The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race. Carl C. Anthony
4
Columbia School of Architecture
JOINING THE CIVIL RIGHTS movement had changed my life. As I began professional studies in architecture and planning, I wanted to know how the planning and design of cities could support the struggle for racial justice. In 1964, many of my friends decided to travel to the South to join Freedom Summer, a voter registration campaign in Mississippi led by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and a coalition of civil rights organizations. I was drawn to and impressed by this campaign which, in addition to voter registration, set up dozens of Freedom Schools, Freedom Houses, and community centers in small towns throughout the South to aid local black people.
As for me, I wanted to support the development of such helpful institutions in the inner cities of the North, so I decided to stay in New York and focus on the architecture program at Columbia University.
Teaching at Columbia’s architecture school was centered on the design studio. The first-year studio under the leadership of Peter Pragnell was a powerful and positive experience. Influenced by a design movement in Europe called Team 10, Pragnell was interested in the social factors that shape the design of buildings. He brought to our design studio the world-famous architect Aldo van Eyck, who delivered an amazing two-hour lecture about the Dogon people, an ethnic group in Mali who live in beautifully designed mud, thatch, and stone dwellings along and near the cliffs of Bandiagara.
Our project-based learning began with designing a summer camp for twenty-four people. Next, we were instructed to find an existing English town and produce a detailed map that demonstrated how people’s needs were met by the built environment. The town I chose was an agricultural settlement of fifty houses clustered around the main road. Another assignment was to do a photo essay in the city organized around a theme. I chose the theme of barriers. I noticed and photographed many walls, signs, and signals showing where not to go—restricting traffic, parking, and access to grassy lawns, for example. For a paper analyzing mechanical systems, I studied the Richards Medical Center in Philadelphia designed by Louis Kahn. For an assignment to produce working drawings and models, I chose the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University by Le Corbusier.
I did well in the course, and at the end of the first year, Professor Pragnell arranged for me to get a summer job working for the firm of Patrick Desalles in the outskirts of London. Finding a place to live proved challenging. After visiting many agents without success, I realized that “no coloreds” was on the index cards they searched. I slept in the park a few nights. Finally, I got a bed in a shared flat in Islington. One of my neighbors was an infamous neo-Nazi.
While I was abroad, I visited, at Mr. Pragnell’s suggestion, the architecture of Peter and Alison Smithson in England, Aldo van Eyck in the Netherlands, Le Corbusier in France, Antonio Gaudí in Spain, and a few others. Each of these architects in their own ways had tried to manifest a more humane approach to architectural design than was seen in the mainstream.
Van Eyck and the Smithsons were leading members of Team 10, a social movement of younger architects who were breaking away from the Congrèes International d’Architecture Moderne (CAIM). They were rebelling against the faceless and soulless architecture that was springing up everywhere. They tried to introduce elements of humanism into their designs. Van Eyck, for example, installed mirrors at various levels and in unusual places in the Municipal Orphanage in Amsterdam to give the children opportunities to explore and make discoveries in their environment. I appreciated that he was inspired by indigenous building traditions in America and Africa, and I was intrigued by his idea that a city should function in a unified manner like a house and that a house should function in an expansive way like a tiny city.
Le Corbusier, who was the leading architect of the twentieth century, designed buildings that were spiritually moving, such as the chapel of Notre Dame du Haut (Our Lady of the Heights) on a hill above the village of Ronchamp. The thick curved walls and roof give the impression of a massive piece of sculpture. I also visited the building he designed for the convent of Saint Mary of La Tourette. It is much larger than the chapel and contains bedrooms, study halls, a library, dining hall, kitchen, and a church. His designs are very modern, but also draw on nature and on human needs. He took the symbols of modern life and incorporated them into his designs to create a new vocabulary of modern architecture that was used by many.
Antonio Gaudíi’s designs were clearly inspired by nature—organic forms that are curvilinear and flowing with lots of color and decoration, reflecting and responding to the human spirit in profound ways. I was grateful to spend time taking in the work of all these great architects who wanted to accommodate and address the needs of ordinary people while creating architectural innovations.
From the Studio to the Streets
The studio is a metaphor for the specialized training of the architect, including the physical environment in which he or she works. An inspiring studio space often features high ceilings and skylights and is shared by twelve to twenty students. Beautiful objects are located strategically throughout the space, such as plaster casts of Renaissance sculptures, Greek urns, and columns from European buildings, all intended to stimulate the muse.
The studio is led by a master architect who acts as a coach, giving frequent crits (short for critiques) at each student’s drafting table. The master architect also simulates the role of the client. Lectures and other coursework are subordinate to the studio experience. Students are given a design problem to work on for several months and spend most of their time in the studio at their drafting table. At the end of the semester, they present their work to a jury.
I call the real world where low-income families live “the streets.” The physical environment where poor people live, work, and play often reflects a lack of care. Liquor stores abound, but there are few places where you can get fresh food. Buildings are boarded up and covered with graffiti. Overflowing trash containers, unclaimed automobiles, abandoned refrigerators, and broken furniture are everywhere.
Toward the end of my experience at Columbia, the conflicts of the real world intruded on the curriculum. I experienced a clash of cultures between the architecture planning studio and the streets of the city. The studio emphasized thoughtful, creative problem solving in which the practitioner controls all the variables. In the streets, life was different. In 1967, the nation experienced violent, race-related civil insurrections. Significant areas in many cities had gone up in flames. In 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered. Upon learning of the assassination, I was enraged. Eventually, when I could no longer contain my emotions, I went out to join the crowds in the streets.
The Kerner Commission, appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate the causes of the riots, referred to the two Americas: rich white people and poor black people. Real-world, city-building processes are shaped by the conflicting interests of public officials, financial 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