institutions, real estate developers, community groups, and civic organizations. Often, there is no single client or decision maker. African Americans and other communities of color find themselves at a disadvantage in dealing with more powerful groups in society, and the racism inherent in real-world dynamics tends to marginalize them even further.
It became clear to me that the city is shaped by the restless migrations of people and sometimes by forces for social change. The city was losing people and jobs to the suburbs. Inner-city decline and suburban sprawl went on unabated. The political landscape was turbulent. I found no one to talk to about these things during the years I was a student at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, situated in Avery Hall, an acropolis perched on Morningside Heights.
At that time, there were no African American architecture students in any of my classes, and only a handful in the school as a whole. Until 1968, when Max Bond joined the faculty, there were no African American members of the architecture teaching staff. No coursework discussed the legacy of racism in the built environment or explored prospects for community development to address structural inequality of opportunity.
In 1968, social change demonstrations came to Columbia. Protesting a bungled planning process to construct a gymnasium in a park shared by residents of Harlem, African American students and residents of Harlem occupied Hamilton Hall, the university administration building. In sympathy, white students occupied other campus buildings to protest the university’s complicity in the Vietnam War. The university was shut down for a month, and the president was fired. At one point, the black students occupying Hamilton Hall held a press conference and invited Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown to speak. I happened to be passing by and, when I stopped to speak with Stokely, I was swept into the building with the crowd and captured on film that was aired on the television newscasts. To tell the truth, I was not very excited about the protests, but I was glad that the gymnasium was not built on that poorly sited location. As I was older than most other students and had been working in civil rights campaigns for six years, protest movements were not new and exciting to me, and I was somewhat detached from the actions.
I focused on increasing the numbers of African American and Puerto Rican faculty members and students. We not only pressured the administration but also did outreach to the historically black colleges in the South. I made a recruiting journey, funded through Columbia’s School of Architecture, to several black colleges to let students know they were welcome to apply for admission. A significant number applied and were accepted. As a result of our efforts, Columbia is among the leading universities whose graduating African American architecture students became licensed architects.1
Experimental Professional Projects
While I was an architecture student, I had opportunities to undertake several professional projects. The projects were experimental in nature and helped broaden and deepen my understanding of architecture and the role that building design can play in meeting people’s needs.
The school was in disarray during those years since there was no permanent chairman of the architecture department. I managed my courses reasonably, but dropped out for a semester to complete a design/build of a Vermont artist residence. I also designed an odd triangle-plan house to the owners’ specifications in East Hampton, and designed and built another innovative vacation home for a family on Block Island with a team that included fellow students Mark Hawkins and James Piccone, with Karl Linn deftly altering the landscaping. I had long been interested in Buckminster Fuller’s thinking and work with geodesic domes, so I was excited when we bought two geodesic dome kits and erected them to form the new vacation home, converting some of the triangular panels into window openings.2 We connected the two domes via a boardwalk elevated five feet above ground.
In August of 1968, Jean and I used the money earned on the geodesic dome construction to travel to Cuba with a group of architects and planners organized by Chester Hartman. Chester became a lifelong colleague and friend—an urban planning professional with a commitment to social justice.3 On the visit, we documented the planning and architecture of revolutionary Cuba; ten years had passed since the ouster of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. The elegant architecture of the Cuban National Ballet School particularly impressed me with its gentle vaulted ceilings that spanned large spaces—an ancient Catalan technique. The ceiling structure was composed of four or five layers of thin brick tiles with staggered mortar joints. The building has recently been restored.
In the summer of 1966, Jean and I traveled to southeast Turkey for a three-month dig at the little town of Samsat with Nemrud Dagh Excavations, directed by archeologist Theresa Goell. It was a very small group with a small budget, but we appreciated the chance to be in a faraway place. My main duty was to survey. I bought a book on surveying just before departing New York and trained myself during the journey. We all had to wait a full month in Ankara before being granted permission to go to our site. Once a fortified city, Samsat had become a small village in the near-denuded landscape of Adıyaman Province on the banks of the upper Euphrates River. Theresa entertained us with stories about her youth as a Marxist–Leninist in the 1920s and 1930s and the irony of being lectured to about “standing up to capitalist pigs” by some Black Panthers she was renting an apartment to in New York.
Being in Samsat was quite an adventure. At the top of a high hill of layered construction (the former fortified castle) was fourteenth-century material; and nine feet down was Roman era. On one occasion, I nearly died of sunstroke when I worked sunup to midday in full sun at 120°F despite Theresa’s warning to quit by ten o’clock in the morning.
Later, Teresa disappeared for several weeks with a colleague to ride a traditional raft—with floatation provided by inflated sheepskins—on rapids in the Euphrates to demonstrate that it could have been done long ago. I was concerned because she had lost hearing years before and with it, a sense of balance. As she was unreachable during this absence and had left me in charge of the local digging crew (nearly all the able-bodied men of the village), we had to pray she knew what she was doing. Everywhere we wandered in the village, there were things created by people of the past—Roman stone sarcophagi used as water troughs, inscribed rocks built into house walls, and pot shards and coins underfoot. The excavation turned up fifty crates of finds—mostly pots—that ended up in the basement of a local museum.
During our time in Turkey, I felt no hostility toward me as a black man. They related to me primarily as an American.
My Experience at Columbia: A Mixed Bag
I decided early on to become an architect because it seemed to be mostly about art and beauty. Later, I found out that it was also about justice because the environment people grow up in largely determines their chances for success in life. My primary goal was to develop and learn how to use professional skills to improve the quality of life for African Americans living in cities. I wanted to learn how to plan, design, and construct buildings that would serve the needs of clients, fit into the fabric of the city, and improve the quality of life for people who lived in low-income communities of color. The defining challenge of my professional and political education during the 1960s was my quest to integrate the studio culture of architecture and urban planning with my experiences in the civil rights movement. I confronted the great challenge of fusing elitist architecture and urban planning methodologies with bottom-up direct action civil rights organizing strategies.
It became inescapably clear that our society is fractured primarily along lines of race and class, but also by gender, age, and differing perspectives about society’s relationship to the natural world. The lack of consideration within my profession of these realities and their implications weighed heavily upon me.
In my decision to be an architect, I had gradually, over the years, shifted my attention away from nature to artifacts made
