How American architecture can address systemic anti-Black racism: a
creative challenge in 10 case studies
A New York Times critics' pick Best Art Books 2021
Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America is an urgent
call for architects to accept the challenge of reconceiving and
reconstructing our built environment rather than continue giving shape
to buildings, infrastructure and urban plans that have, for generations,
embodied and sustained anti-Black racism in the United States.
The architects, designers, artists and writers who were invited to
contribute to this book--and to the exhibition at the Museum of Modern
Art for which it serves as a "field guide"--reimagine the legacies of
race-based dispossession in 10 American cities (Atlanta; Brooklyn, New
York; Kinloch, Missouri; Los Angeles; Miami; Nashville; New Orleans;
Oakland; Pittsburgh; and Syracuse) and celebrate the ways individuals
and communities across the country have mobilized Black cultural spaces,
forms and practices as sites of imagination, liberation, resistance,
care and refusal.
A broad range of essays by the curators and prominent scholars from
diverse fields, as well as a portfolio of new photographs by the artist
David Hartt, complement this volume's richly illustrated presentations
of the architectural projects at the heart of MoMA's groundbreaking
exhibition.
