Potts- In 1908 the Anglo-American business ville, PA, erected 1852 (above community successfully advocated for right) nearly identical to Lee the construction of a new Post Office and monument in its original Federal Courthouse at Lafayette Square. design An Art Moderne addition opened in 1933 on the uptown side of the square. federal reserve bank With the post office’s move to Loyola Ave and the construction of a new federal building and courthouse next door facing the widened Poydras Street, the 1908 building became the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. The Federal Reserve built its gallier hall New Orleans branch adjacent to Gallier Hall in the 1980s, surrounding the Square almost fully with insitutions of American McDonogh monument facing governmental power (Campanella). Gallier Hall (left), focus of 1954 protest organized by Arthur http://www.lafayette-square.org/site296.php Chapital of new orleans NAACP and labor leader Revius Ortique http://www.gsa.gov/portal/ext/html/site/hb/ Jr. Black students boycotted the category/25431/actionParameter/exploreBy- traditional laying of flowers at Building/buildingId/719 the statue, which they had done separately from White students http://www.aviewoncities.com/neworleans/ after waiting hours in the sun. lafayettesquare.htm 109 SITE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 tivoli place // Howard Library, lee circle now vacant (left); Confederate Me- Warehouse District morial Hall (below) New Orleans, LA USA French surveyor Barthelemy Lafon laid out streets on the Delord-Sarpy Plan- tation into the Faubourgs St. Mary and Annunciation in 1807 , creating a ‘Place du Tivoli’ at a bend in Nayades Street, now St. Charles Avenue (Douglas, 2011). Union Army encampment at Tivoli Circle, 1864 Before the War for White Ownership of Black People , the space was used as an open public park, for purposes including as a baseball field (Karst, 2015). In 1877, the Robert E. Lee Monumental Associa- tion, an organization of ex-Confederates undertook to perpetuate the ‘Lost Cause’ mythology through the erection of a monument to Virginian General Robert National American Bank, E. Lee. The City Council renamed the Moise F. Goldstein, 1954 circle as a prerequisite for the erection of the monument, which was formally dedicated on the Friday before Mardi Gras, YMCA, Roessle & van 1884 (Larino, 2015). Osthoff, 1959 The monument, a 60-foot Doric column topped by a bronze statue of Lee, was hailed with an editorial in the Daily Picayune, which proclaimed that “‘by every appliance of literature and art, we must show to all coming ages that with us, at least, there dwells no sense of guilt.” Temple Sinai from Lee Warehouses and rowhouses, (Karst) Circle, 1901 1948 The circle became a home to key civic institutions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These included Temple Sinai, built in 1872; the Howard Library, Henry Hobson Richardson’s only building in his home state, opened in 1886; the Confederate Memorial Hall and museum, opened in 1895; the New Orleans Public Library, in 1908; and the YMCA, built in 1929 and expanded in 1959. All of these institutions were closed to Black citizens. In the latter part of the 20th century, the Lee Circle, 1920s; public library behind monument Lee Circle, 2016; K & B plaza behind monument era of integration and subsequent White flight, many closed or moved. Mardi Gras, 2015 As protests swelled following renewed media attention to police and White terrorist murder of Black people in the mid-2010s, Lee Circle became a center for activist energy. The monument was appropriated by protestors to display messages challenging the narrative of spatialized White supremacy.

http://media.nola.com/tpphotos/pho- White Linen Night to/2014/03/14411942-standard.jpg projection protest, 2014 http://media.nola.com/tpphotos/pho- Memorials to/2015/06/28/lee-circle-3jpg-8c797042165ab- for murders da8.jpg of Trayvon http://www.old-new-orleans.com/images/N_ Martin, 2012 TivoliCircle_became_Lee_1877_eee.jpg (right); Alton Sterling, 2016 https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN- (left and above) OV434_VIGILS_J_20160709114234.jpg 110 SITE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 site documentation

lee circle // new orleans, louisiana // united states of america

29.9435 N, 90.0725 W

Intersection of St Charles Avenue, Howard Avenue, and Andrew Higgins Drive (formerly Nayades Street and Delord Street)

111 SITE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 Site Plan

View from Taylor Foundation Building

112 SITE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 Vacant Howard Library and Ives Warehouse Vacant Howard Library

Vacant Ives Warehouse

K &B Plaza, Exxon Station and Parking Lot (Site of Temple Sinai, 1872-1977

113 SITE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 conceptual site diagrams

White Flight Paths

More money than the people on St. Charles Street (Solange feat. Master P, 2016)

114 SITE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 Views (In/Out)

Look Down

Rise Up

115 SITE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 Existing Program

Office

Business

Vacant

Public display/education Housing

Proposed Manner of Intervention

Potential new intervention

Adaptive reuse

116 SITE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 Federal Land Bank 1937 // hub for whites-only civic institutions Seamen’s Town House New Orleans Public Library

Young Men’s Christian Association

Former Temple Sinai

Former Howard Library (WTPS- TV) and Confederate Hall Jerusalem Shrine Temple

Hotel Modern Ogden Museum 2016 // of Southern Art Confederate Museum vacancy and opportunity

Greater New Orleans Foundation

Vacant (former library/TV station)

Exxon gas station

Vacant (Ives Office Supply Co.)

K&B Plaza office building Circle Bar + music venue AIA Center for Design + upper-floor condos Tivoli Place senior housing 117 SITE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 sankofa and social context in four dimensions

Time is the critical fourth dimension to the creation of social and architectural space. The concept of time underpins the construction of social space (Lefebvre, 1992), with events in the past carrying important implications for the present and future. The Twi language of the Akan people, in present-day Ghana, names this presence of history in the present and future ‘sankofa’, meaning ‘return and pick it up’. Sankofa is “a constant reminder that the future is built on aspects of the past” (Zewede, 2008). Thus, it is necessary to document the historical as well as present social context of a space before an architectural intervention on it. Asante adinkra symbolizing sankofa: bird flying forward while looking backward From its initial definition as the ‘Place du Tivoli’ in the Lafon (into the past) with an egg (symbolizing the future) in its mouth plat of 1807 through the present day, the Circle at the intersection of St. Charles and Howard Avenues has played an important role in the civic life of New Orleans.

Initially concieved as a public garden in the style of its European namesake, the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, the Place du Tivioli before the War for White Ownership of Black People was a public open space much utilized by the residents of the dense Irish, German, Jewish and other immigrant communities which inhabited the neighborhoods of the present-day Central City, Warehouse District and Lower Garden District (Campanella). Documented use of the site as a playfield for the new game of baseball, popular with immigrant youth, is evidence of its viability as democratic public space (Karst).

When the nation was reunified following the Confederacy’s loss in the War for White Ownership of Black People, the White men in positions of political and economic power in the South sought to redeem the ‘Lost Cause’ of the Confederacy. Their movement was called the ‘Redemp- tion’, and they called themselves the ‘Redeemers’, with all the messianic undertones that entailed (Du Bois). Redemption was enabled in part through selectively remembering the ‘chivalry’ of Southern gentlemen in days now ‘gone with the wind’, to reference the title of Margaret Mitchell’s acclaimed 1936 work of Lost Cause propaganda (Branley).

The cult of the Lost Cause downplayed the role of chattel slavery and White supremacy in the history of secession and the war. despite the open ackowledgement by figures like former Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens that slavery, a system premised upon White supremacy and a perception of Black people as less than human, was at the ‘cornerstone’ of the Condederacy (Trefousse). Where Lost Cause propa- gandists did depict slavery, they sought to portray the barbaric practice as a beneveolent institution sustained by enslaved Black people’s love of and loyalty to their White masters (Adams, 2007).

One means for the perpetuation of the ‘Lost Cause’ fiction was the

118 SITE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 erection of monuments and memorials to Southern military leaders and politicians. One of the most memorialized was General Robert E. Lee, a Virginian whose family ties to George Washington and distinguished military career gave him a prominent place in the Lost Cause pantheon. Lee never visited New Orleans, but a memorial association was organized in the city which lobbied the City Council and raised money for the monument erected on the renamed Tivoli Place in 1884 (Karst).

Over the following decades New Orleans’ commercial prosperity translated into further philanthropy, much of which funded the construction and operation of civic institutions surrounding the Circle. These included the Howard Library, the New Orleans Public Library, the Seamen’s Town House, the YMCA, Temple Sinai and the Jerusalem Shrine Temple.

All of these institutions, contributors to the fabric of democratic society though they may have been, constrained their view of the ‘public’ they served to a category recently further empowered by their separation and definition under Jim Crow: White people. Black people, or ‘colored’ people, had separate but unequal institutions, like the Colored Branch of the Public Library or the Colored YMCA on Dryades Street, all at physical remove from the clearly defined White space of Lee Circle.

By the mid-20th century, the tightly planned Romanesque and Beaux-Arts Classical buildings of Lee Circle could no longer hold the institutions for which they were built. The Howard Library decamped for Tulane University’s campus in 1939, while the Public Library moved to the new civic center on Loyola Avenue in 1954. Temple Sinai moved Uptown in 1928 to follow the residential resettlement pattern of the the city’s Jew- ish population (Campanella). The surrounding neighborhood was severely scarred by the automobile, with much of its 19th-century built fabric falling to parking lots, car dealerships and repair shops, as well as the first bridge across the Mississippi River. This bridge, opened in 1957, was the beginning of the now-formidable barrier at Calliope Street. This was reinforced by the 1985 addition of a second, wider bridge and new approach ramps from the Pontchartrain Expressway.

The replacement of the Public Library by Skidmore, Owings & Merril’s John Hancock Insurance Building, later K&B Plaza, was an architectural bright spot if not a humanistic one - the building’s raised and gated plaza effectively kills street life in an entire quadrant of the Circle, in a manner emblematic of much High Modernist public space design (Whyte). The Miesian aesthetic of K&B Plaza sits squarely within the European White world of architectural symbolism, much like the Classi- cal library it replaced had. Its fountain, a 1963 Isamu Noguchi sculpture entitled ‘The Mississippi’, abstracts the Lee monument, normalizing a White supremacist symbol as just another element of the cityscape.

Some Lee Circle landmarks found new lives, and incongrous or

119 SITE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 subversive ones at that. After 1928, the former Temple Sinai hosted an advertising agency and the first location of Southern University of New Orleans’ law school in the from 1956 to 1959 (Medley), where many of the state’s pioneering Black lawyers taught the generation that would lead Black Louisianans through the civil rights era and into the halls of government power for the first time since Reconstruction.

SUNO moved to Pontchartrain Park, safely walled off by canals and railroad tracks from White people afraid of Negroes’ - even college-educated Negroes’ - effect on the value of their Gentilly homes. Though of deep historic significance, the building was demolished in 1977; its site is now a parking lot adjacent to an Exxon station.

The Howard Library became a TV studio, and then the offices of Texas oilman and Saints founder John Mecom, Jr. It was donated to the Ogden Museum of Southern Art with funds donated by oilman Patrick F. Taylor, though funding ran out before it could be converted to gallery space, and it sits partly restored but entirely vacant today. Between it and the Ogden’s main building on Camp Street sits the Confederate Memorial Museum, a shrine to physical objects of the War for White Ownership of Black People.

Though not a part of the same building, the shared Richardsonian Romanesque style and red stone leads many to assume the Howard Li- brary carries a Confederate connotation; this has at times been problematic, as when the American Institute of Architects considered hosting an event in the Howard Library building during its 2010 convention in New Orleans, but backed out due to the building’s percieved association with the Confederacy (Lea, 2017).

The decline of New Orleans due to economic relocation and systemic disinvestment in the latter half of the 20th century and into the 21st can be observed in the selective demolition of the Circle’s built fabric and the underutilization of the buildings which remained. Oil-boom money created the Ogden Museum and the Patrick F. Taylor Foundation, but the bust left both without enough money to activate their property holdings on the Circle, including the vacant lot formerly home to the National American Bank, and the former Taylor Library.

The successes of the post-Katrina ‘new New Orleans’ can be read in the fundraising for and construction of a new home for the Greater New Orleans Foundation on the site of a long-shuttered gas station, while the continued failures and frustrations of this period are evident in the YMCA’s sale of its building for transformation into a series of hotels while the institution remains without a home, and in the failure of two schemes for the renovation of the building at the corner of Howard and Caronde- let - first as an artists’ workspace by the state of Louisiana, and later as a culinary school by a consortium of local businessmen.

120 SITE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 present conditions, 2017

The vacancy and underutilization which characterize Lee Circle in the modern era have made it something of a liminal space, available to the homeless population living under the nearby Pontchartrain Express- way and concentrating around the New Orleans Mission and Ozanam Inn, each three blocks away from the Circle in opposite directions. Home- less men can often be found sitting or sleeping on the base of the monument, or on the sidewalk, as tourist-jammed St Charles streetcars glide over the curving tracks encircling the Circle.

This liminal quality, combined with the White supremacist conno- tations of the monument and the Circle’s name, has allowed for popular appropriation of the space for political protest against White supremacy. This has been done through the application of spray-paint graffiti to the monument on multiple occasions of the murder of unarmed Black people by police officers, and in an active manner, when large popular protests have overwhelmed the monument, the Circle and even the surrounding streets. These protests have been spontaneous, such as after the election of Donald Trump as President (right), or organized with speakers and a program, as in the case of protests against the police murders of Eric Har- ris and Alton Sterling by Take Em Down NOLA.

The 60-foot white granite Doric column can be read as a ‘big White penis’ (Jordan, 2017), a phallocentric imposition of power on space. This represents “a style that no longer aesthetically convinces” in the post-Modern present (West, 1997), in which Eurocentric forms and styles may no longer serve as the sole source of inspiration for built-environment interventions. Purusant to Ordinance 31,082 and to the RFP issued by the City of New Orleans on March 7, 2017, the Lee statue will be removed from the column, which will itself remain in place.

The Circle Bar, in a c.1830 townhouse, is a lively and vital urban place that would be at home in the dense Bywater or Irish Channel. It stands strangely alone in the midst of the vacancy. During the Mardi Gras season, when the Circle fills with college students from around New Or- leans and the nation, it does a brisk business; year-round, its live shows attract crowds who keep the streetcar stop just uptown of the Circle occupied into the early morning. Next door, the tenants of the Tivoli Place senior apartment building take the air on chairs positioned on the sidewalk outside their building’s lobby. They can be found here on most days and in most weather, as the entryway has a large awning.

The AIA Center for Design, the ground-floor tenant of the 1920s-vintage former warehouse building at the corner of St Charles and Andrew Higgins, contributes to the streetcape with art displays often

121 SITE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 visible through its large windows, and occasional activation of its wide sidewalk with programming. However, the large vacant lot just uptown (former site of the 1959 National American Bank building) and the vacant former Ives Warehouse adjacent on Higgins isolate it, creating of it an island in the vacancy.

The vacant Howard Library building, built to design by H.H. Rich- ardson following his death in 1887, is well-maintained, but completely devoid of program and functionally contributes very little to the urban life of the space. The same can be said of the adjacent Taylor Foundation building, built in the early 20th century and renovated in the early 1990s, whose entry is defensively fortified with gates and bars in a highly unwel- coming manner.

The adjacent Hotel Modern, built as the YMCA by Roesselle & Van Osthoff, 1959, activates the street with tables and chairs, in which people sometimes sit and enjoy the view of the Circle, particuarly at night. However, the cramped nature of the hotel’s indoor spaces and the narrow sidewalk limit this activity.

Across St Charles Avenue, the newly completed Greater New Orleans Foundation building by Waggonner & Ball Architects looks to be much more accessible to the street than other modern interventions. Its ground floor retail space is set to be occupied by a Pressed, a new cafe owned by a couple, Artis and Leslie Turner, who are Black. This will hope- fully bring a renewed street life to the Circle through greater pedestrian presence on the sidewalks.

The many curb cuts of the Exxon station on the corner of Howard Avenue detract from the ability of pedestrians to comfortably use the sidewalks of its quadrant, which are further deadened by the elevated and gated outdoor public space of K&B Plaza (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, 1960), which presents to the entire street frontage along the Circle as a 10-foot-tall blank concrete wall.

limitations and opportunities

Lee Circle is a site of considerable symbolic importance to many people of very different political affiliations, from committed antiracists to staunch White supremacists. Thus, any politically viable antiracist intervention in the space should seek to combine the positive antiracist goal of removing symbols of White supremacy and a concern of those who object to the monuments’ removal, which this constituency frames as a fear that “history’ will be ‘erased’ (Quigley, 2016).

Underlying this position is a vision of ‘history’ as a singular narra-

122 SITE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 tive, in this case an avowedly White supremacist narrative (Karst, 2014). This intervention will seek to represent the counternarrative, presently unrepresented in the space, of the value of Black lives. This will take the form of a non-monumental or counter-monumental intervention (Wil- son, 2015), the Pool.

For this reason, the primary limitation - and the most unique opportunities - of this site is the neccessity for adaptive reuse of the existing monument and surrounding buildings, rather than the clearing and re- placing of them. This eschewal of the ‘tabula rasa’ approach characteristic of Modernism is characteristic of the Postmodern philosophical realm, distinct from the Postmodern stylistic realm (Jencks, 1989).

Limitations of an intervention on the existing structure of the Howard Library include the necessity to maintin the historic integrity of the buildings. A lower threshold of historic integrity will be employed in considering intervention on the object of the Lee Monument, as it is the most visceral symbol within the site of the White supremacist ideol- ogy which the intervention will seek to counter. This proposal seeks to relocate the monument to the periphery of the circle while severing the statue from its column and placing it inside the Howard Library with the other White supremacist monuments of New Orleans, a symbolic re-presentation - not an erasure - of history in a newly pluralistic context.

As an intersection on St Charles Avenue, a major street in New Or- leans, another limitation inherent to an intervention in the space of Lee Circle is the neccesity of allowing for the continued flow of automobile and streetcar traffic. This does not imply the maintenance of the exact current rights of way, but does require an intervention to accomodate some level of traffic flow.

A potential limitation following from this one is the need to accomodate the Uptown Mardi Gras floats and crowds at the parades which traditionally pass through the Circle. Citing the history of Mardi Gras, a colonial holiday deeply embedded with implicit and explicit expressions of White supremacy, class hierarchy and exclusivity on these premis- es (Gill, 1997), the Freedom School of Design will seek to oppose these philosophies by requiring the maintenance of a right-of-way for Mardi Gras parades down St. Charles Avenue through the Circle. This proposal follows in the activist tradition of Dorothy Mae Taylor, New Orleans City Councilmember representing the historic Black neighborhood of Central City from 1986-1994 and the first Black woman to serve in that body. Taylor worked tirelessly to expose and oppose the racist, exclusionary traditions of New Orleans Mardi Gras (Radcliff, 2011), adding her work to the architectural tradition of politicizing the occupation of public space (Rice, 2013) by challenging the ability of openly White supremacist Carnival organizations to parade on public streets.

123 SITE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 the freedom school of design a critical pedagogy for the deconstruction of white supremacy

124 VEHICLE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 critical questions The preceding portion of this document was the product of research and analysis begun in in the fall of 2016. The following questions were written in January 2017, the beginning of the design process. The completed design was presented on May 8, 2017. concurrent with the requirements of Tulane University’s Masters of Architecture program.

Questions undergoing exploration include:

- How will the Freedom School of Design be a space for protest?

- How can architecture be used to initiate and sustain conversations? Within a school? Outside a school?

- What conditions do designers take for granted in planning schools? In planning any intervention? How can the FSD, using the pedago gy of freedom education, critically examine these conditions?

- How is the FSD a countermonument?

- What is a strategy of countermonumentality or non- monumentality which can be implemented at the Lee Circle site?

- How might architecture inherently serve as a vehicle of totalitarianism? As a vehicle of freedom?

- What is the criteria for ‘success’ of the FSD? For failure?

125 VEHICLE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 pontchartrain park gentilly

new orleans east

st roch mid city seventh ward desire

hollygrove sixth ward zion city treme upper ninth ward gert town iberville lower ninth ward seventeenth ward algiers point

freret central city

black pearl st thomas

algiers

what is the history of Black space? // african american urban enclaves

126 chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 what is the history of White exclusion? // 1935 Federal Housing Administration redlines

127 chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 how is this history symbolized? // monuments to White supremacy and to those who have resisted it

128 chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 interpretation

how can we re-present this history? Movement // revealing hidden White space at Tulane University

129 chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 boundary

center

lee circle as panopticon what makes the circle?

pillar greco-roman idiom, further importance through elevation

base seating, views, pleasant plants

what makes the monument?

130 chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 museum sankofa circle support entry

museum gallery

16 32 64

N underground .5 12

131 VEHICLE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 st jose p h st

ho w ard ave

hotel modern coered greater ne orleans outdoor foundation public space

art studio

locker room

toilet ogden museum of southern art toilet

school courtyard

lobby confederate contemporary memorial hall arts center

locker room sankofa circle taylor foundation toilet

dorothy mae taylor lobby plaa

library

t s

t gathering e l food prep loading dock de n o r a c design studio andre w h iggin s blvd art studio

aia ne orleans ca center for design lliop e st

gallery

dance studio

gathering circle bar media lab

toilet gathering k b plaa toilet library

design studio

design studio media lab

library library gathering orld ar museum tioli place section media lab school courtyard subsidied gathering senior apartments

calli gathering library o library media lab pe st

gathering

design studio

t av s s e p l

m ar

h ca c t s

first floor

132 VEHICLE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 design build

lab

library

large gathering

lab

food service gathering food prep

gathering

lab

gathering

gathering gallery

gathering library gathering lab

design studio gathering design studio

library gathering

lab gathering

library lab

32 64 128 gathering

N gathering .5 12

second floor

133 VEHICLE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 design build

gathering lab

lilibrb ary

balcony

library

lab

gathering

art studio

gathering gathering

music studio

third loor

134 VEHICLE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 32 64 128

N .5 12

roof

135 VEHICLE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 decentering white supremacy

136 VEHICLE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 Reclaimed from its White supremacist condition, the public space of the ‘Circle’ is appropriated as a venue for protest in the Black New Orleans spatial tradition of street occupation.

the circle

137 VEHICLE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 The space formerly occupied by the Lee monument will become an area for passive recreational occuption, ‘monumentalizing’ the democratic reclamation of the space. The name ‘sankofa’ is a Ghanaian word meaning ‘go back and get it’, used to express the concept of carrying the past into the future. It is represented by an adinkra, or symbol, used throughout West Africa and the Diaspora, which reprsents it as a bird flying forward while looking backward.

sankofa circle

138 VEHICLE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 The teaching and learning spaces of the FSD are arranged non-hierarchically in 10 small buildings shaped in plan like fragments of glass. This form creates a large number of spaces of many different shapes and sizes, both indoor and outdoor, providing a number of options for educators and students who might desire different learning environments for different purposes. Symbolically these sharply angled ‘shards’ of form recall the violence which the freedom movement has faced, in the form of glass shattered in the 1963 Sixteenth the shards Street Baptist Church bombing (left).

139 VEHICLE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 The form and fenestration of the glass ‘prism’ of the largest gathering space recall the K&B Building located on the St. Charles Avenue side of the block, designed by noted Modernist architect Gordon Bunshaft in 1963. The co-opting of Euro-American capitalist architectural langauge for the purposes of the Freedom School of Design represents architectually the linguistic strategy of ‘code-switching’ used by people of color to preserve their culture in White spaces.

cooper union highlander folk school freedom school, north atlanta high school new york, new york USA monteagle, tennessee USA church sanctuary, atlanta, georgia USA free education for all a space of the Movement meridian, mississippi USA integrating Southern freedom summer, 1964 urban schools the half has never been told

140 VEHICLE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 great mosque pedregulho development student-built dormitories student pod shelter djenne, mali rio de janiero, brazil tuskeegee, alabama USA rural studio, design-build as public practice social housing design-building newbern, alabama USA for social change a Black institution design-build as experimentation Public engagement in the process of design and construction is a traditional means of maintaining the built environment in many places outside the Euro-American design tradition, including for the Dogon people of Mali. Within design schools, the concept of students designing and building their own dormitory accomodations dates was practiced by students at the Tuskegee Institute in the early 1900s, and is practiced today by disciples of Samuel Mockbee at the Auburn Rural Studio in Newbern, Alabama.

the search for new forms

141 VEHICLE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 union army encampment st augustine marching 100 councilmember dorothy mae taylor tivoli circle, 1865 Krewe of Rex, 1967 desegregator of White krewes, 1992 a space of Reconstruction first Black band in a White parade first Black woman councilmember

The efforts of brave and talented people who have asserted themselves in the spaces of New Orleans have produced the freedoms which can be enjoyed today. A grass athletic field usable for marching band practices, will facilitate school identity formation and maintenance, while signifying the importance of athletic and musical performance as avenues for the expression of Black excellence.

the soul of Black folk

142 VEHICLE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 The basement of the 1887 Howard Library building, the only in Louisiana designed by acclaimed American architect H.H. Richardson, will be adaptively reused as a museum with exhibits on White supremacy and resistance.

statuary hall // museum

143 VEHICLE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 The Lee statue and other White supremacist monument of New Orleans will be placed in an open-air gallery on the main floor of the former library, where the public will be allowed to write and draw on them using tools provided by the museum.

144 VEHICLE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 presentation The following presentation was delivered on May 8, 2017 at Richardson Memorial Hall, the home of the Tulane School of Architecture, New Orleans, Louisiana, before a panel of visiting critics:

Natan Diacon-Furtado Sue Mobley Deborah Gans Maziar Behrooz

and adviser Graham Owen.

The presentation was begun with an acknowledgement that it took place on ground stolen through force from Native people and cultivated through the labor of enslaved Africans, whose labor also built the fortune of the Richardson family who endowed the building itself.

“The inquiries which became this project began in the 7th grade when my English teacher, Ms. Gratten, assigned our class to interview family members about their childhood. I talked to my grandmother, Ellen Green Loeb, a White Jewish woman who grew up in Bessemer, a small town outside Birmingham, Alabama. I was struck by a story my grandmother told about the maid who raised her, a Black woman named Lene Brown. In 1942, Lene was arrested for taking a shortcut home across a Whites-only park. My grandmother, then too young to have internalized the American race construct, recollected her bewilderment at the arrest. I remember wondering: are there still Whites-only parks?

I grew up off a street called Robert E. Lee, in a neighborhood with no Black neighbors. In high school I attended a magnet program located at a school in a Black neighborhood, where my advanced-placement classes were almost entirely White and Asian-American. We took all our classes on the second floor, literally and figuratively above the Black and brown kids ‘downstairs’. At Tulane, in a city whose population is 60 percent Black, my architecture school class is about 5 percent Black and there has not been a single adjunct or tenure-track Black professor teaching in this building for two years.

According to the American Institute of Architects, less than 2 percent of registered architects in this country identify as Black or African-American. Only 15% are women; the number of Black female architects in a large American city can often be counted on one hand.

Political theorist Lani Guinier, the first woman of color to become a tenured professor at Harvard Law School, writes that policies do not change to benefit those historically excluded from the full benefits of a society until people from that excluded group themselves become

145 VEHICLE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 policymakers. The same is true for our built environment, because architecture has in addition to the widely known Vitruvian dimensions of ‘strength, beauty and utility’, a fourth dimension, the political, defined as the capacity to reinforce or deconstruct the systems which govern human relations.

We each experience these systems in the built environment differently depending on the intersection of our racial, gender and other identities. A cisgendered, or non-transgendered, straight White man experiences the built environment differently than a Black transgender woman, or even a White gay man.

The only way to ensure that excluded perspectives are authentically represented in architectural discourse is to ensure that the field reflects the full breadth of the population across race, gender and social class. This effort must start with a change in how we educate our architects. In order to sustain lasting change we must foster an ongoing critical conversation on the ways design can reinforce or deconstruct political systems like White supremacy, the patriarchy and imperialism.

The vehicle for this thesis, the Freedom School of Design, is a pedagogy and a sited intervention for this purpose. Reinforced by and in turn reinforcing the activist work of the Take Em Down NOLA coalition to remove this city’s monument to Robert E. Lee and all symbols of White supremacy in the built environment, the FSD seeks to deconstruct a White supremacist space through an intervention on that monument and in the public space which surrounds it.

Originally an open space used as a baseball diamond for neighborhood children and as an encampment for the Union army after the city’s recapture in 1862, the Circle was claimed by resurgent White supremacists in 1877 following the end of Reconstruction to monumentalize the hero of the ‘Lost Cause’ mythology, General Robert E. Lee.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries a number of civic institutions including private and public libraries, synagogues and Southern University at New Orleans’ School of Law located on the Circle. Auto- centric planning, suburbanization and White flight hollowed out the neighborhood after the 1950s. Today there are several vacant lots and the 1887 Howard Memorial Library, the only building designed by Henry Hobson Richardson in Louisiana, stands vacant.

The FSD proposes constructing new educational and recreational facilities on these vacant lots, and adaptively reusing the Howard Library as a ‘Statuary Hall’ to hold White supremacist monuments following their removal from the city’s public spaces.

146 VEHICLE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 The school follows the teachings of Brazilian educator Paolo Friere, as first applied by Charles Cobb, Septima Clark, Howard Zinn and others as the Freedom Schools in Mississippi during the summer of 1964. ‘Freedom education’, or ‘education for the practice of freedom’, consists of asking questions and critically examining the world in which children live through art, performance, writing and other forms of creative expression. The FSD applies these principles to design education for 15-19 year old students, as seen in the curriculum outline [on page 97].

The design of the building seeks to raise questions of hierarchy and spatial control, facilitating discussion and activities between groups of various sizes and between students and teachers, rather than a top-down ‘delivery’ of information. The school emphasizes design-build experimentation, visible in the rendering headlined ‘the search for new forms’, in which students can construct and inhabit residential units to be modified and replaced continually by subsequent generations of students.

The FSD seeks to preserve the column and base of the Lee monument as urban furniture, repositioned in a new plaza outside the entrance to the museum occupying the existing basement of the Howard Library building. This will allow it to continue functioning as it is presently used – a space for everyday occupation and enjoyment by a diverse group of users, as well as literal platform and focus for protest seeking to bring about the deconstruction of the White supremacist imperialist patriarchy, as seen in the rendering [on page 137].”

147 VEHICLE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 praxis During the presentation, a slideshow was run on a television screen displaying two sets of photographs taken by the author:

15 photographs of the installation ‘Movement: revealing hidden White space at Tulane University’ [see page 129]

and 40 photographs, of which the following pages are a condensed selection, illustrating the process of sign-making and deployment of signs in the Second Line to Bury White Supremacy on May 7, 2017.

The Second Line to Bury White Supremacy was a protest action organized by Take Em Down NOLA to celebrate the removal of the Crescent City White League (Battle of Liberty Place) monument on April 24, 2017, and to sustain energy for the removal of the Jefferson Davis, P.G.T. Beauregard, and Robert E. Lee monuments. Marchers also protested the non-indictment of officers by the United States Department of Justice, under Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, in the murder of Alton Sterling on July 5, 2016.

During the first week of May, 2017, Tulane School of Architecture students Bradley Rubenstein and Kelsey Willis were engaged to assist the author in the manufacture of:

4 36”x46” double-sided photo posters 2 36”x24” spray-painted signs 1 4’x15’ canvas banner and 150 copies of a 12-page booklet entitled ‘What’s That Monument? A guided tour of White supremacist symbols in New Orleans.’

These materials were produced for Take Em Down NOLA, whose meetings the author attended and with whose leaders formatting, content and delivery of materials were coordinated.

148 VEHICLE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 Sign making, Tulane School of Architecture

Banner making, Tulane School of Architecture

149 VEHICLE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 Sign deployment, Congo Square

Booklet deployment, Congo Square

Banner deployment, Congo Square

150 VEHICLE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 Poster deployment, Jackson Square

Banner deployment, Jackson Square

Sign deployment, lee circle

151 VEHICLE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 Corey, Lee Circle

Malcolm, Angela and Quess, Lee Circle

Assata chant, Lee Circle

152 VEHICLE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17 153 VEHICLE chris daemmrich // thesis adviser: prof graham owen // 5.14.17