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Book Review Part 2: The Crisis of the African-American Architect

© Nichel Anderson

Mitchell’s book makes his case that a major factor in the black architect’s crisis is the larger crisis of the white architect. A virtually all-white “high culture” modernist-post modernist architectural education establishment dominates all aspects of architectural socialization. That establishment is either unaware of or simply not interested in the reality of black culture’s dominant influence in shaping the rhythmic based modernist aesthetics of larger American culture.

The white educational establishment continues to be deeply instrumental in maintaining psychological and cultural barriers that marginalizes African-American architects while mitigating against their creation of an architecture that is derivative of the cultural realities, imperatives, responsibilities, and opportunities in Black America.

Mitchell cites a recent occurrence that is highly symbolic of other important dimension of the crisis; the estrangement between black architects and black culture over the past eighty years since the onset of the Harlem Renaissance. I was quite surprised to learn that Africana: The Encyclopedia of African and African-American Culture - edited by Harvard based Henry Louis Gates and Ghanaian philosopher-scholar Kwame Appiah and packed with over 2,000 pages of black achievements, issues and ideas including countless numbers of the names and bios of cultural figures from the black worlds of music to the arts…does not list a single architect.

This oversight had never dawn on me until I read it in Mitchell’s book. While not an architect, I am a woman of color, whose mode of black creative expression is through writing. One rewarding gift I received after reading Mitchell’s book is that I am now much more aware of the imperative that my architect brothers and sisters their creative talents to utilize their art form to express the excellence of mainstream black culture.

I personally had to rediscover my ancestors past that started at the banks of West Africa and extended to the 100-acre farm in Alabama that became Tuskegee Institute in order to more fully comprehend just how far we have come. My hopes for our future rose when I found out that Kwame Kilpatrick, the highly intelligent new black Mayor of Detroit, was quoted as saying that he plans to revitalize the city by bringing back the glory of music, art, sports, and the architects.

My eyes rose in anticipation of the possibilities in a situation where African-American architects are truly encouraged to express their creativity in the same way that we black writers, musicians, and artists do in our own arenas.

Hopefully, Detroit’s new mayor will follow in the earlier footsteps of Detroit’s late Mayor Coleman Young whose initiatives led to the creation of several major black owned architectural firms. One of those firms, through Mayor Young’s patronage, broke rank with convention and designed the nation’s largest Afrocentric themed cultural center. The new Detroit mayor can also look to the courage of former Mayor Marion Barry, of Washington, DC. During the 1970s through 1980s, in which, Barry used the DC government to radically expand the black middle class and the major big business sector.

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