Utopias and Futures: A Study of Black Architects and Interior Designers, MidNineteenth Century to Recent Times

The history and impact of black architects and interior designers is underrecognized and understudied within the fields of design, decorative arts, and material culture. This course addresses such an absence by studying foundational figures and their respective projects ranging from airport terminals to university campuses to public works and housing. Important names include Harold Curtis Brown, Norma Merrick Sklarek, Paul Revere Williams, Beverly Loraine Greene, Robin Robinson Taylor, Cecil Taylor, Sheila Bridges, and Lesley Lokko. Also, artists like Art Smith and June Jordan were impactful in the areas of architecture and interior designs. Concepts like “utopias” and “futures” are imaginative, spatial, and architectural modes of thinking about the built environment, and are foundational to how these Black architects and interior designers drew inspiration, trained, and worked. This course adopts a case-study approach to consider the historical context in which practitioners worked and the black experience within the context of the built environments that they created. Reframing histories of architecture and interior design through the lens of blackness offers an important context to rethink the built environment and civic architectures as well as the ways in which studied figures changed the spaces we continue to inhabit. The course will also introduce a range of design practices and histories that challenge more conventional notions of architecture, design, and material culture, and will consider questions of dispossession, migration, citizenship, and value. 3 credits.