Archinect - News

Plans for restorative New Lots Library are unveiled in Brooklyn

2024-12-09T14:00:00-05:00

MASS Design and the New York-based Marble Fairbanks Architects are behind a new library project in Brooklyn that combines restorative justice with the needs of the community into one dynamic 25,000-square-foot design.

The forthcoming New Lots Library will be realized on a site historically recognized as a burial ground for former slaves and freedpersons dating to the Revolutionary War era, simultaneously acknowledging their experiences and the fact that slavery as an institution was legal in New York until two decades into the 19th century.

Image credit: MASS Design Group and Marble Fairbanks Architects

Through an extensive community feedback process, both firms have envisioned a library whose activity is centered around a unifying 'Palaver' inspired by traditional African spaces used for collective community gatherings and defined by 'branch-like' radial beams extending outward to cover the reading areas and collection rooms.

Image credit: MASS Design Group and Marble Fairbanks Ar...

Historic civil rights-era church in Memphis to undergo $25 million renovation

2024-02-19T12:02:00-05:00

Memphis’ Clayborn Temple, a historic civil rights landmark, is set to undergo a $25 million renovation. The five-year-long project hopes to “not only preserve its historic significance but also usher in a new era of vitality for this cultural gem and the surrounding community,” as seen in new renderings by Self+Tucker Architects.

Image credit: Self+Tucker Architects

The building was originally constructed in 1892 as Second Presbyterian Church, where it served an all-white congregation. In 1949, the building was sold to an African Methodist Episcopal congregation for $100,000 and renamed Clayborn Temple.

Image credit: Self+Tucker Architects

Throughout the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, the church served as an important node for social, cultural, spiritual, and political expressions for the city’s African American communities, ultimately becoming the organizing headquarters for The Sanitation Workers’ Strike of 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s last campaign.

Image credit: Self+Tu...

African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund: Another $4 million will go toward preserving Black churches

2024-02-02T12:20:00-05:00

The African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund of the National Trust for Historic Preservation has announced another round of funding totaling $4 million that will be put towards preserving Black churches in 22 states across the country.

The program’s second round of funding for the two-year-old Preserving Black Churches initiative will help maintain the legacies of 31 churches.

Black churches in the United States are at the center of the country's lifelong fight for democratic reforms and are a key character in the story of African American's survival and resilience in America. As the historian and advisor to the Action Fund, Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., explained, “Black churches have been at the forefront of meaningful democratic reform since this nation’s founding. They’re a living testament to the resilience of our ancestors in the face of unimaginably daunting challenges.”

“The heart of our spiritual world is the Black church. These places of worship, these sacred cultural ...

BIG-designed National Juneteenth Museum receives $1 million grant

2023-08-09T13:45:00-04:00

Bank of America has awarded a $1 million grant towards the development of the National Juneteenth Museum, designed by BIG. The money will contribute to the project’s estimated $70 million price tag. Located in Fort Worth’s Historic Southside neighborhood, the museum will serve as an epicenter for awareness and preservation of Juneteenth’s history. It also aims to revitalize the surrounding area by acting as an economic catalyst.

The 50,000-square-foot museum takes on a handcrafted design, utilizing materials such as heavy timber. It also draws on the local architecture of gabled rooftops. The structure’s undulating roof results in a series of peaks and valleys that combine to form a star-shaped courtyard in the middle of the museum. In addition, the building will feature 10,000 square feet of exhibit galleries, a 250-seat theater to host lectures, a speaker series, performances, and more, a black box, a business incubator for local entrepreneurs, and a food hall featuring local vend...

African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund announces $3.8 million in 2023 grants to preserve 40 historic sites

2023-06-13T17:43:00-04:00

The National Trust for Historic Preservation’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund has announced $3.8 million in 2023 grant funding to protect and preserve 40 sites representing African American history. Established in 2017, the Action Fund, which has raised more than $95 million, is the largest U.S. fund dedicated to preserving historic African American sites.

Since its inception, the Action Fund has received a total of 5,638 funding proposals requesting $655 million. The program has been able to support 242 grantee projects through its investment of $20 million.

2023 grant site: Morgan State University’s Jenkins Hall in Baltimore, Maryland. Photo: Troy Pumphrey Jr., image courtesy National Trust for Historic Preservation.

“The Action Fund’s investment in and celebration of 40 historic African American places illustrates our belief that historic preservation plays an important role in American society,” said Brent Leggs, African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund exe...

Take a look inside the new International African American Museum ahead of its opening

2023-06-05T17:41:00-04:00

One of the most anticipated projects of the summer is ready to make its official public debut later this month as the finishing touches are being put in place for the new Moody Nolan and Pei Cobb Freed-designed International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina.

Sited along the city’s historic harbor that was, in its heyday, the “ground zero” of the slave trade in the southern United States, the museum seeks to educate visitors using a series of nine thematic galleries and the “power of place” present in its location at Gadsden’s Wharf.

The project is the culmination of over two decades of planning, advocacy, and design consultations between both firms, varied stakeholders, historians, politicians, and residents whose collaborations, in the end, beget what ought to become a transformative testament to the power of storytelling for Americans of every background.

Credit: © Sahar Coston-Hardy/Esto. All rights res...

New program created to protect African American burial grounds endangered by construction projects

2022-12-23T11:21:00-05:00

New federal legislation is set to be introduced which will help protect African American burial grounds impacted by new construction. The African American Burial Grounds Preservation Act is part of a series of measures expected to be signed into law by President Biden before the end of 2022 and is the result of five years of bipartisan efforts.

The act will create the African American Burial Grounds Preservation Program, which aims to identify burial grounds ahead of infrastructure projects and commercial development. It is hoped that the program will minimize construction delays on projects, as well as avoid “unnecessary community heartache.” The program will also assist descendants and communities in expressing their histories through grant money to identify, interpret, and preserve historic cemeteries.

“The African American Burial Grounds Preservation...

Opening of the anticipated International African American Museum pushed back due to climate control problems

2022-12-22T17:32:00-05:00

The International African American Museum (IAAM) in Charleston, South Carolina, will postpone its scheduled opening date next month due to unresolved climate control issues in its new building. The museum was expected to open on 21 January 2023 and now expects to open sometime in the first half of next year, according to a statement released on 16 December.

Construction of the Moody Nolan and Pei Cobb Freed & Partners-designed International African American Museum (IAAM) began in the fall of 2019 after nearly two decades of planning. In April, a request for additional funding was submitted to the city of Charleston in order to complete the genealogy center that’s planned for the museum. The board apparently had known about the HVAC issues for some time and is now planning a new special exhibition in the interregnum.

“I was as excited about this opening as everyone else,” museum President Tonya M. Matthews told supporters via email. “I am an overachiever and I am ambitious. I honor and respect things like deadlines, but this is a huge responsibility and we will do what we need to make sure that we present this museum and the stories we tell in an extraordinary light.”

Moody Nolan and Pei Cobb Freed set an opening date for South Carolina’s International African American Museum

2022-08-04T13:50:00-04:00

The much-awaited debut of the Moody Nolan and Pei Cobb Freed & Partners-designed International African American Museum (IAAM) in Charleston, South Carolina, now has an official opening date after the latter announced it will be available to the public for the first time on January 21st, 2023.

This is an important project to both offices as over 22 years of planning have gone into the creation of the almost $100 million new institution. Its location on the site of the city’s former Gadsden’s Wharf is significant, too, as Charleston Harbor is considered the “ground zero” of the North Atlantic slave trade, a place where 48.1% of all enslaved Africans entered the United States, according to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a Harvard professor, historian, and early contributor to the project.

Image courtesy International African American Museum.

The museum's website, therefore, outlines a mission to “create an opportunity for visitors to engage with authentic and lesser-known history through tran...

African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund: More than $3 million in grants to sites and organizations announced

2021-08-24T19:29:00-04:00

On July 15, 2021, the National Trust for Historic Preservation announced more than $3 million in grants to 40 sites and organizations through its African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund. Over the past four years, the National Trust has funded 105 historic places connected to Black history and invested more than $7.3 million to help preserve landscapes and buildings imbued with Black life, humanity, and cultural heritage.

Grants were awarded across four categories: capacity building, project planning, capital, and programming and interpretation. Grantees include the Oakland Public Library, City of Sacramento, Indiana Landmarks, African American Heritage Trail of Martha’s Vineyard, Save Harlem Now!, and Huston-Tillotson University.

Since the inception of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund in 2016, the effort has accumulated $50 million in funding, making it the largest preservation effort ever undertaken to support African American historic sites. This year’s announcement marks the largest single disbursement in the fund’s four-year history, made possible by a $20 million grant to the Action Fund by philanthropists MacKenzie Scott and Dan Jewett.

The full list of African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund grantees can be seen here.

Previously on Archinect: African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund receives $20 million grant from MacKenzie Scott as part of a $2.7 billion over...

African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund receives $20 million grant from MacKenzie Scott as part of a $2.7 billion overall gift

2021-06-21T17:25:00-04:00

The National Trust for Historic Preservation’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund has been awarded a $20 million grant from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott in an unprecedented move that will nearly double the amount of funding the organization has received since its inception in 2017.

Scott’s grant was announced in a Medium post she authored, which outlines some of her motivations for supporting causes with a progressive social agenda.

The donation is part of a larger $2.7 billion gift Scott and husband Dan Jewett gave to a variety of arts organizations with a focus on African diasporic cultural concerns, including the Souls Grow Deep Foundation and the Studio Museum in Harlem, which is currently undergoing a radical transformation at the hands of Adjaye Associates.

Holmes Hall at Morgan State University. Image courtesy Baltimore Heritage.

The money will allow the fund to pursue its stated goals of promoting a “national identity that reflects the nation’s true diversity...

Architect, preservationist, and advocate of D.C. statehood, Charles Cassell, dies at 96

2021-05-26T17:42:00-04:00

Charles I. Cassell, a distinguished architect who helped shape the campus of the University of the District of Columbia and fierce advocate of Washington D.C. statehood, passed away on May 17th, the Washington Post reports. He was 96. According to his wife, Linda Wernick-Cassell, the cause of death was congestive heart failure.

Born on August 5, 1924, Cassell grew up in Washington, D.C., the son of one of the country’s most prominent Black architects, Albert I. Cassell, who was the head of Howard University’s architecture department and designed eleven buildings on the campus, along with many other academic communities across the United States. Albert I. Cassell’s Founders Library at Howard University was named a national treasure by the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 2016.

Following in his father’s footsteps, Charles I. Cassell spent several years as an architect for the Navy Department, designin...

The HBCU Africa Architecture Lecture series brings the voices of Black architects and the African Continent together for representation and discourse

2021-02-04T17:52:00-05:00

Here at Archinect, we highlight academic events and lectures that provide insight and access to public programming created by architecture schools. Year after year, these events welcome various leaders and innovators within architecture, design, and its adjacent fields of study. While in-person events are put on hold, the ability to engage and invite a global audience is possible thanks to virtual events outlets. 2021 welcomes an exciting series of talks, panels, and lectures that we've featured in our 2021 Get Lectured series and Archinect's Virtual Event Guide. However, an upcoming lecture series creates an opportunity for a much-needed platform for Black design professionals to share their work, expertise, and initiatives for change.

Archinect Feature by Sean Joyner: "Discovering a Black Aesthetic in Architecture" — An Investigation by Woodbury Grad Demar Matthews. Image courtesy of Demar Matthews

February is Black History month, and the rise in promoting and highlighting Black ex...

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...

Tulane researchers receive grant to repurpose abandoned "separate but equal" schools in Louisiana

2020-08-21T13:36:00-04:00

Laura Blokker, interim director of the Tulane University School of Architecture's Preservation Studies program, and Andrew Liles, assistant professor of architecture at the school, have won the Richard L. Blinder Award, a $15,000 grant from the Trustees of the James Marston Fitch Charitable Foundation that will aid the researchers in their efforts to repurpose abandoned school facilities originally built to enforce Jim Crow-era racial segregation in education.

The schools, built as part a last-ditch attempt to establish "separate but equal" educational facilities in the state, were abandoned as racial integration began to take hold in 1970, and have sat empty for many years. The grant award will allow researchers to work with alumni of the schools in designing reuse strategies for the buildings, Tulane News reports.

The research project will include identifying the surviving schools across the state so that the research team can "assess and categorize the overall design, plans and...

Southern plantations adapt to the Black Lives Matter era

2020-08-13T13:43:00-04:00

While much attention has been paid this summer to the removal of racist monuments to the confederacy, America's legacy of historic plantations continues on as a lucrative, popular, and deeply controversial industry.

A transformation has been taking place within some of the organizations and entities that own and operate these sites, however, writes Tiya Miles, professor of history at Harvard University, in The Boston Globe.

Previously on Archinect: "Architect Jobie Hill is creating a national survey of America's slave houses." Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons / Preservation Maryland.

Miles explores the conflicting messages sent by the operators of some of these estates in recent months as support for the Movement for Black Lives has increased even among the operators of former plantations.

Miles also highlights Whitney Plantation in Louisiana and the McLeod Plantation in South Carolina has a new type of historic plantation that "consciously centers African and African American e...

National Trust leads effort to protect HBCU campuses

2020-07-31T14:17:00-04:00

The National Trust for Historic Preservation, National Endowment for the Humanities, Ford Foundation, The JPB Foundation, J.M. Kaplan Fund, and The Executive Leadership Council are collaborating on a $1 million pilot project that aims to develop conservation and preservation plans for Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).

The so-called HBCU Cultural Heritage Stewardship Initiative is an outgrowth of the National Trust's African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, a $25 million initiative billed as "the largest preservation campaign ever undertaken on behalf of African American history."

Previously on Archinect: "As Historically Black Colleges and Universities shutter, America loses its history."The remnants of Morristown College, which is listed in the National Register of Historic Places and shuttered in 1994. Image courtesy of Wikimedia user Bravidos.

A statement published by the National Trust explains, "The historic buildings and landscapes on HBCU campuses—m...

NASA names D.C. headquarters after "Hidden Figure" Mary W. Jackson

2020-06-25T17:33:00-04:00

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) headquarters in Washington, D.C. has been named in honor of Mary W. Jackson, the first female African American engineer to work at the American space agency.

A NASA announcement explains that Jackson, a mathematician and aerospace engineer with degrees from Hampton University, began her career at NASA working within the segregated West Area Computing Unit of the agency’s Langley Research Center. Before working at NASA, Jackson got her start at NASA's predecessor agency, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), and made a name for herself within these agencies by analyzing high-velocity wind tunnel tests, eventually working as an engineer in NASA's Compressibility Research Division, its Full-Scale Research Division, the High-Speed Aerodynamics Division, and in the Subsonic-Transonic Aerodynamics Division. Over nearly three decades with NACA and then NASA, Jackson authored or co-authored 12 technical papers. In 19...

Architect Jobie Hill is creating a national survey of America's slave houses

2020-02-28T11:00:00-05:00

Since 2012, Hill has surveyed hundreds of structures that she believes once served as a home to enslaved African Americans. More often than not, the buildings bear no visible trace of their past; many have been converted into garages, offices, or sometimes—unnervingly—bed-and-breakfasts. In some cases the structures have fallen into ruin or vanished entirely, leaving behind a depression in the ground.

Writing in Atlas Obscura, writer Sabrina Imbler takes an in-depth look at the work of Jobie Hill, the Iowa City architect who started Saving Slave Houses, a project that aims to catalog, document, and ultimately preserve the remaining "living and working environments of enslaved people" in America.

Among many other thought-provoking comments, Hill tells Imbler, “There has never been a national survey of slave houses, except for the one I’m trying to do."

Assessing the built legacy of America's slave auction sites

2020-02-13T18:52:00-05:00

The latest installment of The New York Times' 1619 Project takes a look at the largely erased built legacy of slavery in America. The article visits a collection of sites that had to be uncovered more or less through original research, as little documentation and few historical markers exist with regards to these places.

Writer Anne C. Bailey and photographer Dannielle Bowman take a look at what remains of this sordid legacy. In the article, Bailey writes, "After the Civil War, most former auction sites quietly blended into the main streets of today. Except for the occasional marker or museum, there was no record of the horror of separation suffered by many black families."

Enslaved people owned by Thomas Jefferson were sold on the steps of Monticello to help pay off the ex-president's debts following his death in 1826. Image courtesy of Wikimedia user David Broad.

Bailey adds, "The sales took place all over the growing nation — in taverns, town squares and train stations, on riverb...

Efforts to recognize African American historic sites are taking flight across the country

2020-01-28T12:30:00-05:00

Since its founding, the National Register of Historic Places has helped to generate an estimated two million jobs and more than a hundred billion dollars in private investments. But, because many biases were written into the criteria that determine how sites are selected, those benefits have gone mostly to white Americans. One of the criteria for preservation is architectural significance, meaning that modest buildings like slave cabins and tenement houses were long excluded from consideration.

Writing in The New Yorker, Casey Cep profiles Brent Leggs, director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund at the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

The lengthy, eye-opening report delves into the work of preservationists like Leggs who are fighting to uncover, highlight, and preserve a vast but under-acknowledged collection of vital African American sites, structures, and spaces across the United States. That includes growing rosters of African American burial grounds, Historic Black Colleges and Universities, and collections of private homes and other sites once occupied by African American communities.

Houston residents fight to save African American cemeteries

2020-01-10T15:08:00-05:00

The Pleasant Green-Culbertson cemetery, which sits in northeast Houston behind roads peppered with concrete plants and trucking depots, is just one of thousands of eroding African-American cemeteries across the state, in danger of being erased as descendants of those buried have died out, moved out or been pushed out. Many of the cemeteries are long gone. For years, mainstream historians didn’t pay attention to them; now genealogists, historians and families are rushing to save them.

The Houston Chronicle takes a look at the growing movement to rediscover and preserve the forgotten African American burial grounds of Texas by highlighting the story of the Pleasant Green-Culbertson cemetery.

The push to save and memorialize African American cemeteries is part of a larger national effort aimed at highlighting and preserving key aspects of American American history and culture at a time when many of these sites have been forgotten or are susceptible to being lost due to increased development.

...

Colonial Williamsburg embraces its queer histories

2019-12-20T13:00:00-05:00

Alongside a wider effort to uncover and rediscover the lost and forgotten histories of historically marginalized groups and populations, Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia has recently taken steps to uncover the 18th century living-history museum's queer legacies.

In a recent report, Atlas Obscura takes a look at the nascent efforts being undertaken at Colonial Williamsburg to shed light on these historical narratives in order to present a more complete picture of the time.

Photo of the Raleigh Tavern in Colonial Williamsburg. Image courtesy of Wikimedia user Humberto Moreno.

A recently formed research committee is digging through court records, historical accounts, and other forms of documentation pertinent to the era of the museum in order to better understand and communicate the lived experiences of people who did not conform to the gender or sexual norms of the time, with the eventual goal of incorporating these stories into the "living" aspects of the museum in some way.

Of par...

Expanded federal grants seek to preserve a more inclusive selection of built heritage

2019-11-07T20:13:00-05:00

The National Trust and its partners have led advocacy efforts to increase funding for five competitive grant programs: the African American Civil Rights Grant Program, the Underrepresented Community Grant Program, the Historically Black Colleges and Universities Grant Program, Save America’s Treasures, and the Historic Revitalization Subgrant Program. In total, these competitive grant programs received $41 million in FY 2019.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation breaks down some of the recently expanded funding opportunities that have taken shape at the federal level earmarked for the preservation of diverse and inclusive built heritage.

Highlighted programs include the African American Civil Rights Grant Program, Underrepresented Community Grant Program, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) Grant Program, Save America’s Treasures program, and the Historic Revitalization Subgrant Program.

Applications for these funds are available through the federal government via the above links.

Central Park's unjustly demolished Seneca Village honored with new plaque

2019-10-21T13:30:00-04:00

In Central Park, about a mile from land that was once home to Seneca Village, a mostly black community forced out by the park’s creation in the 1850s, the city is planning a privately funded monument to a revered black family from that time. The new addition to New York’s landscape, honoring the Lyons family, is part of the de Blasio administration’s push to diversify the city’s public art and recognize overlooked figures from its history.

The privately funded plaque, paid for by the Ford, JPB, and Andrew W. Mellon Foundations and the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund, will become the second monument to Seneca Village in the park, following a public plaque erected in recent years. At its height, the village stretched from 82nd to 89th streets and was home to roughly 350 individuals, two-thirds of whom were Black.

The settlement is considered the first significant community in New York City made up of African American property owners; Seneca Village was demolished in 1857 to make way for what is now Central Park.

Fight to save one of the few remaining, intact, and occupied “Freedman's Town” in the nation picks up steam in Dallas

2019-08-19T14:00:00-04:00

On August 14, 2019, the Dallas City Council unanimously approved a resolution that temporarily halts the use of public funds on any further demolitions in Tenth Street—an important move given that to date, at least 70 of the district’s 260 homes have been demolished. Thanks to a broad-based coalition effort bolstered by the media attention of the 11 Most listing, this vote removes the immediate threat to the neighborhood and helps advance the cause.