RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS
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SHIFTING THE LANDSCAPE: BLACK ARCHITECTS AND PLANNERS, 1968 TO NOW

From September 27 - 29, 2018, the National Museum of African American History and Culture presented 

Shifting the Landscape: Black Architects and Planners, 1968 to Now, a symposium focused on the activism, 

engagement, and impact of black architects and planners over the past 50 years.

The 2018 symposium brought together architects, planners, and scholars of the built environment. 

Participants reflected on key events in the late 1960s that shaped architecture and planning in the decades 

that followed. Live-streamed presentations enhanced public access to black architects of today and 

highlighted projects of architects and planners currently working to create more equitable spaces. Shifting the 

Landscape also provided opportunities for high school and university students to engage with practicing 

architects and to learn about their different modes of practice.

Why 1968? In June 1968, Whitney M. Young Jr., Executive Director of the National Urban League, delivered a 

landmark address to the American Institute of Architects (“AIA”). He called for more diversity in the profession 

and challenged architects to act on critical issues facing urban communities. Following Young’s speech, new 

funding initiatives opened doors for minority students to pursue architecture and planning degrees in greater 

numbers. Also during this era, architect J. Max Bond Jr. mentored several students and shaped their 

commitments to social justice and community needs.

Watch keynote presentations, panel discussions, and more from the 2018 symposium on NMAAHC’s Ustream

channel.

Architect J. Max Bond Jr. served as executive director of the Architects’ Renewal Committee of Harlem (“ARCH”). In 1968, ARCH 

produced this community-oriented design for the 125th Street East Harlem Triangle Plan.

Drawing by E. Donald Van Purnell. Courtesy of Arthur Symes.
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FORESTGEO NETWORK PROVIDES FOUNDATION FOR REMOTE SENSING OF FOREST BIOMASS

Tropical forests cycle more carbon and water than any other ecosystem, and they play critical roles in 

determining Earth’s energy balance. Trees capture and store carbon from the atmosphere as they grow, and 

this may ameliorate the effects of increasing carbon emissions. Effectively using this in climate change models 

or in strategies to protect or restore forests depends on the ability to measure how much carbon is stored in 

forests and how that changes through time.

Several remote sensing missions by NASA and the European Space Agency will soon produce detailed carbon 

maps over all terrestrial ecosystems. These missions are dependent on accurate and representative groundbased datasets for the training and validating of their algorithms. There is now a renewed commitment to 

invest ground resources at sites where there currently is assurance of a long-term commitment locally and 

where a core set of data is already available—called “supersites.” Forest Global Earth Observatory

(“ForestGEO”), the global network of forest research sites, is engaged in these missions in several ways 

including through the Department of Energy’s Next Generation Ecosystem Experiment with Brookhaven 

National Laboratory and other partners. ForestGEO has also proposed a strategy for enhanced coordination of 

global networks of forest plots, which would benefit biomass remote sensing.

WHAT STOPS MASS EXTINCTIONS? LESSONS FROM THE AMPHIBIAN DIE-OFF IN PANAMA

Black plague killed between 30 to 50 percent of people worldwide. The cause, Yersinia pestis, is still around, 

but people are not dying of the plague. An even more devastating modern disease caused by the chytrid 

fungus wiped entire frog and salamander populations off the map. New results from work at the Smithsonian 

Tropical Research Institute (“STRI”) in Panama published in the March 29 edition of Science, reveal the 

outcomes of the chytridiomycosis epidemic and their implications for diseases of mass destruction.
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“Imagine a deadly disease that affects not only humans but other mammal species like dogs, cats and cattle,” 

said Roberto Ibáñez, STRI staff scientist and in-country director of the Panama Amphibian Rescue and 

Conservation Project. “Chytridiomycosis kills off most of the individuals in many different species of 

amphibians, but for some species it stops short of driving them to complete extinction.”

Skin secretions from wild frogs that survived the epidemic inhibited growth of the fungus significantly more 

than secretions from frogs moved into captive breeding programs before the disease arrived. Researchers 

think that wild frogs became more resistant to the disease.

“The Panama Amphibian Rescue and Conservation Project collected healthy frogs before the outbreak,” 

Ibáñez said. “We learned to breed them in captivity and are now releasing Atelopus varius in areas where the 

epidemic has passed, so it is extremely important for us to realize that the defenses of these frogs may be 

weaker than the defenses of frogs that survived the epidemic in the wild. Captive breeding programs must 

consider breeding and releasing frogs with stronger defenses and testing their skin secretions against the 

fungus is one useful tool to see which frogs are more resistant.”

NASM ANALYSIS SHOWS THE MOON IS TECTONICALLY ACTIVE

Thousands of young cliff-like, fault scarps detected in images taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter 

Camera (“LROC”) are evidence of a shrinking moon and recently active lunar faults. But just how recently 

these faults were active was not known. The Apollo astronauts placed seismometers on the moon that 

recorded shallow moonquakes, but the source of these quakes was also not known. New analysis of Apollo 

seismic data shows that some shallow moonquakes can be linked to young faults. This is evidence that the 

moon, like Earth, is tectonically active. The analysis is explained in “Shallow Seismic Activity and Young Thrust 

Faults on the Moon,” a paper by lead author and National Air and Space Museum senior scientist Thomas R. 

Watters, published in the May issue of Nature Geoscience.

“It’s a great testament to the continued benefits of the Apollo program that seismic data collected over 40 

years ago is helping to confirm that the moon is likely tectonically active today,” Watters said. “The 

connection between the location and timing of shallow moonquakes and known young faults is further 

evidence that our moon is a dynamic world.”

The Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15, and 16 astronauts placed 

seismometers—instruments that measure the shaking 

produced by quakes—at their landing sites. Four of the 

seismometers operated from 1969 to 1977 and recorded 28 

shallow moonquakes. Watters is lead author of the study 

that analyzed data from these seismometers using an 

algorithm, or mathematical program, developed to pinpoint 

quake locations detected by a sparse seismic network. The 

new analysis gave a better estimate of the moonquake 

locations.

This prominent lunar lobate thrust fault scarp is one of thousands 

discovered in Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (“LROC”) images. 

The fault scarp or cliff is like a stair-step in the lunar landscape (leftpointing white arrows) formed when the near-surface crust is pushed 

together, breaks, and is thrust upward along a fault as the Moon 
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contracts. Boulder fields, patches of relatively high bright soil or regolith, are found on the scarp face and back scarp terrain (rightpointing arrows). Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University/Smithsonian

SMITHSONIAN LEARNING LAB NAMED BEST EDUCATION WEBSITE

The Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access has announced that its Smithsonian Learning Lab 

(learninglab.si.edu) was named the Best Education Website in the 23rd Annual Webby Awards. Hailed as the 

“internet’s highest honor” by the New York Times, the Webby Awards, presented by the International 

Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, is the leading international awards organization honoring excellence on 

the internet. The center and the Smithsonian Learning Lab were honored at the Webby Awards ceremony 

Monday, May 13, in New York City.

The Learning Lab, which launched in 2016, makes available more than 3 million digitized resources from across 

the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, as well as its research centers, libraries, archives and the National Zoo. These 

resources and online collections offer new ways of learning for teachers and students, who, through digital 

tools, can customize and share collections to match their educational needs.

SMITHSONIAN PLAYS CRITICAL ROLE IN CAPTURING LANDMARK BLACK HOLE IMAGE

The first-ever image of a black hole was seen on April 10. This monumental achievement was made possible, 

in part, by key leadership and funding from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (“CfA”).

The Event Horizon Telescope, or EHT, is a global array of radio telescopes involving dozens of institutions and 

hundreds of scientists. The breakthrough discovery by the EHT is an image of Messier 87’s “(M87’s”) 

supermassive black hole in the center of the Virgo galaxy cluster, 55 million light-years away. This black hole 

contains 6.5 billion times the mass of the Earth’s sun.
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Six papers were published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters to describe this groundbreaking result.

Black holes are extremely compressed cosmic objects containing extraordinary amounts of mass within a tiny 

region. This mass is shrouded by an event horizon, that is, the boundary beyond which nothing—not even 

light—can escape from the black hole’s powerful gravitational pull.

The presence of these objects affects their surroundings in extreme ways, including warping space-time and 

heating surrounding material to hundreds of billions of degrees. General relativity predicts that a black hole 

will cast a circular shadow upon this bright, glowing material. The newly released image of M87 from the EHT 

reveals this shadow.

Credit: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration