Pennsylvania State Senator Nikil Saval tells the story of an unlikely
partnership between June Jordan and R. Buckminster Fuller, and their
attempt to reimagine Harlem in the wake of the 1964 riots.
In the tense days leading up to the 2020 American elections,
then-candidate for Pennsylvania State Senate Nikil Saval addressed a
virtual audience at the Harvard GSD to tell a story about Black feminist
writer June Jordan and a little-known project that resulted from the
aftermath of the 1964 Harlem riot. The events of police brutality and
community grieving made a lasting impression on Jordan, who, while known
for her work as a poet, playwright, and activist, responded with a
proposal for a multiple-tower housing design. Through an unlikely
partnership with R. Buckminster Fuller, Jordan's "Skyrise for Harlem"
project offered a Futuristic vision for Harlem that argued for
environmental redesign: "it is architecture, conceived of in its fullest
meaning as the creation of environment, which may actually determine the
pace, pattern, and quality of living experience."
Jordan was not an architect in the conventional sense, Saval says. "But
in the understanding of someone who sought to propose and build
interventions in public space, she was."
