Category: Essays

(This essay was published in Weiss/Manfredi’s monograph Drifting Symmetries (Park Books, 2024), 272. I want to thank the architects and the publishers for giving me permission to repost it on my personal website.) Standard architectural histories of postwar Harlem are usually illustrated by the vast range of buildings produced by top-down urban renewal policies or […]

The following essay was published in the September issue of The Architectural Review for their “Reputations” series. You can read its edited version here on the magazine’s website. I would like to thank the editors for permitting me to publish the longer version of this essay on my personal blog. bell hooks taught us to […]

The following “Field Note” was co-written with Irene Cheng (CCA) and Mabel Wilson (Columbia University) in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. This essay discusses the content of the publishing workshop for our forthcoming volume on Race and Modern Architecture with the University of Pittsburgh Press, as well as the broader need within […]

The following essay was published in the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) Journal, a venue for analyzing contemporary art from an interdisciplinary perspective. I would like to thank Lisa Uddin (Whitman College) and Michael Gillespe (CUNY) for editing the series of posts on blackness. The original essay can be […]

  The following essay appears in volume 42 (Winter/Spring) issue of Log, a special issue that was entitled “Disorienting Phenomenology.” The full title of my essay is “Blackness in Practice: Toward an Architectural Phenomenology of Blackness.” I would like to thank the editors for permitting me to post this essay on my academic blog. Table […]

Just after the 2016 Presidential election was called and Donald Trump became the President-elect, the CEO of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) wrote a letter to congratulate the new administration and secure business contracts for the more than 89,000 members of this organization. Metropolis magazine was one of the first sources to cite the […]

Abstract: This essay explores the rhetorical integrations of race and style  in Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter’s urban design text Collage City (1979). Despite being penned in one of the contentious periods of political activity in American history, Rowe and Koetter insist that American democracy cannot be displaced by contemporary forms of social revolution. Having already experienced their revolution in 1776, […]

I am please to announce the reposting of my thoughts on June Jordan on another website. The Aggregate collective, an experimental forum for architectural historians had recently curated a call for papers on the recent Black Lives Matter protests. This effort was headed up by Professors Jonathan Massey (California College of the Arts) and Meredith […]