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Book Review Part 1: The Crisis of the African-American Architect

© Nichel Anderson

Art can be expressed in many different physical expressions ranging from liquid paint on a canvas to the rhythm of blues and jazz music. African-Americans, from the homeland of Africa to the shores of America, have always re-shaped their physical environments into memorable expressions of creativity. Our history foretells a sense of triumph and strength during hard times and how our many different art forms of creativity reached out and touched, encouraged, and influenced other cultures by adding our rich African culture.

In his provocative book Melvin L. Mitchell reveals how African culture has been manifested – though not acknowledged - in the white world of 20th century modernist architecture. More importantly, Mitchell also reveals how and why architecture has not yet been consciously used by black architects as a mode of black cultural expression that complements world-class black music, dance, literature, and other cultural art forms.

Mitchell examines and explains some of the psychological, intellectual, race, class, and power based conflicts that exists between the culture of mainstream (white) architecture and the culture of Black America.

Mitchell’s book a - three-part series of independent essays - delivers a powerful message; today’s black architects must find a way to integrate architecture with the others areas of American cultural life that are dominated by black creativity. The book begins in the transitional period between the dawn of black freedom from slavery and the start of black efforts to create and construct buildings and communities that made the best of our socio-economic and political powerlessness in America.

Mitchell specifically begins with the 1880s beginnings of the construction of Tuskegee Institute by the much-maligned Booker T. Washington. Mitchell convincingly establishes the fact that Washington practically invented the modern era black architect on the Tuskegee campus.

Mr. Washington was a patron saint to extraordinary achievements by black architects on the Tuskegee campus between 1892 and his death in 1915. In 1892 Mr. Washington brought the aspiring mind and talents of Robert Robinson Taylor, a recent young black graduate of the school of architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), to Tuskegee. Under Washington’s tutelage and patronage, Taylor would recruit or train other architects who would help him coordinate the design and construction of virtually all of the major buildings on the Tuskegee Institute campus and in the surrounding model black community.

This important work was beginning at Tuskegee in relative obscurity during the same period of the design and building of the universally acclaimed Chicago Worlds Fair architectural extravaganza that offered no similar opportunities to black architects. After Washington’s death, the center of black architectural education and professional practice shifted from Tuskegee to Howard University in Washington, DC. By the beginning 1920s years of the Harlem Renaissance era, the notion of a black signature style of architecture grounded in black cultural identity had not been pursued.

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