Mabel O. Wilson: Spaces of liberation.

A is for Architecture Podcast

In this episode, architect and historian Mabel O. Wilson discusses the new book 'Thinking from Black: A Lexicon' and her work with the Pract

Key takeaways

• The book 'Thinking from Black' uses an experimental lexicon to resist deficit-based frameworks of Black identity.
• Wilson describes the 'vampire' nature of architectural education, where students of color often do not see themselves reflected in the canon.

Main topics

• Architectural history and bias
• Black Studies and American Studies

Notable quotes

Architecture likes to tell a story about its heroes and the foundational myths which frame them.

Conclusion

The episode offers a profound look at how intersectional frameworks ca

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Hello. Architecture likes to tell a story about its heroes and the foundational myths which frame them. How it began, who built it, what it was for. Its knowledge is a red-lined sight, neat, discreet and observable. But what if it isn't all there is to tell? What if our architectural history itself, the knowledge it describes and the methods used to collate and disseminate it, are themselves subject to biases and distortions, the better to mediate what is known, and about, and by whom? How can architecture as a discipline tell that story? The unknowing, the syncopated or dreamy? a story of the other and of the everyday, the better to broaden its relevance. My guest this week is architect, historian and professor at Columbia University, NYC, Mabel O. Wilson, director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies. Mabel's work includes books, exhibitions, memorials and the collective work of the Practical Refusal Collective. We speak about a recent volume of the collective, Thinking from Black, a lexicon. An unusual reference book and work of literature that brings together artists, scholars, poets, architects and activists to build a vibrant, experimental vocabulary for black life, culture and collective imagination. Through its collection of cross-referenced and eclectic entries, presenting, as the blurb has it, words, phrases, concepts and ideas that are part of the many languages constituting and animating black life, the book argues for thinking from black as a creative, plural and liberatory practice rather than a fixed identity. one that refuses deficit-based frameworks and makes room for contradiction, tension and possibility. Speaker 1 (1:29) A is for Architecture, a podcast about architecture, buildings, urban culture and space. Speaker 2 (1:37) Hello and welcome to another episode of the A is for Architecture podcast. I'm delighted to be talking today to Professor Mabel O. Wilson. Mabel, thank you so much for joining me. I'm going to be talking about a book you contributed to and your practice as an academic, scholar, activist, designer, I guess. But the book we're talking about is Thinking from Black, a Lexicon, the Practicing Refusal Collective, which was edited by a group and it's... published by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, or FSG Originals, and it came out this year. Before we get to discussing your part in that and your part in the Practicing Refusal Collective, would you be so kind as to introduce yourself? Speaker 3 (2:17) Yes. Well, one, thank you so much for having me. Always a pleasure to talk about work, to talk about collaborations, to talk about what's going on in the world. And I am Mabel Wilson. What pays the bills is I'm a professor at Columbia in architecture, where I am actually split between architectural design, so I still teach design studios, and architectural history theory. And so I work with doctoral students and teach one of the required classes for our Masters of Architecture students, which is a long 19th century history survey, which is absolutely fascinating. And I'm also joint appointed in African American and African Diaspora Studies, where I am currently chair of the department, essentially in Black Studies at Columbia. So I'm kind of all over the place. And I just describe myself as being undisciplined. Speaker 2 (3:10) Not trans-disciplined, not inter-disciplined, undisciplined. I like that. I think that's probably quite honest. Keeps it messy. In a good way. Speaker 3 (3:18) Where Speaker 2 (3:19) did you train in architecture? Speaker 3 (3:21) I actually have two architecture degrees. I have an undergraduate from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, hence my Thomas Jefferson obsession. And I have a master's of architecture from Columbia's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation where I teach. So I, yeah, and I've worked professionally, had my own practice. So really, you know, my background is in architecture. But I've always had questions about my own, let's say, cultural, even racial experiences as an architect about the discipline I was learning. I often describe my undergraduate as being a vampire, just never seeing myself reflected in what I was learning. And that kind of led me to a set of critical questions that I wanted to ask by pursuing a doctoral degree. But architectural history wasn't quite ready for those questions. So my doctorate is in American Studies from New York University. What Speaker 2 (4:13) is American Studies? We don't have the equivalent over here, like British studies. Speaker 3 (4:19) Yes. Well, because even here in the United States, we just learned English as a discipline, right? If you're going to study literature, you study English. And so American studies was sort of a post-World War II discipline that really emerged kind of in response to exactly those traditions to try to find a body. of knowledge, particularly cultural knowledge. So like, like what, you know, like, what is American literature, culture? And, you know, some will argue that it linked to the project of soft power, post World War Two, CIA, you know, how to how to actually trans trans Speaker 3 (5:07) transport American culture internationally, and that the field of American studies was to kind of generate a canon about Americanness that could be spread globally. That's the backstory. But my degree is really kind of a cultural studies background. So coming out of the UK, thinking about people like Stuart Hall, Speaker 1 (5:27) the keywords Speaker 3 (5:29) guy. Speaker 3 (5:32) Why am I blanking on his name? Very famous, Thompson. You know, so coming out of the cultural studies movement and in the UK, sort of being translated into the United States, probably in the 80s, I would say. Speaker 2 (5:48) It's a really interesting comment, this idea of the vampire nature of the architecture that you studied, not seeing yourself reflected in it. Can you talk to that a little bit? How American studies, how have they been advantageous in you understanding the Black voice, Black experience within architectural practice and design history and so on? Speaker 3 (6:12) I would say... My undergraduate education, for example, you know, the sort of history classes, the influence when I was at the University of Virginia of sort of reexamining classicism and precedent. And so it was literally a kind of post-modern curriculum moving away from modernism, which, you know, initially sort of questioned history. Speaker 3 (6:40) in relation to an embrace of progress, even though history, even in modernism, kind of returns by the 40s and 50s, never really leaves, as the postmodernists would argue. But nonetheless, you know, I was looking at Noli maps. of Rome, learning about different palazzos, the Palazzo Farnese, looking at proportions, you know, reading the works of Slutsky, Eisenman, you know, very, very, you know, steeped architectural history theory at that point, and even very steeped in, you know, European and American culture, primarily European. driven American culture. And what I wasn't seeing really was any understanding about the kinds of spaces that I would have experienced growing up in. My grandparents lived in a double shotgun, for example. And but that wasn't a part of, let's say, the history that I was learning, even about American history. You might get a hint of it in vernacular, but now it was usually, you know, Richardson in the 19th century, H.H. Richardson in the 19th century, Charles Bullfinch coming out of colonialism, Jefferson having gone to UVA. And so you really didn't get much of a kind of more expansive interpretation of what essentially becomes global architecture, I think, by the global architecture movement by the 2000s. I think it's radically different now. But certainly when I was doing my undergraduate in the 80s, wanting to do a doctorate degree in the mid 90s, there was still some reticence about race and racial discourse, racialization being a part of the discipline and the discourse. And so American studies said, sure. Speaker 2 (8:39) Come study with us. And so I ended Speaker 3 (8:42) up doing a degree in American Studies instead. Speaker 2 (8:45) I'm interested, obviously, immediately enticed by your grandparents' double shotgun house, which sounds very exotic, but is in fact kind of everyday. I've wanted to ask this question for a long time. I've not had a guest who perhaps can speak to it a bit. Do you see this turn towards, say, for example, trying to understand ethnic minority? ethnic majority or non-white Western perspectives as a part of the postmodern turn away from the kind of heroic and totemic and canonical? Is there something distinct in this particular form of African-American studies, for example, which distinguishes it from that general diversification or perhaps better engagement with the everyday experience of quote-unquote normal people? Speaker 3 (9:38) I think that's a really great question. I think that, well, I think there are two things. There's one, there's the discipline discourse of architecture, and then more broadly, you know, like if you start to think about disciplines like history or... or Black Studies. So for example, in history, there's the emergence of social history. So ways in which histories exactly do what you say, move away from the kind of historic figures, the generals, the great men, and ask, well, what's really going on on the ground? You know, sort of influenced by Marxism, of course, thinking about working class histories. But then you get, you know, gendered histories, women's histories, you know, so social histories really does kind of blow that kind of open to say, well, what are the other ways in which people are kind of making their lives and literally the kind of production of historic history in the sense of Marx perhaps can be important. I think in architecture, and again, I mean, these are disciplines that are emerging in the West in very specific ways. Architecture is a Western discipline. It is, you know, I make that very clear to my students. There's building and people build, humans build. Architecture is a specific set of practices that emerge from building that gets codified in particular ways. modes of drawings, treatises, all of that stuff that then really becomes what we call architecture. And the trick, which is what architectural history does, is to then take that umbrella and then spread it all over everything and says, well, now we can look at Egypt as architecture. Then we can look at Rome in particular ways as architecture. Then we can go to the Phoenicians and look at them as architecture or the Incas as architecture. And oftentimes what that did when you look at early architectural history, history tracks, is that they produced social, cultural, racial hierarchies in relationship to the modern architecture and those who are going to lead civilization forward. And that's well documented in things like global architecture. This is why we produced the book Race and Modern Architecture, is to exactly show how from the 18th century onward, the formation of this kind of modern discipline and eventually modern practice of architecture. is situated in particular ways. What Speaker 2 (12:00) a fantastic way of putting it. I think that's amazing. I've actually made the hairs on my arms go up. I'm not being silly. I just think identifying this universalization, or as you say, is spreading it all over everything and then using it as a way to kind of leverage authority, hierarchy. I think it's been both profoundly distressing for those folk that have had it spread on them when they didn't want it in the first place. But it's also been really subversive for the practice of architecture itself, which has lost its sense of identity within that. It's very difficult to point to something and call it architecture at a certain point if everything becomes subsumed in this. Does that make sense? Speaker 3 (12:42) Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think there was an effort in the 60s, Rudofsky, Architecture Without Architects. Yeah, I mean, I think there were efforts to many different emergence of vernacular, you know, there's the, you know, the whole organization of people that, you know, sort of study vernacular architectures. And so I, you know, I think it just sort of, you know, kind of blew open and in ways, particularly in the 60s