Archinect - News

These are the eight historic sites receiving Conserving Black Modernism grants today

2024-07-18T12:07:00-04:00

A group of eight important Black modernist sites across the country has been selected for a round of grants worth a total of $1.2 million by the Getty Foundation in partnership with the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

They were part of the Conserving Black Modernism program that is being directed by the Trust's African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund. Grants ranging up to $150,000 were awarded in four categories. Each joins almost two dozen other heritage sites connected to Black history as part of the larger $3 million initiative, which now means 304 grantees have been awarded $140 million nationwide through the fund since 2017.

Brent Leggs, the Fund's Executive Director, said, "The National Grant Program represents the Action Fund's enduring commitment to telling the full American story — one that makes room for Black resilience, creativity, and achievement. History is crucial to our nation's understanding of where we've come from, who we are today, and how we en...

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...