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."

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 earned both Bachelor's and Master's degrees from Harvard University before launching a career that took him to France and Ghana, where he designed many innovative and distinctive public projects, including the Bolgatanga Regional Library. Eventually, Bond settled in New York City, where, in the late 1960s, he chaired the Architects' Renewal Committee (ARCH) in Harlem and eventually founded his own practice with Donald P. Ryder. In 1990, Bond and Ryder's firm merged with Davis Brody & Associates to create Davis Brody Bond, a major national firm that designed, among other notable commissions, the museum at the the National September 11 Memorial & Museum at the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan.

The book, according to the publisher, "charts an alternate history, showing how race had everything to do with architecture and urbanism in the postwar United States," and follows Goldstein's 2017 volume, The Roots of Urban Renaissance: Gentrification and the Struggle over Harlem from Harvard University Press, which received the Lewis Mumford Prize for best book on American city and regional planning history in 2019.