The Black Architects Archive
Few people know the names of Horace King, Ethel Madison Bailey Furman, Julian Francis Abele, Norma Sklarek, or Georgia Louise Harris Brown—just a few among the many Black architects who made significant contributions to the built environment but who have remained absent from architectural history. Additionally, few people are aware of the buildings, bridges, and parks in their neighborhoods that were built by Black architects. Structural racism kept these architects from being publicly acknowledged for their works and, in some cases, from even being paid for them. For many of these architects, the knowledge of their contributions has persisted only in the memories of their descendants.
The Black Architects Archive works to surface these and other under-represented architects across history as a means to diversify the architectural canon while also serving as a public history resource that documents the impact of Black spatial practices on the American built environment. The project furthers the work towards equity in architectural education and in the profession by helping to diversify the curriculum, in part by acknowledging and highlighting the role of Black architects in the making of the built environment.
More than simply an encyclopedic digitization of practitioners, however, the Black Architects Archive offers tools for analyzing the history of the built environment while foregrounding a collaborative and community-driven public history practice that relies on crowd-sourced and community-based contributions to grow its repository of Black shapers of the built environment.
See the Black Architects Archive here.