Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America

Author: Sean Anderson, Mabel Wilson
Publisher: The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Year: 2021
Pages: 173
ISBN: 978-1633451148

Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America is an urgent call for architects to accept the challenge of reconcieving 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 dispossesion in ten 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.