The Nexus

Overview
508 W Beach St is Brandon Bibby’s (Bibby) earliest memory of a building. The complexity of navigating one’s spatial position in Arkansas was the earliest recognition of the mediation of race and class in the built environment. At Beach St, the 900 square foot home provided the basis for a career in preservation, or “a gift and appreciation of our ancestors’ sacrifices in the intention designed with love for our collective history, heritage, memory, and culture.” “Bibby,” the affirmative name acknowledging his family’s past as his purpose for architecture, receives architecture as an interpersonal affair of preserving and stewarding spaces of the Black diaspora. 

In his own practice, the people and culture are first, and design “happens.” For Black architects, he recognizes a displacement of the “ego-driven” archetype and an acceptance of making space that would not exist if no one else had. The beneficence of these Black architects does not solely impact Black communities but, in turn, has created typologies of design that reflect the spaces of radical inclusion. Bibby’s work with the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund (AACHAF) reflects his belief that architecture has a social good and can make a change for the social betterment of all. The AACHAF is narrating the stories embedded across the country of Black designers and communities forging design excellence through a sovereign craftsmanship informed by their local condition. 

Historically, the exclusion of Black communities from accessing the materials to design and produce space has meant an erasure of our contributions to formalist architecture or the reorientation of our work as “vernacular.” What preservation provides is the ability to assert the nameless designers that exist in the archive of Black history. And to assert these designers with their unique capacities and expert capabilities in making lasting architectural heritage in the interstitial social, political, and economic conditions. Even in the loss of urban renewal and contemporary gentrification, the disconnection of African-American communities to one another has intentionally severed us from a deep connection to place. Preservation means unearthing these connections and holding these memories with us towards change. 

This episode Black Preservation, or how we know what to fight for? is dedicated to intersecting recent historic preservation work for Black architectural works and history, with a sustained realization of the role of advocacy/protest in the design process of Black spaces throughout history. We are seeking to forge a new definition for preservation and design within a Black context and aesthetic to be able to attend to all of the past + that which can be built for the future.

 

Full Transcript

 

About Bibby

Brandon Bibby is a senior preservation architect with the National Trust’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, helping them manage the Conserving Black Modernism program. Bibby, ASID, AIA, NCARB, NOMA, WELL AP, is an artist, activist and architect raised in the plains of Arkansas, where the Delta meets the Ozarks. He is a multidisciplinary researcher and designer invested in questioning narrative, representation and access in the built environment and its impacts on memory and behavior for marginalized communities. He is a next-generation preservationist motivated by movement, memory and culture in contemporary Black space. 

 

How to Listen
You can listen to all available episodes and find program notes here on our website, or subscribe to the series via one of these providers: iTunes, Spotify, iHeartRadio.

About the Show
Developed by the African American Design Nexus at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, The Nexus is a podcast that explores the intersection of design, identity, and practice through conversations with Black designers, writers, and educators. The Nexus is produced in conjunction with a commitment by the Frances Loeb Library to acquire and create an open-access bibliography of various media suggested by the GSD community on the intersection between race and design.

Show Credits
The Nexus Season 4 is hosted by Tyler White, a dual candidate in  the Masters of Urban Planning and Master of Design Studies, Narratives program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. The show is recorded and edited by Maggie Janik, and the theme music is produced by DJ Eway.

Contact
For all inquiries, please email [email protected].
The post Bibby first appeared on The Design Nexus.

Overview
The core of environmental practice is a resonance with the land at the register of the self and with concern for sustaining the productivity of the land for generations to come. Across the Black Belt South and Appalachia, Black women have been stewarding the cultural practice of memory and kinship to their daughters and children to come. The generations of learning have fortified Black approaches to land management and practice that require a deep reciprocity with giving to the land what is taken. Mavis Gragg’s great-great-grandmother, self-entitled “America,” laid claim to a nascent entrepreneurial spirit, owning land in her native western North Carolina. Reflections of childhood embody an inherency with nature, not by name but through experience, walking to school in the forest and spending time with family. Nature enshrouds these communities in a solace that emerged to provide rest and healing. Both of these “country girls” take heed from the caretaking methods of their foremothers to take care of all things with respect and love for their agency. Memory becomes a story of how to do things and how to keep things. 

 

At the center of Mavis’s practice is the affirmation of the act of humanity and resistance that is Black ownership. To combat the challenges around heirs’ property, Gragg has co-located resources for Black communities to govern their land through legal consultation, digitizing official documentation, and imagining new methods of buying and purchasing intra-Black communities. Euneika’s work brings light and joy to the heaviest of topics around race, justice, and our country’s deep history. As a designer and creative artist, her work defines the “social architectural practice” of how Black women hold and make space. This practice of translation combines community organizing and political education to produce a public history trail that makes visible the endless contributions of generations of Black women to shaping the productivity and cultural importance of the South. 

 

The agricultural sovereignty that Black communities transported to the Americas, through their forced enslavement, was an intelligence and manipulation of the landscape for the abundant capital surplus that has made the modern economic system. The landscape intelligentsia of Black labor and land practice manifests beyond high outputs of raw material, but also in the cultural stewardship of making meaning of a violent place through ethics of care, rest, leisure, and entertainment. Without the committed work of Black women through time, the longevity of Black life and Black culture would have been reduced to its intended decline and eradication. Through the preservation of Black land ownership and the maintenance of Black land sovereignty, Afro-ecofeminism becomes history’s ledger of the conservation of land and Black futurity. When we align our history to the care practices of respect, reflection, and reciprocity with the landscapes that sustain us, and even those that are constructed to oppress us, we become embodied knowledges of how to live beyond land as an object

 

This episode, Afro-Ecofeminism and Preserving Black Ecologies, is dedicated to exploring the intersection of design, land preservation, and land reclamation within a notion of the critical role of Black women and Black femmes in shepherding the cultural and ecological knowledge that sustains the generationality of Blackness. How can understanding the land as a domain of history and future reshape the way we design and preserve the potential of Black life? More importantly, in this moment where there is the Great Return, how does reorienting Black focus and investment to the South maintain, repair, and project a new trajectory? Where are designers in this fight? 

Full Transcript

 

About Euneika and Mavis

Euneika Rogers-Sipp  (artist name: Ndgo Bunting) is a planning and design artist, a social entrepreneur, as well as the Founder of the Destination Design School of Agricultural Estates in Atlanta, Georgia. Most recently, she launched an ongoing exploration, “Digging DuBois,” a regional reparations ecology project on spatial solutions to decades of racial health inequities impacting descendants of enslaved Africans in the Southern United States Black Belt Region. Previously, Euneika was Executive Director of Regenerative Design at the Sustainable Rural Regenerative Enterprises for Families (SURREF), where she coordinated the Black Belt Community Based Tourism Wealth Creation Program and delivered design interventions such as the Family Water Access Project, Black Belt Agricultural Homestays Project, and a Community Regeneration Education curriculum.

Mavis Gragg is a self-described “death and dirt” attorney and conservation professional with nearly twenty years of experience. Mavis’ mission is to empower generational, family real estate owners, especially heirs’ property owners, with knowledge and tools and to raise the visibility of numerous ways in which heirs’ property is important to affordable housing, rural and urban planning, climate resiliency, and markets. She is the co-founder and CEO of HeirShares, which is building groundbreaking technology to facilitate affordable solutions for family real estate ownership. A 2024 Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Mavis previously led the eight-state Sustainable Forestry and African American Land Retention Program and The Gragg Law Firm, PLLC.

How to Listen
You can listen to all available episodes and find program notes here on our website, or subscribe to the series via one of these providers: iTunes, Spotify, iHeartRadio.

About the Show
Developed by the African American Design Nexus at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, The Nexus is a podcast that explores the intersection of design, identity, and practice through conversations with Black designers, writers, and educators. The Nexus is produced in conjunction with a commitment by the Frances Loeb Library to acquire and create an open-access bibliography of various media suggested by the GSD community on the intersection between race and design.

Show Credits
The Nexus Season 4 is hosted by Tyler White, a dual candidate in  the Masters of Urban Planning and Master of Design Studies, Narratives program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. The show is recorded and edited by Maggie Janik, and the theme music is produced by DJ Eway.

Contact
For all inquiries, please email [email protected].

 
The post Euneika (Ndgo) Rogers-Sipp and Mavis Gragg first appeared on The Design Nexus.

Overview
“Architecture as a cultural expression” informs the intangible pull for many Black architects, less concerned with the building and recontextualizing architecture as cultural heritage. Narratives, stories, archival work, and politics animate the interests of Cousin-Wilson’s practice of architecture. The parallelism of architecture and curation can be understood in how these disciplines distill, select, and co-manage the production of a new way of existing in or navigating a relation to space. 

 

As co-founder of The Studio of Contemporary Architecture (SOCA), Wilson has made visible and reinterpreted the cultural ingenuity of material and making across the Black diaspora. SOCA has helped organizations like Black Lives Matter Canada bring their political vision to life through building style and design techniques that evoke the capacity for a structure to bring safety to the expression of Black life. The reflexive approach of SOCA and Wilson to the dialogue architecture contributes and emanates from within contemporary culture and characterizes the essence of their practice. Deep engagement and research with both clients and community groups drive their design process. The outcomes bring intimacy and interiority to the facade of structures, buildings, and housing typologies whose origins reflect a history of Black adaptation. The proof of their design excellence has been in narrating their research around Black specific conditions to illustrate universal aims and lessons for architectures of climate adaptation and mobility in the face of environmental crisis. 

 

SOCA has placed itself in the moment of the political rhetoric and reckoning to materialize the diverse urban imaginary that occupies the cultural melange that makes up Canada. Wilson’s work is deeply collaborative, not only within SOCA but beyond the scale of the building and into the individual lives of Black designers in the country.  Wilson’s rise in shaping new architectures in Canada emerged from co-founding a collaborative of Black architects and interior designers, BETA, to take stock of and build the ranks of engaged Black designers practicing in the country. Their approach to engaged architecture embodies the rigor of using history to understand the current situation and design, intending to change the physical and relational experiences of the most vulnerable within the built environment. 

 

This episode, Black Curatorial Practices, is in honor of architects’ growing role in influencing contemporary thought’s material, cultural, artistic, and sonic disciplines through curation, design, and politics. Our goal here is to understand how perspectives from outside of American Blackness are redefining and reconnecting the Diaspora through shared practices of the local role of Black communities in shaping the geologic, architectural, and public lives of our built environments. I ask, how then is ‘curating’ a tool of power and care? How can the process and outcomes of ‘curating’ be a corrective to the architectural canon, and futuring the capacity for Black existence to be a known contributor to innovating material culture, as it develops?

Full Transcript

 

About Tura

Tura Cousins Wilson has the professional experience and interest span a variety of scales including exhibition design, multi-unit housing, private homes, cultural spaces, and urban design. He is equally compelled by exploring the craft and intimacy of small scale architecture along with the redemptive qualities of reconstituting existing buildings and spaces.  The Studio of Contemporary Architecture (SOCA) is an architecture and urban design studio dedicated to inclusive city building and the creation of beautiful spaces. Founded on the belief that architecture both shapes and is shaped by the contemporary condition, the studio is deeply engaged in research and the broader discourse of architecture’s impact on culture, the environment and the shaping of cities. The studio is the recipient of the 2023 Professional Prix de Rome in Architecture, a travelling grant allowing the studio to explore sites of Black joy and community globally. SOCA is also a contributor representing Canada at the 2023 Venice Biennale of Architecture and has been awarded the 2023 Emerging Architectural Practice Award from the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada.

How to Listen
You can listen to all available episodes and find program notes here on our website, or subscribe to the series via one of these providers: iTunes, Spotify, iHeartRadio.

About the Show
Developed by the African American Design Nexus at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, The Nexus is a podcast that explores the intersection of design, identity, and practice through conversations with Black designers, writers, and educators. The Nexus is produced in conjunction with a commitment by the Frances Loeb Library to acquire and create an open-access bibliography of various media suggested by the GSD community on the intersection between race and design.

Show Credits
The Nexus Season 4 is hosted by Tyler White, a dual candidate in  the Masters of Urban Planning and Master of Design Studies, Narratives program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. The show is recorded and edited by Maggie Janik, and the theme music is produced by DJ Eway.

Contact
For all inquiries, please email [email protected].

 
The post Tura Cousins-Wilson first appeared on The Design Nexus.

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