Gabrielle Bullock, 56, is the Los Angeles-based head of global diversity for the international architecture and design firm Perkins+Will, an 83-year-old company with a workforce of more than 2,000 professionals. Bullock is also something of a pioneer, one of only 404 African American women who are licensed architects in the U.S. In 2017, Bullock was appointed as president-elect of the International Interior Design Assn., which has more than 15,000 members in 58 countries.
Posts tagged as “black architects”
by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (@lakinhutcherson)
On the heels of launching the African-American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, the largest preservation campaign ever undertaken on behalf of African-American history, the National Trust for Historic Preservation announced a preservation easement on Madam C.J. Walker’s estate, Villa Lewaro. A powerful preservation tool, the easement prevents current and future owners from making adverse changes to or demolishing the estate’s historic, cultural and architectural features.
Madam C.J. Walker (December 23, 1867–May 25, 1919), America’s first self-made female millionaire, commissioned Villa Lewaro, her “Dream of Dreams,” at the height of her wealth and prominence as inventor and entrepreneur of haircare products for African-American women. Constructed in 1918, alongside the Hudson River in Irvington, New York, Madam Walker’s elegant residence was built to inspire African-Americans to reach their highest potential.
Designed by Vertner Tandy—the first African-American registered architect in the state of New York and one of the seven founders of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc.—the 34-room mansion served as the intellectual gathering place for notable leaders of the Harlem Renaissance, such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes.
“On the 150th anniversary of her birth, we are delighted to have played a lead role in the lasting protection of Madam C.J. Walker’s tangible legacy,” said Brent Leggs, director of the National Trust’s African-American Cultural Heritage Action Fund. “The legal protection of irreplaceable historic sites like Villa Lewaro, one of the most significant places in women’s history, is essential in telling the full American story and inspiring future generations.”
Since designating the site as a National Treasure in 2014, the National Trust has worked with Villa Lewaro’s current owners and exceptional stewards, Ambassador and Mrs. Harold E. Doley, Jr., to recognize its architectural and historical significance and secure long-term protections before the property changes hands. The easement marks a successful culmination of those efforts.
Villa Lewaro stands as a living monument to Madam Walker’s entrepreneurial spirit and remains central to understanding her unprecedented achievement during an era when neither women nor African Americans were considered full citizens. Soon to be portrayed by award-winning actress Octavia Spencer in a series produced by LeBron James, Madam Walker’s story of persistence continues to inspire a growing number of African-American women taking leadership roles in business, politics, philanthropy, and other industries.
To learn more about the National Trust’s commitment to expand America’s view of history and bring attention to centuries of African-American activism and achievement, please visit: www.savingplaces.org/african-american-cultural-heritage
article via jbhe.com
In December, a JBHE post noted that Duke University was contemplating how to best honor the memory of Julian Abele. A Philadelphia-based architect, Abele designed many of the Gothic buildings on the campus of Duke University.
But because of his race, the university did not originally celebrate the architect of many of its most important structures. Abele died in 1950 having never visited the Duke campus where he had played such an important role. Abele’s role in designing the Duke campus did not become widely known until 1988. That year the university hung a portrait of Adele in the main administration building and another portrait was placed in the Rubenstein Library.
But now the university has announced that the main quadrangle with the university’s initial academic and residential buildings will be named Abele Quad. A plaque will be placed at the center of the Quad. In addition, a plaque honoring Abele will be placed in Duke Chapel. The university also announced that it will purchase the rights to the mural “Shadow and Light (for Julian Francis Abele).” The mural will become part of the permanent collection at Duke’s Nasher Museum of Art.
A video exploring Abele’s contributions to Duke University can be seen below:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVaocXBb9p8&w=560&h=315]
I am also looking at an image of a business school in Moscow, an unabashed work of oligarchic bling, that pre-empts its future rediscovery as a piece of ironic-lovable kitsch. There is a cool, white, slatted structure in an idyllic Mediterranean landscape, apartment blocks in Doha, and a composition of 10 inverted cones, to be arranged in a giant circle in Kampala. These are works of a realigned world, where the distribution of money and power ignores former distinctions of third and first worlds. They collectively offer the same reorientation as those world maps that dispense with the Eurocentric bias of Mercator’s projection.
David Adjaye’s Buildings in Pictures
The location is a black-floored, black-walled office on the edge of Marylebone, London, with shelves of black files with small white lettering. Galvanised steel shelves denote work, but a black, oblong pool of water, bright green curtains, and an impressive bunch of lilies suggest more an exclusive club or hotel. Possibly the lair of a Bond villain, only more benign. Architectural models are displayed like artworks, although inopportune beige printers puncture the stylishness. The entrance to the office, as often in David Adjaye’s projects, is barely perceptible.
Adjaye is late, as he often is, but is then generous with his time, as he also often is. He says something nice about my personal life, as I make to sit down in the Eames chair by his desk. “Er, that’s mine,” he then says, directing me to a plywood seat opposite, which turns out to be a touch excruciating, in front of shelves bearing a discriminating selection of architectural books, and opposite a wall of inspirational images – great buildings, beautiful bodies, maps of Africa, the former model Ashley Shaw-Scott, whom he recently married. “Do you mind if I eat?” he asks, as he uncovers a late lunch from a local curry house, “I have to eat.” He is on the move, as usual. Where has he come from? “Just New York.” Diplomacy and charm are at work here and a tiny assertion of status, which have helped get him where is, but the warmth is also genuine.
New York is where he has another office, a more informal, light-filled place above an old bank on Canal Street. He has a third in Accra. This tri-continental practice is not bad for an architect in his 40s who seven years ago, when the credit crunch hit, nearly went bust, but the nature of the commissions is more impressive. He has a knack for projects freighted with significance, the foremost of which is the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture on the highly charged turf of the National Mall in Washington DC, just across from the Washington Memorial. (To be more precise, Adjaye is one of a team of four architectural practices working on the museum, with his role described as “lead designer”.) It is due to open next year, a century after the idea of such a museum was first mooted by some black veterans of the civil war.
He also has a knack for associating with conspicuous and interesting people. In the early years of his practice these tended to be creative types – the artists Jake Chapman, Tom Noble and Sue Webster, Ewan McGregor, Alexander McQueen. Now it is more people like Kofi Annan, the former secretary-general of the United Nations, for whom Adjaye has designed a house in Ghana. Or the new mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, who recently toured Adjaye’s housing development in Sugar Hill, Harlem, or Barack Obama.
He doesn’t want the latter connection to be exaggerated – “I am not on his speed dial” – and he scotches rumours that he is to design Obama’s presidential library: the choice of architect hasn’t been considered yet. But the Smithsonian museum will be the most significant architectural project of Obama’s presidency, and Adjaye has had more contact with the White House than most architects.
Adjaye’s friends praise the range of his influences and interests. “I was incredibly, incredibly inspired by the breadth of his vision,” says Thelma Golden, director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, of the time she first heard him speak. “There’s Bauhaus in it,” says the artist Lorna Simpson, for whom Adjaye designed a studio building in Brooklyn, “but also the places where he grew up as a child – ornament, pattern, the way light comes in, different things from different places.”
Adjaye was born in Tanzania to Ghanaian parents, his father a diplomat, so these formative places included parts of Africa, Saudi Arabia, and eventually London. It was in London that he studied architecture, launched his practice, and designed his first projects.