Reconstructions: architecture and Blackness in America The Museum of Modern Art announces the fourth installment of the Issues in Contemporary Architecture series Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America an investigation into the intersections of architecture Blackness and anti Black racism in the American context. On view from February 20 through May 31 2021 the exhibition and accompanying publication will examine contemporary architecture in the context of how systemic racism has fostered violent histories of discrimination and injustice in the United States. Such conditions have structured and continue to inform the built environment of American cities through public policies municipal planning and architecture with specific repercussions for African American and African diaspora communities. Projects will explore how people have mobilized Black cultural spaces forms and practices as sites of imagination liberation resistance and refusal. City Life Org website (viewed on February 18 2021) Foreword Glenn D. Lowry Preface Robin D. G. Kelley Introduction Sean Anderson and Mabel O. Wilson Refusal. Black gathering: An assembly in three parts Christina Sharpe Immeasurability (Atlanta GA) Emanuel Admassu Visible by design Michelle Joan Wilkinson The refusal of space (Nashville TN) Mario Gooden Moving beyond repair: Constructing a revisionist history of architectural modernity at MoMA Charles L. Davis II Liberation. Designing for social justice Roberta Washington Fabricating networks: Transmissions and receptions from Pittsburghs Hill district (Pittsburgh PA) Felecia Davis Reconstructions breadth Adrienne Brown Black towers Black power (Oakland CA) Walter J. Hood At the YMCA swimming pool Arièle Dionne Krosnick Supply side criminomics Carla Shedd On exactitude in science (Watts) David Hartt Imagination. Time memory and living in shotgun houses in the south of the South City of New Orleans Tonya M. Foster A spectrum of Blackness: The search for sedimentation in Miami FL Germane Barnes Shack stories Aruna DSouza R:R (New Orleans LA) V. Mitch McEwen Entanglements of slavery segregation and mass incarceration in the United States Dianne Harris Care. We had a garden Audry Petty We outchea: HIp hop fabrications and public space (Syracuse NY) Sekou Cooke Housing as insertion point for creative urban alchemy Ifeoma Ebo Environmental racism and its afterlives in the prison system David Naguib Pellow Directions to Black space (after Mutabaruka) (Kinloch MO) Amanda Williams Knowledge. A refusal of border Jennifer Newsom black city: the los angeles edition (Los Angeles CA) J. Yolande Daniels Reconstructing difference: Design for all of the above Justin Garrett Moore The frozen neighborhoods (Brooklyn NY) Olalekan Jeyifous Toward an architecture race theory Milton S. F. Curry Manifesting statement: the Black Reconstruction Collective Project teams Acknowledgments Trustees of The Museum of Modern Art. Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America is an urgent call for architects to accept the challenge of reconceiving 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 dispossession in 10 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 volumes richly illustrated presentations of the architectural projects at the heart of MoMAs groundbreaking exhibition. Back cover