But the silent, implied ‘White’ in ‘American Institute of Architects’ remained silent. Young’s speech represents a rare moment in which White architects in power were forced to consider themselves as White, a status that could have been be further reinforced by the foundation of NOMA, the National Organization of Minority Architects, following the AIA’s 1970 conference. In campaigns against ‘Architecture and the Nuclear Arms Race’ and ‘Architecture and Racism’, condemning Skidmore, Owings and Merrill’s contract to design the Carlton Centre in apartheid Johannesburg, South Africa, TAR argued that “architecture for racists is racist architecture.” TAR’s assertion that architecture had been reduced to an aesthetic and technical profession which ignored its ethical responsibility to the public echoed Young, and prefigured much criticism to come (4). Whitney Young’s June 1968 castigation of the AIA’s membership for its “thunderous silence and complete irrelevance on the cause of civil rights,” for having constructed a “White noose around the central city”, was not directed at the Black architects whose practice had been entwined with Black community development for nearly a century (3).Ī few young White architects, including the Columbia, MIT, and Yale students who organized The Architects’ Resistance (TAR) from 1968 to 1970 received the message and applied it broadly. Bond brought his experiences and connections in Kwame Nkrumah’s independent Ghana to his teaching at Columbia in this period, a dramatic departure from the White European-American canon (2).

ARCH evolved along with Black politics, informed by the internationalist, postcolonial perspective of its post-1968 leader J. A key example was the Architects’ Renewal Committee in Harlem, or ARCH, founded in 1964. In the late 1960s and 1970s, Black practitioners particularly created architectural and planning expressions of Black Power (1). Revolt, reform, advocacy and apathyĪs the civil rights revolution reshaped American life in the 1950s and 1960s, culminating with the legal deconstruction of Jim Crow by the passage of the Civil and Voting Rights Acts in 1964-65, Black citymakers contributed significantly to the early community design movement, sometimes called “the architectural arm of the civil rights movement”.

The following is an excerpt from ‘Freedom and the politics of space: organizing and convening for self-determination in the American citymaking professions’ presented at the Schools of Thought architectural education conference in Norman, Oklahoma, March 2020.

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