“…My family kills niggers” she said.
The confession: Can we still be friends after a night celebrating and dancing at the legendary Studio 54 nightclub.
We were summer students in the late ’70s at Parsons School of Design in New York City.
Her dad was an ‘establishment’ architect in a capital city in one of America’s original 13 colonies.
She, the petite white southern belle who avoided getting in the elevator with me for many weeks.
She eventually came to accept I was, in fact, a Black human kid who loved architecture and design.
The cost to me, a young Black boy from Canada, of becoming human in the eyes of this white southern belle was for her to confess;
“…My [her] family kills niggers”.
Fast forward to 1991(Social Context)
- Rodney King was beaten half to death by white police officers and filmed live for everyone to see. The White police were acquitted after most of North America witnessed the obvious attempted murder of another Black man. The L.A. Riots ensued.
- … Then 1994 O.J. Simpson had his ‘Negro Wake Up Call’. The cultural divide further exposed.
- … Then around the same time, on a visit to my parents Florida home in a gated community with golf courses, a black security helicopter aggressively hovered over my head while I doing my tai chi exercises. I survived the encounter by continuing to move even more slowly and quietly chanting to myself.
Then the very next day two pre-pubescent white southern girls took offense to a Black man exercising. Tai chi exercises, as is my usual. These young girls used their 550-year privilege to spit on my slowly moving body and regale me with many known hateful words showered on Black humans for centuries. 25 minutes of slow movement while silently chanting to myself, all while being showered in young white teenage girl spit. They knew, at their young age, that for me to retaliate is to openly invite physical torture and perhaps painful death.
• … Then it’s late1993 and a group of Black Queen’s University students from Kingston, Ontario, Canada ask me to contribute an article for their journal highlighting stories of Black post-university experiences in Canada. My contribution was architectural design and culture in Ontario for Black people. The students asked me because I was one of the very very very few Black architecture graduates in the entire country at the time.
Malcolm X
*too many*
Martin Luther King Jr.
*too many*
Rodney King
*too many*
Sandra Bland
*too many*
Trayvon Martin
*too many*
Breonna Taylor
*too many*
Eric Garner
*too many*
George Floyd
*
*
*
And here we all are … And yet more white police, otherwise known as slave catchers, have murdered George Floyd and many many other Black humans. … And on we go.
It is 2020, design, planning, architecture, engineering and development has not shared nearly enough of their gain while ignoring and or exploiting the environment to which we all belong.
We are not begging to be … We are not begging to be … We are not begging to be … it was not an option and WILL NOT BE AN OPTION.
We are becoming and we are returning to sharing and good stewardship. … “And still we rise” … as Maya Angelou reminds us all.
Good design and architecture is about the quality of people and their relationship to place and each other.
The process is as important as the goal.
________________________
My contribution to Queen’s University Journal 1994.
BLACKOUT ON BLACK ARCHITECTURE
I am in a home located in one of Toronto’s traditional upper-middle-class neighbourhoods. The old-fashioned drawing-room in which I sit is adorned with sumptuous furnishings. I drink tea from fine china. I pause and look at his finely tailored cotton shirt, elegant wool pants, crafted leather shoes, and Black face. He warmly makes the introductions.
To me, the only thing Black about this man is his skin. Every other outward cultural signal is White, aristocratic, middle class, and British. He is studying architecture at a California university and has asked me to review his portfolio in order to consider him for future work. He continues to speak; I continue to speculate as to whether I’m wasting my time here. Is this another “Wanna Be White” Black man using me as a convenient crutch, mistakenly thinking we might have the same goal of White acceptability? I decide to sit tight and let him continue to describe his portfolio of work, in the hope that something resembling Black culture appears.
As my frustration begins to peak, he finally introduces his concluding project for that year, 1992/93: a centre for Black culture. The project was created at the time of the White police beating of Rodney King. Finally !! The great ‘AH-HA’ moment had presented itself. What a relief. Here was the Black man I was beginning to think had lost himself by desiring White acceptability.
His Centre of Black Culture had created quite a stir. His exquisite model had a screen that displayed a snapshot of King’s beating. The reaction of many of his predominantly White peers was hostile. So much so that during the development of his project, he had come to the conclusion, through many informal discussions, that his peers and critics were not equipped culturally, ethically, or intellectually to discuss the merits of his project. His Black Cultural Centre. They couldn’t digest its “Blackness”. He explained that his discussions inevitably led him to defend how the Black culture views itself and how it views White society. Conversely, he observed, that the defense of White cultural values wasn’t necessary: why? Well, “naturally”, White culture was seen as the measure against which all other cultures were to be judged.
By now, this man was smoking a cigarette. His nerves soothed as he recounted to me these painful and necessary realizations. His eyes did not display pain or anger. On the contrary, they were focussed, contemplative, alive, and insightful.
It was at this point that I felt true empathy. I was glad that I had made time for him; he who had chosen the precarious path of self-discovery as opposed to White acceptability. Furthermore, we had become linked at that point where it is no longer possible to function as mere shadows of White methodology and mythology.
We began speaking freely: like two Black soldiers serving in an all-White army, sharing stories; discovering beauty in horrific circumstances; engaging in the healing dialogue of shared experience.
What definition of architecture could possibly bind these two Black cultured individuals together?
Black architecture is, for us:
A collective body of built and/or theorized work that has been produced by the descendants of Black-African slaves and non-slaves since the beginning of the slave trade. This architecture was born in the colonized world expropriated from the Great Red aboriginal races of this land. Further, it is that body of work produced by Black people who have not subjugated their imagination to the presently dominant race and it is that architecture that is inclusive and diverse as opposed to the exclusivity of Judao-Christian and Grecco/Roman-Pantheistic traditions.
————————————-
Black culture has forever changed natural science, modern science, modern medicine, modern technology, modern engineering, music, clothing, food and food products through people such as Jan Ernst Matzeliger (inventor / mechanized shoe assembly), Elijah McCoy (inventor / engineer), Granville Woods (inventor / electronics), Albert B. Blackburn (inventor / train signals), Dr. Charles Drew (blood plasma / researcher), Issac R. Johnson (modern bicycle frame), Madame C.J. Walker (entrepreneur / cosmetics) and many more too numerous to name in the limited scope of this paper. So, why don’t there seem to be any celebrated Black architects who have contributed to the major and minor built symbols of our collective society?
To begin to understand this absence, I reflect upon a university field trip I took in the mid-’80s to a major midwestern American city. While there, many of my classmates made the usual, dutiful, visits to the numerous shrines of architecture which the city had to offer, i.e., plenty of monuments to White men. I, on the other hand, paid a visit to a Black magazine publisher, getting introductions to any Black architects practicing and teaching in the city. Although I was successful, I did not stop there. Noting that this city was divided into the north and the south – the Black half and the White half – I paid a brief, unannounced, visit the head of city planning; at the time, a White man of eastern European heritage. I asked him why divisions by race continue to exist in his jurisdiction? He answered from the bottom of his heart. He said: ” … that until Blacks prove themselves to be human beings, like the rest of us [Whites], they should live in barracks with dirt floors”. Needless to say, I got my fresh Black face and bow-tie out of there in short order.
This experience led me to imagine, what it must be like to be a Black architect in that city. What kind of support would your project receive in a bureaucracy where your “humanness” is non-existent. I had a discussion with such an architect, a senior partner (a Black man) in the largest architecture firm in the world, whose key role lay in project supervision and administration, not design. Our discussions led him to theorize that the White society portrays their architects as demigods; the great conductors of form, space, and people. That being the case, that white society finds it exceedingly difficult to allow a Black person to hold such a revered position in their scheme of things. After all, what would heaven be like if God were a Black woman?
Nevertheless, as wealthy and secure as this Black partner was, he had been pigeon-holed and he was fully aware of it. He had given into the trappings of White power. The resulting diminution and muting of his true talents became inevitable. He was now, for all intents and purposes, lost in the dreams of other men. This happens all the time. He had, like many others, knowingly made this choice and we must begin to understand why.
An analogy I use but am not fond of, because it is so painfully evident, not only in my life but the lives of many other people, is that we, as Black architects and designers, are like prostitutes. Instead of selling our flesh, we sell our imagination and energy, in order to fuel the dreams of our handlers. Our predominantly White professors, bosses, and the city officials with whom we interact benefit from our toil. They supply money, security, a sense of continuity, direction, strategic adulation, and scorn, consciously and unconsciously, designed to manipulate and break our spirits should we get too “uppity”, that is, demand equal respect. However, when we show exceptional ability and tenaciousness, these people will often ask us to their beds. This recalls the adage: keep your friends close, but keep your enemies even closer. Nevertheless, we are supposed to be flattered and grateful at being asked closer. Should we reject their advances, we may become ostracized, isolated, and eventually outcast. As a result, many of us have slept in such unworthy beds. Fear made us do this. Fear that we will not be able to make it on our own without a White face behind us. Fear of not being able to feed ourselves and our families. Fear of being an outsider for the rest of our lives. Fear of experiencing the loneliness of the genius who is heard and seen by no one. Fear of failure. As a consequence of our fear, too many of us have succumbed to the stable and unfulfilling bed of mediocrity.
—————————
So, after all this, where is the collected body of work which bears the distinctive mark of Blacks in modern architecture without having to return to Africa or Polynesia? Sadly, I haven’t yet found an answer that would even satisfy myself, let alone anyone else.
A conversation I had with an editor of a major design magazine in Toronto (a White woman) reinforced this sadness. After reading several articles in her magazine concerning the contribution of women to design and architecture, the contributions of Italians to architecture, and so on, I wrote to her stating that I would renew my subscription for one more year with the expectation that her magazine would write some articles on Black and Indigenous contributions to design and architecture. Her response was not unexpected. She did not believe there was such a thing as Black design and architecture. She gave this response, of course, only after having initially denied that her magazine printed articles based on gender and nationality. I retorted by reading straight from her magazines, to which, she back-tracked and expressed her real sentiments. I pointed out the contributions of Blacks and Indigenous people to art, literature, music, fabric, clothing design, photography, furniture, and construction methodology. It was at this point that she asked me if I would like to be a contributing writer to her publication. God knows I would like to contribute to such a popular magazine, but I wasn’t being asked for my writing talents nor was I guaranteed that what I wrote would ever be published. No, on the contrary, I was being offered this precarious and symbolic position in order to pacify me. This was confirmed by her subsequent statement: that it wasn’t necessary that her writers pursue such topics as Black and Indigenous contributions to design and architecture.
My work – my love: structure, space, art, and the movement of people with them. These are the things I love. This is architecture and architecture is what I do. On the other hand, being a writer for a magazine whose editor believes that my very being is diametrically opposed to her reality, would be, without a doubt, stupid.
————————–
Suffice it to say, I have not discovered any collective body of Black architectural thought and tradition [within the definition previously stated] from which I can draw strength and nurturing, inspiration and camaraderie. My pursuit has lead me to uncover a gaping cultural void. In other words, there has been a BLACKOUT on Black architecture. This apparent desert of Black achievement recalls those days when it was illegal to teach Blacks to read or write. Now, in 1993, Toni Morrison (a Black woman) has won the Nobel Prize for literature. Toni Morrison has managed to convey the complexity of her Black-Womanly experience by reshaping and re-structuring the English language in a manner whereby it can now convey the power, wisdom, joy, and adversity of the Black journey; a task made previously impossible in the guarded and entombed language of White cultural exclusivity. The architecture of language and the architecture of the built form are inextricably linked.
Architecture is a snapshot; a frozen song of light, of sound, of solid, of the void, of dreams and of diverse realities. Architecture captures the spirit of where people have been and where people are. Our legacy is, so far, obscured. The obscurity of Black architecture is linked directly to our ability to dream our own dreams, speak with our own voice, and express our own culture with that voice. Black architecture will, one day, have its own Toni Morrison, its own Ralph Ellison, its own Maya Angelou. It must; therefore it will.
Rohan Walters B. Arch.,
Principal Designer of Spaces By Rohan,
© February 5, 1994
Love Always.
Spaces By Rohan
Blackout On Black Architecture – 26 Years Later, Is It Still The Case?
“…My family kills niggers” she said.
The confession: Can we still be friends after a night celebrating and dancing at the legendary Studio 54 nightclub.
We were summer students in the late ’70s at Parsons School of Design in New York City.
Her dad was an ‘establishment’ architect in a capital city in one of America’s original 13 colonies.
She, the petite white southern belle who avoided getting in the elevator with me for many weeks.
She eventually came to accept I was, in fact, a Black human kid who loved architecture and design.
The cost to me, a young Black boy from Canada, of becoming human in the eyes of this white southern belle was for her to confess;
“…My [her] family kills niggers”.
Fast forward to 1991(Social Context)
Then the very next day two pre-pubescent white southern girls took offense to a Black man exercising. Tai chi exercises, as is my usual. These young girls used their 550-year privilege to spit on my slowly moving body and regale me with many known hateful words showered on Black humans for centuries. 25 minutes of slow movement while silently chanting to myself, all while being showered in young white teenage girl spit. They knew, at their young age, that for me to retaliate is to openly invite physical torture and perhaps painful death.
• … Then it’s late1993 and a group of Black Queen’s University students from Kingston, Ontario, Canada ask me to contribute an article for their journal highlighting stories of Black post-university experiences in Canada. My contribution was architectural design and culture in Ontario for Black people. The students asked me because I was one of the very very very few Black architecture graduates in the entire country at the time.
Malcolm X
*too many*
Martin Luther King Jr.
*too many*
Rodney King
*too many*
Sandra Bland
*too many*
Trayvon Martin
*too many*
Breonna Taylor
*too many*
Eric Garner
*too many*
George Floyd
*
*
*
And here we all are … And yet more white police, otherwise known as slave catchers, have murdered George Floyd and many many other Black humans. … And on we go.
It is 2020, design, planning, architecture, engineering and development has not shared nearly enough of their gain while ignoring and or exploiting the environment to which we all belong.
We are not begging to be … We are not begging to be … We are not begging to be … it was not an option and WILL NOT BE AN OPTION.
We are becoming and we are returning to sharing and good stewardship. … “And still we rise” … as Maya Angelou reminds us all.
Good design and architecture is about the quality of people and their relationship to place and each other.
The process is as important as the goal.
________________________
My contribution to Queen’s University Journal 1994.
BLACKOUT ON BLACK ARCHITECTURE
I am in a home located in one of Toronto’s traditional upper-middle-class neighbourhoods. The old-fashioned drawing-room in which I sit is adorned with sumptuous furnishings. I drink tea from fine china. I pause and look at his finely tailored cotton shirt, elegant wool pants, crafted leather shoes, and Black face. He warmly makes the introductions.
To me, the only thing Black about this man is his skin. Every other outward cultural signal is White, aristocratic, middle class, and British. He is studying architecture at a California university and has asked me to review his portfolio in order to consider him for future work. He continues to speak; I continue to speculate as to whether I’m wasting my time here. Is this another “Wanna Be White” Black man using me as a convenient crutch, mistakenly thinking we might have the same goal of White acceptability? I decide to sit tight and let him continue to describe his portfolio of work, in the hope that something resembling Black culture appears.
As my frustration begins to peak, he finally introduces his concluding project for that year, 1992/93: a centre for Black culture. The project was created at the time of the White police beating of Rodney King. Finally !! The great ‘AH-HA’ moment had presented itself. What a relief. Here was the Black man I was beginning to think had lost himself by desiring White acceptability.
His Centre of Black Culture had created quite a stir. His exquisite model had a screen that displayed a snapshot of King’s beating. The reaction of many of his predominantly White peers was hostile. So much so that during the development of his project, he had come to the conclusion, through many informal discussions, that his peers and critics were not equipped culturally, ethically, or intellectually to discuss the merits of his project. His Black Cultural Centre. They couldn’t digest its “Blackness”. He explained that his discussions inevitably led him to defend how the Black culture views itself and how it views White society. Conversely, he observed, that the defense of White cultural values wasn’t necessary: why? Well, “naturally”, White culture was seen as the measure against which all other cultures were to be judged.
By now, this man was smoking a cigarette. His nerves soothed as he recounted to me these painful and necessary realizations. His eyes did not display pain or anger. On the contrary, they were focussed, contemplative, alive, and insightful.
It was at this point that I felt true empathy. I was glad that I had made time for him; he who had chosen the precarious path of self-discovery as opposed to White acceptability. Furthermore, we had become linked at that point where it is no longer possible to function as mere shadows of White methodology and mythology.
We began speaking freely: like two Black soldiers serving in an all-White army, sharing stories; discovering beauty in horrific circumstances; engaging in the healing dialogue of shared experience.
What definition of architecture could possibly bind these two Black cultured individuals together?
Black architecture is, for us:
A collective body of built and/or theorized work that has been produced by the descendants of Black-African slaves and non-slaves since the beginning of the slave trade. This architecture was born in the colonized world expropriated from the Great Red aboriginal races of this land. Further, it is that body of work produced by Black people who have not subjugated their imagination to the presently dominant race and it is that architecture that is inclusive and diverse as opposed to the exclusivity of Judao-Christian and Grecco/Roman-Pantheistic traditions.
————————————-
Black culture has forever changed natural science, modern science, modern medicine, modern technology, modern engineering, music, clothing, food and food products through people such as Jan Ernst Matzeliger (inventor / mechanized shoe assembly), Elijah McCoy (inventor / engineer), Granville Woods (inventor / electronics), Albert B. Blackburn (inventor / train signals), Dr. Charles Drew (blood plasma / researcher), Issac R. Johnson (modern bicycle frame), Madame C.J. Walker (entrepreneur / cosmetics) and many more too numerous to name in the limited scope of this paper. So, why don’t there seem to be any celebrated Black architects who have contributed to the major and minor built symbols of our collective society?
To begin to understand this absence, I reflect upon a university field trip I took in the mid-’80s to a major midwestern American city. While there, many of my classmates made the usual, dutiful, visits to the numerous shrines of architecture which the city had to offer, i.e., plenty of monuments to White men. I, on the other hand, paid a visit to a Black magazine publisher, getting introductions to any Black architects practicing and teaching in the city. Although I was successful, I did not stop there. Noting that this city was divided into the north and the south – the Black half and the White half – I paid a brief, unannounced, visit the head of city planning; at the time, a White man of eastern European heritage. I asked him why divisions by race continue to exist in his jurisdiction? He answered from the bottom of his heart. He said: ” … that until Blacks prove themselves to be human beings, like the rest of us [Whites], they should live in barracks with dirt floors”. Needless to say, I got my fresh Black face and bow-tie out of there in short order.
This experience led me to imagine, what it must be like to be a Black architect in that city. What kind of support would your project receive in a bureaucracy where your “humanness” is non-existent. I had a discussion with such an architect, a senior partner (a Black man) in the largest architecture firm in the world, whose key role lay in project supervision and administration, not design. Our discussions led him to theorize that the White society portrays their architects as demigods; the great conductors of form, space, and people. That being the case, that white society finds it exceedingly difficult to allow a Black person to hold such a revered position in their scheme of things. After all, what would heaven be like if God were a Black woman?
Nevertheless, as wealthy and secure as this Black partner was, he had been pigeon-holed and he was fully aware of it. He had given into the trappings of White power. The resulting diminution and muting of his true talents became inevitable. He was now, for all intents and purposes, lost in the dreams of other men. This happens all the time. He had, like many others, knowingly made this choice and we must begin to understand why.
An analogy I use but am not fond of, because it is so painfully evident, not only in my life but the lives of many other people, is that we, as Black architects and designers, are like prostitutes. Instead of selling our flesh, we sell our imagination and energy, in order to fuel the dreams of our handlers. Our predominantly White professors, bosses, and the city officials with whom we interact benefit from our toil. They supply money, security, a sense of continuity, direction, strategic adulation, and scorn, consciously and unconsciously, designed to manipulate and break our spirits should we get too “uppity”, that is, demand equal respect. However, when we show exceptional ability and tenaciousness, these people will often ask us to their beds. This recalls the adage: keep your friends close, but keep your enemies even closer. Nevertheless, we are supposed to be flattered and grateful at being asked closer. Should we reject their advances, we may become ostracized, isolated, and eventually outcast. As a result, many of us have slept in such unworthy beds. Fear made us do this. Fear that we will not be able to make it on our own without a White face behind us. Fear of not being able to feed ourselves and our families. Fear of being an outsider for the rest of our lives. Fear of experiencing the loneliness of the genius who is heard and seen by no one. Fear of failure. As a consequence of our fear, too many of us have succumbed to the stable and unfulfilling bed of mediocrity.
—————————
So, after all this, where is the collected body of work which bears the distinctive mark of Blacks in modern architecture without having to return to Africa or Polynesia? Sadly, I haven’t yet found an answer that would even satisfy myself, let alone anyone else.
A conversation I had with an editor of a major design magazine in Toronto (a White woman) reinforced this sadness. After reading several articles in her magazine concerning the contribution of women to design and architecture, the contributions of Italians to architecture, and so on, I wrote to her stating that I would renew my subscription for one more year with the expectation that her magazine would write some articles on Black and Indigenous contributions to design and architecture. Her response was not unexpected. She did not believe there was such a thing as Black design and architecture. She gave this response, of course, only after having initially denied that her magazine printed articles based on gender and nationality. I retorted by reading straight from her magazines, to which, she back-tracked and expressed her real sentiments. I pointed out the contributions of Blacks and Indigenous people to art, literature, music, fabric, clothing design, photography, furniture, and construction methodology. It was at this point that she asked me if I would like to be a contributing writer to her publication. God knows I would like to contribute to such a popular magazine, but I wasn’t being asked for my writing talents nor was I guaranteed that what I wrote would ever be published. No, on the contrary, I was being offered this precarious and symbolic position in order to pacify me. This was confirmed by her subsequent statement: that it wasn’t necessary that her writers pursue such topics as Black and Indigenous contributions to design and architecture.
My work – my love: structure, space, art, and the movement of people with them. These are the things I love. This is architecture and architecture is what I do. On the other hand, being a writer for a magazine whose editor believes that my very being is diametrically opposed to her reality, would be, without a doubt, stupid.
————————–
Suffice it to say, I have not discovered any collective body of Black architectural thought and tradition [within the definition previously stated] from which I can draw strength and nurturing, inspiration and camaraderie. My pursuit has lead me to uncover a gaping cultural void. In other words, there has been a BLACKOUT on Black architecture. This apparent desert of Black achievement recalls those days when it was illegal to teach Blacks to read or write. Now, in 1993, Toni Morrison (a Black woman) has won the Nobel Prize for literature. Toni Morrison has managed to convey the complexity of her Black-Womanly experience by reshaping and re-structuring the English language in a manner whereby it can now convey the power, wisdom, joy, and adversity of the Black journey; a task made previously impossible in the guarded and entombed language of White cultural exclusivity. The architecture of language and the architecture of the built form are inextricably linked.
Architecture is a snapshot; a frozen song of light, of sound, of solid, of the void, of dreams and of diverse realities. Architecture captures the spirit of where people have been and where people are. Our legacy is, so far, obscured. The obscurity of Black architecture is linked directly to our ability to dream our own dreams, speak with our own voice, and express our own culture with that voice. Black architecture will, one day, have its own Toni Morrison, its own Ralph Ellison, its own Maya Angelou. It must; therefore it will.
Rohan Walters B. Arch.,
Principal Designer of Spaces By Rohan,
© February 5, 1994
Love Always.