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African American Architects: Embracing Culture and Building Urban Communities
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About African American Architects: Embracing Culture And
Product Description Melvin Mitchell believes that the 2016 opening of the NMAAHC signals either a black architect renaissance or the demise of the black architect-practitioner corps in the U.S. by 2040 if not earlier…along with the demise of Black America’s cultural, political, and spatial beachheads in America’s big cities. He argues in this book that America’s perennial housing crisis - most acutely manifested in Black America’s accelerating displacement from America’s cities – must be countered by a new progressive 21st century movement that re-invents the revolutionary construction-based architecture modus operandi deployed 100 years ago by Booker T. Washington. Mitchell believes that Washington completed the build-out of the Tuskegee Institute campus as a counter to America’s building of the “White City” aka the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair-Columbian Exposition 600 miles to the north in Chicago, Illinois. Mitchell argues that the centerpiece of a new “architecture” must realign with the needs of Black America for majorincreases in home and business ownership and wealth creation. That requires a massive “Buy the Block”-type redevelopmentin urban Black America. Today that must entail nothing short of the literal building of at least one million newaffordable housing units in urban Black America by Black America between now and 2030. The means to accomplishsuch a moon shot are there in existing and emerging progressive legislation. The American Housing and Economic Mobility Act, the Green New Deal, and the Opportunity Zones Act must all beharnessed with the trillions of available public dollars, private equity funds, and black nouveau rich wealth to createand sustain an African American-dominated urban affordable housing industry. That may not be the answer but is mostcertainly one of several heretofore missing pieces. About the Author Melvin L. Mitchell has been a practicing architect in Washington, D.C., for forty-five years. He is a Fellow in the American Institute of Architects, a past president of the D.C. Board of Architecture, and former director of the School of Architecture & Planning at Morgan State University in Baltimore (1997-2002). He was a professor at the University of the District of Columbia (1986-1994, 2003-2014); and James E. Silcott Professor of Architecture at Howard University (2016-2018). His degrees are from Howard University and the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
