Jerome Haferd - Works 2023

Jerome Haferd

Jerome W Haferd is a licensed architect, public artist, and educator based in Harlem, NYC. He is principal of JEROME HAFERD studio and co-founder of the award winning BRANDT : HAFERD Architecture. Haferd is assistant professor of architecture at City College’s Spitzer School of Architecture and affiliated with Columbia and Yale University.

Haferd’s practice critically engages built environment projects in both urban and rural contexts, often looking to marginalized histories to unlock a new imaginary for architecture, design, and cultural infrastructure. His work on complex sites includes collaborations with the Harlem African Burial Ground, Roots to Sky Collective, The Park Avenue Armory, and the National Black Theatre. He is lead architect and installation designer for the 2023-24 Culture, Creativity, and Care Initiative with the Mellon Foundation and Harlem Grown. The studio is one of the first prize recipients for the International Africatown Design Competition in Mobile, AL.

Haferd is a core initiator of Dark Matter U, a BIPOC led trans-disciplinary network geared towards new models of design pedagogy and practice. He received the 2022 #BlackVisionaries award as part of a DMU cohort. His team’s recent projects include the Sankofa installation in Harlem, their winning Africatown Competition Proposal “In the Wake”, the BLK BOX experimental arts venue and Beautiful Browns, awarded second prize in the 2021 OnOlive emerging Black architect housing competition. Haferd co-led the DMU “Constellation’’ exhibit at the 2022 Lisbon Architecture Trienale : Terra.

Education

• 2010: Yale University, Masters of Architecture

• 2007: The Ohio State University, B.S. Architecture

• Academic (current)

• Assistant Professor (Tenure Track), CCNY SSA

• Affiliated Faculty, Columbia University GSAPP

• Affiliated Lecturer, Yale University*

• *trans-institutional course w/ CCNY and Yale University

• Dark Matter U (DMU), Initiator and Core Organizer

Selected Awards and Honors

• 2023 1st Prize, Africatown International Design Competition

• 2023 Mellon Humanities In Place Grant (CCNY)

• 2022 #BlackVisionaries Award, with Dark Matter U.

• 2022 United States Artist, nominee (w/ K Brandt Knapp)

• 2022 Emerging Voices Finalist, Architectural League of NY

• 2021 Shortlisted Proposal w/ WXY, Bronx Museum Expansion

• 2021 2nd Prize : Emerging Black House, OnOlive Competition

• 2020 Studio Prize : Pine Street Burial Ground Studio

• 2020 AIANY Design Awards Jury Selection Committee

• 2020 AIA New Practices New York Winner

• 2019 Grand Prize, ZeroThreshold Design Competition

• 2017 MoMA PS1 YAP Nominee

• 2016-2017 Taubman Visiting Fellowship Finalist, U of Michigan

• 2015 NYSCA Grant (NYParks & Harlem Arts Festival)

• 2015 MCAH Grant (NYParks & Harlem Arts Festival)

• 2012 Graham Foundation Grant

• 2012 First Prize, Folly, Architectural League of NY

Recent Lectures & Publications (2020-21)

• “Fugitive Practice”, article w/ Curry Hackett, JAE 2023

• “Blackprints and Undercurrents”, Park Avenue Armory, 2022

• “Dark Methods”, Cleveland CUDC, lecture 2021

• “An Archeology of Architecture : The Harlem and Pine Street Burial Grounds”, Columbia GSAPP Preservation Lecture, 2021

• “A Geography of Practice”, lecture, Univ. of Minnesota

• “UnDesigning Practice”, lecture, Virginia Tech, 2020

• “Loose Talk : Side by Side”, lecture, Ohio State, 2020

• “Junky Systems” with Mitch McEwen, lecture, SciArc, 2020

• “Maintaining Practice”, film, Storefront for Art & Architecture

• “P.O.P.S.”, contribution to MRPJ Journal, 2020

• “An Archaeology of Architecture”, article, Log 48, 2020

•

selected

works

in the wake - Africatown

2023 First Prize, Africatown International Design Competition, Site 2

public space and harlem

sankofa

Harlem, NY, with Harlem Grown, NYParks, MGPA, and, MMPCIA

drum arbor (Walter Hood event)

Harlem, NY, with The Architectural League of NY (2021)*

caesura

architecture and archival sound installation, Harlem, NY (2015-16)*

puzzle figures/notes on the acropolis

Harlem / Storefront for Art & Architecture (2017)

follies

Astoria, NY (2012), Long Island City, NY (2012, 2013)

research and engagement

an archaeology of architecture / harlem african burial ground

Harlem, NY, academic, advocacy, writing (2020)

pine street african burial ground kingston, New York (2020 - ongoing)

restorying the potomac

Oakland, MD and Potomac River Watershed (2021-ongoing)

dark matter university academia / pedagogy / outreach (2020-ongoing)

trienal de lisboa (dmu)

exhibition, lisbon, portugal, w/ dark matter university (2022)

architecture the bookmatch / misc. works New York, NY (2015, 2019, 2021)*

side by side

Cleveland, Ohio (2019-ongoing)*

beautiful browns

St. Louis, MO (2021)

migrate, Harlem Renaissance Pavilion

Harlem, NY, with artist Thomas Heath (2020)*

*BRANDT HAFERD studio (co-director)

“In The Wake”

Africatown International Design Competition 1st Prize

Site 2 : Former Josephine Allen Houses Site Africatown (Mobile), AL

design team : Jerome Haferd (principal / lead), Sidnie Ancion, Suraya Babb, Shadeen Dixon, Violet Greenberg, Tiffany Gonzalez, Gabriel Moyer Perez

“ In The Wake”, embraces the multi-layered “in-between” of water and land urbanistically, architecturally, materially, and conceptually. The proposal seeks to tap into the inter-woven histories of both Native and African stewardship of the site, and celebrates both solid (earth) and flowing (woven) design elements that encourage the remediation and co-existence with the natural floodplain ecology. The design concept and elements invoke the “doubleness” of Cudjo Lewis and the Africatown descendents’ identity (“Trees of Two Woods”) in both ancestral and futuristic ways through a “doubling” of ground and building envelope surfaces : the literal layers that define a new relationship to earth and water. The project proposes this “imaginary” for our relationship to the ground, sky, and social plane of Africatown : one that is layered, billowing, and porous.

The Jerome Haferd team, composed almost entirely of designers with African diaspora backgrounds, proposed a new urban design site plan overtop the now razed Josephine Allen site, that interweaves an intentional floodplain with four venues of Site 2 : a new Africatown Museum and adjacent Clotilda Boathouse Archive for the display of a replica of the Clotilda slave ship, as well as design concepts for over 300 units of “maritime housing” to coexist with the aquatic landscape, and finally a ceremonial Gateway of Baptism, which creates a public plaza connecting land and water. “In The Wake” is meant to be a provocation to work with the community to develop this language into a robust urban, iconic, and everyday architecture that is their own.

sankofa Culture, Creativity & Care Marcus Garvey Park, Harlem

public installations and multi-year plan (2023) lead artist, infrastructure / community design support

“Sankofa” is the first of multiple interactive installations to serve as centerpiece “nodes” of the Mellon funded Culture, Creativity, and Care initiative over summers of 2023 and 2024. Designed by Jerome Haferd of BRANDT : HAFERD, a local Black-led public art and architecture practice, “Sankofa” is the first of these outdoor hubs to be unveiled. “Sankofa” derives from the Akan African folklore, symbolizing remembrance of things forgotten, and “in order to know our future we must look to our past”. The installation is simultaneously futuristic and ancestral.

The design concept, inspired by working in community with members of the Marcus Garvey Park, draws upon intersectional cultures including African, Afro-caribbean and indigenous craft traditions as well as the everyday histories and contemporary life of the Park. The 32 foot circular structure incorporates a gathering space below a striking fabric mesh canopy that features a complex printed design depicting archival images and digitally composed layers evoking a “mythology” of Marcus Garvey Park, as well as other Harlem-inspired motifs. The central space is surrounded by a rotating art gallery.

The piece is conceived of as a community engagement device itself - a process which will unfold, evolve, and showcase the work and co-production of as many local artists as possible. Visitors pass underneath to reveal a ring of mounted artwork, a rotating exhibit that will feature the work of numerous local artists over the course of the summer. Despite its bespoke appearance, the installation is based on a modular system and uses sturdy, reusable materials that can be reconfigured for a number of future uses or sites.

bench and table detail

mounted aluminum art panel detail

advisory committee / stakeholder design session

drum arbor

2021 Architectural League of New York President’s Medal Ceremony : Walter Hood

Marcus Garvey Park, Harlem, 2021, BRANDT HAFERD

The design for this gathering is both an ode to Walter Hood’s work and an ode to Marcus Garvey Park and Black landscapes he invites us to “see” and understand: the idea of the quilt and the bush arbor; of new ground and the extrusion of space from plan into three dimensions; of the interdependence of landscape, bodies, food, and water. Conjuring an archaeology of spaces that harbor a diaspora of Blackness and celebrating that living history in real time is the defining quality we can see running throughout Walter’s work and legacy.

Thus, to celebrate this event, we conceive the space as an “interdependent quilt,” a space of gathering, generosity, and music. The production of space becomes a living excavation of the histories and everyday acts that preserve and maintain Black landscape and the many communities that intersect and are nourished by it. The design aims to channel themes of Hood’s designs: the plans and works, history and ritual, and community building.

Inspired by Black landscape histories of Gee’s Bend and others, the quilt serves as practice, performance, and space of gathering. The creative process for the fabric canopy involves improvisational resourcefulness, the re-use of salvaged material, and celebration of the odds, ends, droops, and folds. Every quilt has a narrative. Once unfolded, an image of historic importance to Marcus Garvey Park emerges, a sea of Black bodies gathered for the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, a moment surprisingly forgotten that is brought back to life and memorialized on the patchwork canvas.

—Jerome Haferd, BRANDT : HAFERD

As a young architect, Walter Hood confronted us and the wider field with a landscape design imaginary that celebrates Blackness as a matter of course, giving our discipline language where there was little before. He models for us an expanded practice that is a heavily cultural, art, and making one. His trajectory underscores that the practice of architecture is itself a deeply cultural act. Reflecting on Walter’s work brings to mind his call to consider “what makes a Black landscape?” His answer: an interwoven history of craft; of assembly; of practice, liberation and ritual. The invitation is for us to see–and others to “be seen”–in ways that give new meaning to the familiar. There is a liveness of gathering, improvisation, generosity, and receivership inherent to these histories (and presents) that we can learn from in how we imagine other spaces.

Harlem Cultural Festival, 1959

bush arbor, 1884

Harlem Cultural Festival, 1969

Gee’s Bend quilt, 1959

concept sketch, 2021

concept model, 2021

caesura : a forum

Marcus Garvey Park, Harlem (2015-16)

Jerome W Haferd and K Brandt Knapp in collaboration

cae•su•ra: a forum is inspired by Marcus Garvey Park’s iconic antebellum Fire Watchtower & Bell, and by Harlem’s vibrant tradition of activism and rallies. The tower was temporarily dismantled in 2015 for restoration and re-installation in 2018 Simultaneously, Harlem is undergoing dynamic change and New York City is experiencing a resurgence of public culture.

caesura seeks to temporarily fill an architectural gap – and create a social space – by echoing and inverting the form and function of the absent tower. Like the bell, caesura aims to call up the neighborhood, to preserve and revitalize Harlem’s lesser known histories, and to connect newer and older community members to each other, by reactivating this site for congregation, viewing, and listening. The installation will reframe history with a temporary structure and sound. A “caesura” is a break or pause, a place to catch your breath, most specifically in ancient spoken-word art.

The architectural component of this piece begins at the Acropolis ground as an open-air, steel frame that supports a “horizontal tower”, which the viewer can pass through and meander under. In the center of the piece, a flattened “bell” made of reflective steel reflects the sky to the south, where the tower stood, and the expansive view of the of the city to the north.

with media artist Jessica Feldman

Sonic composition, by Jessica Feldman, includes historic speeches and contemporary sounds of bells and Black Lives Matter chants, and drumming (2015)

Marcus Garvey, “Hon. Marcus Garvey on His Return to the U.S.A.,”

July 1921, United Negro Improvement Association, Liberty Hall, Harlem

Marcus Garvey, ”Explanation of the Objects of the Universal Negro Improvement Association,” July 1921, United Negro Improvement Association Liberty Hall, Harlem

field recording of #BlackLivesMatter protests, Winter 2014-2015, Harlem

Robert Mugabe, “On Land Reform,” September 2000, Mount Olive Baptist Church, Malcolm X Boulevard

Malcolm X, “The Black Revolution,” June 1963, Abyssinian Baptist Church, West 138th Street

Assata Shakur, “An Open Audio to The Pope and The World,” January 1998, from exile in Cuba

field recording of Marcus Garvey Park Drum Circle, June 2015, Marcus Garvey Park

Jerome Haferd

Notes on the Acropolis

Jerome Haferd

Notes on the Acropolis

different times. What is remarkable about the Acropolis is not that all of these users inhabit this vertical section but that they do so at the same time and with undetermined, ever-evolving relationships to one another.

READINGS

Harlem’s Marcus Garvey Park Acropolis also known as Mount Morris is an exceptional instance of an alternative space for social dynamics in the city. The Acropolis rises out of the quotidian gridwork of East Harlem, paradoxically positioning itself as both community center and marginal space. The natural schist rock formation is traversed by a classical promenade of stairs and landings as well as the improvised paths of its users. The idealized plan of terraces is bent repeatedly in order to adjust to the natural topography, resulting in a hybrid between the formal and the topographic. At the summit, the mountain culminates in a flattened elliptical plinth, which is capped by a historic Watchtower.1 The visual and circulatory connections between the different layers of the Acropolis reveal an urbanism counter to that of the surrounding planimetric city in which the park’s heterogeneous user groups interact and negotiate spatially through section.

Harlem’s Marcus Garvey Park Acropolis also known as Mount Morris is an exceptional instance of an alternative space for social dynamics in the city. The Acropolis rises out of the quotidian gridwork of East Harlem, paradoxically positioning itself as both community center and marginal space. The natural schist rock formation is traversed by classical promenade of stairs and landings as well as the improvised paths of its users. The idealized plan of terraces is bent repeatedly in order to adjust to the natural topography, resulting in a hybrid between the formal and the topographic. At the summit, the mountain culminates in a flattened elliptical plinth, which is capped by historic Watchtower. The visual and circulatory connections between the different layers of the Acropolis reveal an urbanism counter to that of the surrounding planimetric city in which the park’s heterogeneous user groups interact and negotiate spatially through section.

The current ecology of participants includes the two extremes of casual outsiders and frequenting residents, whereby the threedimensional “architecture” of the Acropolis is appropriated in careful calibration of visual and spatial boundaries. The former comprises both local and global tourists, and the latter includes drug traffic lookouts, men cruising for sex, and Drummer’s Circle made up mostly of African and Latino residents from the surrounding community. Each group can be roughly characterized by different visual and physical occupations of the site. Flâneurs and visitors move through the system periodically and randomly, spatially pushing and pulling on the more established user groups. Lookouts are stationary and constant, using precise visual alleys of desired height and length that determine their favorite spots. Cruisers use self-designated areas as well as ad-hoc semi-protected areas at

The current ecology of participants includes the two extremes of casual outsiders and frequenting residents, whereby the threedimensional “architecture” of the Acropolis is appropriated in a careful calibration of visual and spatial boundaries. The former comprises both local and global tourists, and the latter includes drug traffic lookouts, men cruising for sex, and a Drummer’s Circle made up mostly of African and Latino residents from the surrounding community. Each group can be roughly characterized by different visual and physical occupations of the site. Flâneurs and visitors move through the system periodically and randomly, spatially pushing and pulling on the more established user groups. Lookouts are stationary and constant, using precise visual alleys of desired height and length that determine their favorite spots. Cruisers use self-designated areas as well as ad-hoc semi-protected areas at

different times. What is remarkable about the Acropolis is not that all of these users inhabit this vertical section but that they do so at the same time and with undetermined, ever-evolving relationships to one another.

This informal in-the-round urbanism is reminiscent of earlier twentieth-century, avantgarde imaginings such as Hans Hollein’s Überbauung ‘sculpture cities’ abstract collages of floating urban megastructures that resemble geological features in scale and formal character. Conceived as architectural “manifestos” against Modernism, these conceptual formations could support activities and behavior outside the range of those found in the ‘functionalist’ city. New York City parks derived from extreme topographical difference act as figures of resistance, by their very nature and function, to the Manhattan grid. The anomalous topography and diversity of park spaces lend themselves to spatial appropriation of a different kind.

This informal in-the-round urbanism is reminiscent of earlier twentieth-century, avantgarde imaginings such as Hans Hollein’s Überbauung ‘sculpture cities’ abstract collages of floating urban megastructures that resemble geological features in scale and formal character. Conceived as architectural “manifestos” against Modernism, these conceptual formations could support activities and behavior outside the range of those found in the ‘functionalist’ city. New York City parks derived from extreme topographical difference act as figures of resistance, by their very nature and function, to the Manhattan grid. The anomalous topography and diversity of park spaces lend themselves to spatial appropriation of different kind. A critique of grid-based urbanism, which has long been dominant in America, is that it absorbs difference and passively normalizes heterogeneity. In the topographic space of an environment like Marcus Garvey Park (that which is organized by differentiation in slope) rather than striated space (that which is organized by a metric overlay) one notices that political space is re-instantiated, where individuals and groups are introduced into mutual awareness and negotiation. Becoming more sophisticated in spatial vocabularies like those found on the Acropolis could allow for the concerns of the marginalized to be more intentionally synthesized into the mainstream when designing public space.

A critique of grid-based urbanism, which has long been dominant in America, is that it absorbs difference and passively normalizes heterogeneity. In the topographic space of an environment like Marcus Garvey Park (that which is organized by differentiation in slope) rather than striated space (that which is organized by a metric overlay) one notices that a political space is re-instantiated, where individuals and groups are introduced into mutual awareness and negotiation. Becoming more sophisticated in spatial vocabularies like those found on the Acropolis could allow for the concerns of the marginalized to be more intentionally synthesized into the mainstream when designing public space.

See: Hans Hollein, "Überbauung

1963) and "Überbauung Salzburg" (collage, 1962), http://www. hollein.com/.

Marcus Garvey Park, Harlem, Manhattan, New York, 1937.

Photo courtesy the New York City Parks

Photo Archive.

1. The Harlem Fire Watchtower, built 1857, removed in 2015 and currently under restoration by the NYC Parks Department. In 2015, a team including the author installed a temporary pavilion titled caesura on the acropolis in response to the Tower’s absence.

2. See: Hans Hollein, "Überbauung Manhattan" (collage, 1963) and "Überbauung Salzburg" (collage, 1962), http://www. hollein.com/.

Marcus Garvey Park, Harlem, Manhattan, New York, 1937. Photo courtesy the New York City Parks Photo Archive.

puzzle figures

Souvenir Model and Drawings for New New York Icons, Group Exhibition, Storefront for Art & Architecture (2017)

Harlem’s Mt. Morris ‘Acropolis’ is not a singular monolith, but a heterogeneous one. Situated in Marcus Garvey Park, the iconic hard/soft rock, stone paths, and foliage produce a three-dimensional form that is acted upon by different users and environmental forces. Some describe the mountain as a ruin, but it is better understood as contested ground. The ruin is not picturesque but rather a political state(ment) of neglect and urban erosion.

Like the Acropolis of Athens, Mt. Morris is a meld of the human-altered and the pre-historic - the architectural and the geological. The cartesian Manhattan grid is left behind and becomes instead a three-dimensional compositional logic converging on a single point - the Harlem Fire Watchtower. The Watchtower is a symbol for the community; and is currently in a state of temporary absence as many await its rehabilitation and return.

In souvenir form, Marcus Garvey Park’s mountain is represented as a constructed nature of three-dimensional tiles, held by the tower “pin” at the center. The iconic Fire Watchtower and Acropolis act as a “key”, locking the abstracted puzzle of topography into place. Puzzle Figures themselves are produced by a three-dimensional interlocking spatial logic which starts at the tower. The finished product embodies the ever-changing quality of this hybrid and urban topography / strata while celebrating the architectural potential which lies within.

folly/follies

Curtain (2012), Parting (2013)

The folly pavilion series start from a play or ‘troubling’ of the 25 square grid. The invention of the spatial system lies in the coupling of a ‘soft’ material to a rigid but playful underlying structure that transforms via opening ‘beads’. There are only three primary components which make up the architecture; the frame made of wood; steel joints that connect; and the curtain of plastic chain that is then draped. The wooden structure follows a game of rise and fall and the beads provide enclosure. This armature forms a series of frames.

Fantasy lies in the effect(s) created by the plastic chain-link, as it dances across this ghost-like shape in three dimensions. Neither truly hard or truly soft, the repetition of these floor-to-ceiling strands creates a means by which the same system is experienced in several different ways. The overall 25 square is a play between ‘curtain walls’ and fixed boundaries. Some are loose at the ground, while the remaining courses of chain-link are fixed and relatively static. The operable partitions can be played with, pulled back, and passed through. This gives the otherwise rigid system it’s crucial transformative quality and responsive to its siting.

The first version of this fanciful structure, titled Curtain, was proposed and erected in partnership with Socrates Sculpture Park and the Architectural League of New York. The “rules” of the game for this project were designed to explore architecture and form making. These rules are denied, played with, and transformed by the interaction of the folly with its site and users.

The follies are conceived of as part of an iterative series or code, with the ability to transform based on different local conditions.

The second in the series, Parting, changed form to incorporate a path to meander through, and respond to the surrounding context.

dark matter university

academia / community engagement (2020 - ongoing) BIPOC-led trans-disciplinary design “school”

Dark Matter University (DMU) was formed out of the larger organizing efforts of the Design as Protest Collective to build out an antiracist design justice school and alongside reinvigorated Black Lives Matter movement.

Leveraging existing inter-institutional connections and forming new ones, this group of Initiators saw in the confluence of the remote instructional paradigm of COVID and Black Lives Matter an opportunity to mount a radical, transdisciplinary anti-racist critique that could operate both “one foot in and one foot outside” of existing schools of Architecture and Design while centering equity, justice, and care in their work.

My contributions focused on the creation of the group but has included working with institutions to pilot a transinstitutional model of remote/hybrid pedagogy, including a course “Fugitive Practices” that will be taught in the Spring of 2021 between Yale and Howard University with co-faculty Curry Hackett (Howard). Students from both schools will learn and collectively share knoweledge in the same “space”.

The DMU Initiators included Venesa AliceaChuqui, Germane Barnes, Stephen Gray, Jerome Haferd, Mira Henry, Bryan C. Lee Jr., Justin Garrett Moore, Jennifer Newsom, Quilian Riano, and Tya Winn, and brought together multiple different constituencies.

Jerome Haferd

An Archaeology Of Architecture: The Harlem African Burial

Ground

1. Specifically, enslaved African women in the Caribbean, primarily Barbados. See Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

2. One strategy is “critical fabulation,” a writing methodology introduced by historian Saidiya Hartman that combines historical and archival research with critical theory and fictional narrative.

3. Quotation from Fuentes’s presentation at the 2019 conference “1619 and Its Legacies” at Columbia University.

When historian Marisa J. Fuentes set out to find and document individual voices from the lives of enslaved Africans in the Americas,1 she found the archive so lacking that it was impossible to write a standard historical text. Almost always, enslaved individuals entered the historical record through instances of violence, through the hand and gaze of the oppressor. Facing thin and fragmented, even nonexistent records, Fuentes initiated a creative form of scholarship in order to generate a living subjectivity out of the very impossibility of her “site.”2 In her book Dispossessed Lives Fuentes chronicles these individuals and the process of restoring their subjectivity. In the chapter “On Jane and Method,” for example, she uses a runaway slave advertisement to meticulously construct a vignette of Jane, one of the names she gives to unnamed enslaved individuals, thus subverting the archive of that space and time. Only by examining how the machinations of power have operated is Fuentes able to portray the subjects themselves. As she puts it, “The problem of the archive transcends time and plays out two hundred and fifty years later when one still cannot even write about these figures . . . these figures who were not meant for history” – at least not in its current practice.

Neither are these figures easily represented in architecture in its current practice. The archival abyss that surrounds their histories, dispossessions, and subjectivities poses both a practical problem (of memorialization or representation) and a pedagogical problem that centers around violence and, more so, repair. Can we architects do what Fuentes does in our own discipline? How might we mirror her act of scholarly resistance and mount an architectural resistance to our own disciplinary forms of violence? First, we have to identify how architectural violence parallels archival violence and how this violence works. Second, we need creative forms of

James Barron, “Rezoning

pedagogy and practice that not only allow for the marginalized imaginary to speak but also to reframe our discipline such that the conditions for violence and erasure are destabilized. At the same time, we have an opportunity to build up knowledge and new ways of interpreting architecture that allow for these forms of practice to be understood and valued. This challenge is brought to bear at site of particular significance, recently unearthed African burial ground in Harlem. The New York City Economic Development Corporation wants to develop the immediate surroundings of the burial ground into mixed-use housing complex with cultural center and “living memorial” at its heart. The plan to construct an “everyday” urbanism around this highly symbolic site is a starting point for interrogating development where building anything at all is questionable. Can memorial be ephemeral? Can be a set of ethics or programs that pervade the entire site? What tactics can be developed to create an architecture that supports new archival practices?

The implications of this query extend beyond single site, building typology, or set of individual narratives. These questions have been bolstered by the extensive work of historians and community members, as well as by design students with whom I’ve worked on this and related sites. We looked deeply into several areas of the architectural discipline, particularly time, ground, and archive, pushing ourselves to reconceptualize these concepts in new and unconventional ways and testing how each is involved in generating new imaginary out of the historical and architectural layers of site.

The Burial Ground

Where the busy 125th Street commercial corridor meets the western terminus of the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge, there is terrain vague of vacant lots, city vehicles, and police presence – an infrastructural hodgepodge that includes a nondescript Metropolitan Transportation Authority bus depot that spans an entire city block immediately to the north. At 126th Street and First Avenue, beneath portion of the decommissioned depot’s concrete foundation, lies a 17th-century African burial ground that, until its excavation in 2015, few were aware of, even in the communities of Harlem. Miraculously, some scant record of the site’s significance survives in the present: fragments of oral histories, church records, and the faded 1820 John Randel Map that, when examined closely, denotes the “Negro Burying Ground.” One can just make out the irregular, residual shape outlining the

146 Log 48

ad hoc cemetery. The figuration of the boundary is residual and crude, formed by what was then the Harlem River embankment. Today, the river’s edge is an infilled, impervious bulwark nearly 100 feet east of the site, obscured by the infrastructural snarl of the FDR Drive overpasses.

The second church of the Low Dutch Reformed Church, 1686.

16. The series of plans and corresponding maps put place grid of rectangular blocks in Manhattan between Houston and 155th Street.

17. The more agrarian “commons” that characterized the village Nieuw Haarlem, for example.

18. her recent show “1919: Black Water,”

Dyson produced work with Chicago’s history of water and blackness, as well the “current conditions of increasing water levels, land being exhausted, migration, warming.” Torkwase Dyson, “Black Compositional Thought,” interview by Mabel O. Wilson, in 1919: Black Water ed. Irene Sunwoo (New York: Columbia GSAPP, 2019), 16. Exhibition catalogue.

The Ground, the Archive, and Time

When reflecting on the evolution of the Harlem site, the importance of the ground itself cannot be overstated. While the burial ground contains the literal repository of remains and artifacts registry now many times disturbed and eroded – the terrain also indexes layers and layers of political power and environmental violence. The establishment and redrawing of lot lines and changes in land ownership led to historical erasure and the loss of agency for the residents, including those whose ancestors were buried in the cemetery. In 1811, during massive rescripting of the topos of the city to realize the Commissioner’s Plan,16 the capital-driven, grid urbanism often proved antagonistic to other forms of community like the commons of Nieuw Haarlem that once flourished here.17

The burial ground remains blighted and polluted area made toxic by fuel spills, and today its future is further threatened by a rising flood zone. Homeless people shelter under the nearby overpasses in makeshift structures. Attempting to chart and navigate the historical interface between blackness, environmental degradation, the disrupted shoreline, and the transhistorical presence of water conjures the work of artists and thinkers such as Torkwase Dyson, whose interdisciplinary art practice attempts to understand and conceptualize black liberation through mediums such as architecture, water, time, and precarity.18 The first phase of efforts by the Manhattan Waterfront Greenway project to rehabilitate this area with planting and walkways along the Harlem River is underway. Future massive efforts to create resilient shoreline and restore access to the water are still in the schematic phase. Understanding and embracing the ground as constructed, as a

Originally the riverfront site was a trading ground for the Lenape, the indigenous inhabitants of what is now Manhattan.9 European settlers’ accounts of the plot of land designated as a segregated cemetery begin during the time of the Low Dutch Church of Harlem, in what was then the village of Nieuw Haarlem, when the area was mostly farmland. Sites typically set aside for such a purpose were usually leftover spaces: land near the water’s edge; land vulnerable to flooding and disruption.10 From the mid-1600s onward, the Church permitted both free and enslaved blacks to use the church-owned lot for burial and funerary rites, while a separate cemetery was established nearby for European families. In the 1830s, the church began to lease the burial ground to nearby parishioners’ estates for use as grazing pastures, thus beginning a long process of neglect and erasure – an amnesia that would prove productive for future development.

A wave of interventions contributing to the site’s nearly complete physical and historical expungement followed the Low Dutch Church’s eventual sale of the site in 1853, which

11. The number assigned to the present-day New York block set in place by the Commissioner’s Grid Plan 1811.

12. The Harlem River Park complex, which occupied the site from the 1885 to 1917, included freestanding carousel.

13. Information excerpted from HABG Task Force website via New York Public Library records. The casino complex was converted in 1917 to serve World War army barracks for black regiment known as the Harlem Hellfighters.

14. Information excerpted from HABG Task Force website via New York Public Library records. The Third Avenue Trolley Company built the structure, which was purchased in 1962 by what now the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

15. “The transformation of land into property, which could then be seized, is inseparable from the transformation of people into property, who could then banned from considerations of humanity.” Lou Cornum, “Burial Ground Acknowledgements,” New Inquiry October 14, 2019, https://thenewinquiry. com/burial-ground-acknowledgements/.

allowed the redivision of the area including the burial ground into private parcels that would become City Block 1803,11 without recognition of the cemetery. Following this repurposing of the ground, new buildings were designed and foundations were laid. An entertainment complex grew on the block, first with a carousel and then a casino.12 During World War I, the buildings were converted into barracks,13 and after the war, the Hearst family purchased the complex for conversion into movie studio in 1918. Eventually, the studio was torn down, and in the 1940s a trolley (now bus) depot, which still stands today, was constructed.14 The initial mistreatment and erasure of the burial ground was compounded by each subsequent architectural disruption, leading to state of historical and environmental neglect that still characterizes the area today. The related histories of indigenous and black inhabitants of Harlem, and the details of their respective mistreatment and dispossession,15 are key to understanding how we might enact project of repair, the effects of which could resonate beyond the limits of this particular site.

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Jerome Haferd is Harlem–based architect, educator, and cofounder of BRANDT HAFERD studio. He teaches at Columbia University GSAPP, Barnard College, and City College.

such practices to be staged. And what this architecture made of? By choosing materials that are more impacted by time (that erode, degrade, change color), even the care and maintenance of the architecture itself could be foregrounded.

In addition to spatial design of an urbanism, the ability to coproduce an integrated form of architecture and stewardship model with the inhabitants of this neighborhood is critical to the performance of living archive. The more opportunities there are for residents to be engaged in the shaping of the site’s archival dimension the better. The entire site could become means by which the community might work in conjunction with the architecture to “make objects on which [they] can be free.”26

Beyond Our Limits In the growing movement to acknowledge and spatialize America’s Indigenous and black histories and local, lived experience in general – the rediscovery and forthcoming development of the Harlem Burial Ground site is significant, sobering opportunity for architecture to engage in the process of placemaking and justice to reflect desires and subjectivities obscured by mainstream modes of architectural practice and urbanism. The work starts with our own daily practices; unpacking this site through text alone has its limits. By taking cues from the work of Fuentes and others, the latent by-product of such task is to produce new language of liberation, opening up new ways of interpreting the capacity of our discipline to produce new urban imaginaries everywhere. Hopefully, the site will join projects such as the Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn and the African Burial Ground National Monument in Lower Manhattan, which have helped to build restorative processes and change the discipline of archaeology and others in their creation.27 Still others, such as Seneca Village in what is now Central Park, are known but remain physically buried and largely erased. Many more remain unknown and unidentified. The fact that the Harlem Burial Ground has been unacknowledged for centuries produces radical potential for design, propelling us to reexamine the ways that cities are made and the role that capitalism, urbanism, and racism have played in that making. These histories, and those of form and typology, problematize our prevailing models of architectural pedagogy and practice, but if we mine the historical layers of site as series of different practices and ethics that organize communities, then more nuanced approach to history is available to designers, architects, and, indeed, everyone.

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9. Application to the National and State Register of Historic Places: The Harlem African Burial Ground, submitted by the HABG Task Force, September 2013, 267. 10. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives 28–29.

John Randel, Farm Map Composite, 1820. Pen and ink with watercolor on paper. All images courtesy the author.

winner: 2020 studio prize

pine street african burial ground

Kingston, New York (2019 - ongoing) academic design studio w/ CCNY film documentary (guests collab with Sarah Carlson) youth education enclosure (ongoing project)

The collaboration with Harambee of Kingston, the Kingston Land Trust, and other local organizations is a multi-faceted project growing out of research in both the Huson Valley and at other Black and indigenous Burial Ground Sites connected to the Dutch Reform Church (Harlem African Burial Ground), and how these erased histories both challenge and provoke new forms of land ownership, design, and pedagogy.

The advanced design studio, conducted in Spring 2020 titled “Towards an Archaeology of the Future” was done in parallel and in conjunction with the Kingston YMCA high school youth of color who were tasked with the schematic design of the site.

The studio initiated a series of events and an ongoing collaborations with the stakeholders of the site, who are now in the process of renovating the existing house and preparing for youth programming. The next phase of collaboration includes a seasonal enclosure concept as well as work on a publication and collaboration with filmmaker Sarah Carlson on a documentary of the youth design project and land transfer process.

right above : CCNY student project, “A Sovereign Archive”, Nicolas Losi (MArch), Spring 2020 design studio (Haferd, professor)

right below : youth programming enclosure (Haferd, ongoing project)

opposite : CCNY students at the site.

following : workshop with Harambee youth in Kingston (Spring 2020)

The collaboration with Harambee of Kingston, the Kingston Land Trust, and other local organizations is a multi-faceted project growing out of research in both the Hudson Valley and at other Black and indigenous Burial Ground Sites connected to the Dutch Reform Church.

Student work proposed speculative urban futures for the site.

right above : CCNY student project, “A Sovereign Archive”, Nicolas Losi Spring 2020 design studio (Haferd, professor)

right below CCNY studio project, "How It Came About", Kari Kleinman (Haferd, professor)

restorying the potomac

collaboration with Roots to Sky Collective Oakland, MD and Potomac River Watershed (2021-ongoing)

Restorying Potomac is a radical land-based research, restorying, and exhibition and ‘remonumenting’ project being undertaken with Roots to Sky Collective. The project seeks to generate a new living archival activism connecting and transecting the source of the Potomac River with the Washington, DC metro area watershed.

The foundational story of our “Re-storying the Potomac” project is the history of the Fairfax Stone. For 250 years this British colonial territorial boundary marker at the source of the Potomac River has presided as the dominant cultural destination in the region— including the site known as the Fairfax Stone. The project brings voice to the cultural paradigm shift and changing relationship with these monuments and convenes a permanent living, breathing exhibit that tells the stories and experiences of Black and Brown people who were living on this land pre-colonization and post-colonization.

In this inaugural project, we plan on deepening the “gallery experience” from passive exhibition to an active interdisciplinary site that is home to curated decolonizing workshops, educational seminars, short documentary vignettes, art installations, and multimedia historical motifs. humanities programming

right : colonial territory analysis drawing (Jerome Haferd with research assistant Sidnie Ancion)

opposite : archival British colonial map, Potomac watershed showing indigenous territory.

The project activates two new public audiences: first, it engages the existing local rural communities and “mountain experience” visiting public in a new provocative way by providing a living museum-style cultural and civic destination; second, As an educationcentered decolonizing project, “ReStorying the Potomac” engages a wide range of BIPOC audiences who represent many different lineages and experiences which may be interwoven by this exhibit’s common themes of rediscovering the nonwhite traditions that have coexisted along this historic watershed.

P.O.P.S.

New York, NY (2018-19)

research published in MRPJ Journal 2020

These drawings are products of research on the various forms that public space takes in New York City and the permissions, expectations, and “happenings” that occur— and don’t—in these boundaries. The city, itself, performs constantly. The quotidian as well as the spectacular acts are carried out by its infrastructure, its people and the ecosystems it contains. As architects we believe in the public realm and its opportunities to serve as a forum, a place for public discourse, for culture to thrive and to engender place-making and specificity.

Today there are more than 550 POPS lodged deep within Manhattan’s thick, privately owned grid. Yet these spaces provoke a series of questions about inclusivity: Do they work? Who has access and when? How does one know they have access? Besides “access” what makes the space “public?” Since POPS can be ambiguous within the overlapping realm of public and private space, we feel a need to “prop” them up. Through a series of imaginary events, these drawings weave together interstitial, interior and exterior— stitching dead ends into connective tissue and sparking habitation of new and different kinds. By combining underutilized fragments of the urban realm, a more contiguous “forum” is produced and imagined. The stitching is an exercise in arrangement, and how to produce a civic, spatial language out of three-dimensionally “puzzled” territory. While only a fiction, the act of drawing unlocks an urban imaginary to aid us in asking more of our public spaces.

rolled-up city

24x24x24 Storefront for Art & Architecture (2018)

“The seat is a collective act of drawing, movement and meditation. Unpacking our city, we unroll and exchange - folding the Individual into the collective.”

Rolled-Up City is a project consisting of several parts a stool - which doubles as a collective drawing, and a corresponding performance - which doubles as a narrative text which unpacks the experience of an East Harlem region.

The project starts with a seat concept in this case a singular object that is comprised of 24 constituent rolls. These allow the seat itself to become the program, as the yoga mats unroll to allow for the drawing to be displayed, the narrative read, and the meditative practice to take place. The collective drawing, coproduced by many authors, is produced using East Harlem as a point of departure, and then follows a logic of contamination across individual and collective territories. The finished drawing mirrors the physical performance as both are simultaneouisly intensely individual and yet entirely collective spatial exercises.

This ‘happening’ is part of a larger collection of mini-events, each filling one hour of the summer solistice.

side by side

Cleveland, Ohio (2019-ongoing) mixed-use accesible housing grand prize, ZeroThreshold design competition

SIDE by SIDE proposes an accessible urban prototype that incorporates communal cooking, gardens, and learning. Designed for intergenerational living, this project utilizes the prototype’s concept to transform an empty double lot and adjacent vacant lot into a mixeduse project designed to combat social isolation and provide an innovative new accesibile living typology.

Substandard housing, lack of access to green space, and lack of social connectedness affects a wide variety of neighborhoods and demographics, including Old Brooklyn. Rather than tackle these issues in isolation, SIDE by SIDE offers a holistic design to address and improve accessibility and community-based issues faced by both the alter-abled and ablebodied alike.

The siting of this prototype - three lots located at the transition between the neighborhood scale and the retail / light industrial scaleoffers an opportunity to bridge the two and bring people together. These urban “edges”, common in many cities, become the point of departure of the project’s two primary components : 1) the community park / semipublic zone, and 2) the mixed-use living building with rear private garden.

beautiful browns

St. Louis, MO (2021), multi-unit housing

Jerome Haferd w/ Wayside Studio (Curry Hackett) second prize, OnOlive Emerging Black competition

Beautiful Browns conceives a single family house not only in the landscape, but from outside to in, behaves as a landscape itself. Wrapped on all sides in a second skin to support vegetation, Beautiful Browns draws upon Black and indigenous American references, systems, and parallel histories to imagine a dialogue between domicile and landscape.

Inspired by the post-urban landscapes of St. Louis, the massings of the Cahokian mounds of this territory, and Gee’s Bend quilts, Beautiful Browns echos the form of a ziggurat facing the street and stepping down to the back. Gardens invade the house from the north, progressively stepping up the building to occupy planted roofscapes, trellised rain screens, and idiosyncratic cavities between interior and perimeter.

great migration

Harlem, 2020 - under construction

*collaboration with artist Thomas Heath

Great Migration is an installation which seeks to conflate public and private community stakeholders, as well as architecture and painting, which fuse with the structure in an exercise of co-produced ‘contamination’. The collaborative piece is an outdoor eating and public programming pavilion - part of a civic response and economic rejuvination in wake of COVID-19, and sits at the confluence of Harlem’s historic Striver’s Row neighborhood, an important district for the heart of Harlem’s small business and arts community.

Reminiscient not only of migration and diasporatic themes and scope of Thomas’ work, which depicts scenes of the Black American diasporatic narrative from the middle passage into bondage, and subsequent historical narrative of Great Migration from the south to the Northern USA, itermingling motifs of cultural perserverence. The dialogue between painting and architectural form is a process that evokes other black modes of production such as jazz, which is sophisticated in it’s transgression of rhythm and structure.

Heath’s paintings are digitized, composed and ‘mapped’ onto the ‘topographic’ structure, overlaying and undermining the ‘order’ of the architecture with a second ‘geography’ that migrates from a street facade to the roof, creating a dynamic canopy and interior that is fully three-dimensional. The project is due to open Nov 21, 2020.