Donald P. Ryder, New York architect and professor, has passed away

2021-04-26T15:11:00-04:00

Donald P. Ryder, whose firm designed important repositories of Black culture and social history in becoming one of the nation’s most prominent partnerships of Black architects, died on Feb. 17 at his home in New Rochelle, N.Y. He was 94. [...] Mr. Ryder joined with J. Max Bond Jr., widely regarded as the most influential African-American architect in New York, to form Bond Ryder & Associates in the late 1960s.

During his partnership with J. Max Bond Jr., Donald P. Ryder left his mark as architect of several noteworthy residential and civic buildings, including the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta. After leaving the firm which had merged with Davis, Brody & Associates in 1990, Ryder was a professor and later chairman of the Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York.

First biography on architect Max Bond to be published by Princeton University Press

2020-08-24T13:36:00-04:00

Princeton University Press (PUP) has announced plans to publish If Architecture Were for People: The Life and Work of J. Max Bond., Jr., a forthcoming biography on the pivotal 20th century architect written by architectural historian Brian D. Goldstein.

A PUP announcement explains that Bond's works, which include the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among others, offer "a new perspective on two sweeping forces that transformed architecture, urban planning, and American culture: modernism and the Civil Rights movement."

View of the Bolgatanga Library in Ghana. Image courtesy of Willis E. Bell and Davis Brody Bond.

Bond, often considered among the most prominent Black architects working in the United States during the late 20th century, was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1935 and ea...

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Donald P. Ryder, New York architect and professor, has passed away

First biography on architect Max Bond to be published by Princeton University Press