Table of contents
01 . Statement
02. Lexicon
03. We Wear The Mask
04. The Mask We Wear
05. Behind The Mask
06. Let Me Through!
We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,— This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be over-wise, In counting all our tears and sighs? Nay, let them only see us, while We wear the mask.
We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries To thee from tortured souls arise. We sing, but oh the clay is vile Beneath our feet, and long the mile; But let the world dream otherwise, We wear the mask!
Ornament as crime, “satisfactions of a high order”, rejection of “esthetic speculation” and a “definition of truth” – these positions have shaped the foreground of the field of architecture, producing a singular consciousness: ‘ One soul, One line of thought, in One body ‘.
In the background is its double. Prescribed as the opposition and suppressed, in common contempt, under a veil cast by that single ‘high’ order.
The presence of the veil, although not visible to the foreground, creates friction. This friction and the resulting tension obscure the boundary between the foreground and background, causing a fracturing and doubling of the perceived space between them. The thesis becomes focused on this moment of obscurity. The moment when that hidden consciousness begins to emerge and make its way to the foreground. What was once singular and unified, now splits, with two lines of thought emerging within a single body.
The Apollo theater, situated in Harlem, embodies its own historical and cultural twoness. With origins in the burlesque, the theater was transformed programmatically into one of Harlem’s preeminent cultural hubs. Despite this significant transformation, The Apollo’s architecture has remained unchanged. This architectural stagnancy acts as a veil, obscuring a different aspect of the building’s identity and placing it in the background. The thesis, however, looks to flip that position from background to foreground.
The thesis that I am describing is an architectural exploration of what W.E.B Dubois coined as double consciousness. A consciousness which operates based on the complexity of identity, movement, and rhythm. It is an exploration that centers the black experience and begins to carve, and pull, black spaces out of the dominance of Eurocentric modes within architecture. It is an Afrofuturist manifesto, with hints of (Afro) surrealism, that looks to tangibly recontextualize the black experience within a dominant framework.
Afro [ Futurism ]
Future
Black [ Style ] Identity
Present
Culture
Subjectivity
Double Conciousness
Afro [ Surrealism ]
Space Architecture
Doubleness [ Counter ] Culture
Representational
The primary goal of Afrofuturism is to seperate blackness and those within the African diaspora from Western standards and modes of being. It re-examines the historical events of the past, and interrogates present day dilemmas inorder to imagine a future centered around Afrocentric themes and experiences.
Afrosurrealism is similar to Afrofuturism in the way that it looks to re-imagine and reflect on the lived experiences of people of color. However, rather thank looking to the future, Afrosurrealism roots itself in within the present in order to bring light to the almost surreal life that these individuals already live.
Black style “Complex spatial relationships of simultaneity, movement, and overlaps of visual foregrounds and cultural backgrounds.”
Double Consciousness “One ever feels his two-ness - An American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
-W. E. B. Du Bois
Counter Culture A way of life and set of attitudes opposed to or at variance with the prevailing social norm.
“Most African Americans, if given the chance, would have chosen to be ‘just Americans’ ... But that choice has never been left up to us.”
Pg. 11
“Culture is an understanding of one’s internal and external relationships to place (geography) and time (the order in which events occur), as well as an intimacy with ones own existence (the materiality of presence and self).”
Pg. 13
“Black style ... involves an ‘ evolving semiotics of black self-creation that has been designed from its very outset to impose a degree of individuality on the numbing uniformity bred of slavery, poverty, Jim Crow laws, and white racism.”
Pg. 14
“It is not a politics of style that refers to images and representations at all. Rather, it is a politics that refers to spatial praxes and resistance”
Pg. 14
“escape the traps of essentialism and stereotypes”
Pg. 16
“Put space rather than form into question”
Pg. 53
“... doubleness ... produced by multiple subjectivities flickering between foreground/background, interior/exterior , and here/there - reveals multiple identities: cultural ... political ... class and labor ...gendered ...”
Pg. 106
“reconceptualization of ... architecture as being itself a container of that collection of identities.”
Pg. 108
“ The paradox of architecture ... about the complex dialectical relationship between the ‘ideal’ (form) and the ‘real’ (experience) in architecture - the questioning of the nature of space while at the same time experiencing a real space that is sensual and, perhaps, even political.”
Pg. 56
“Architecture only survives where it negates the form that society expects of it. Where it negates itself by transgressing the limits that history set for it.”
Pg. 56
“... a self-conscious otherness that is spatial, three-dimensional, and simultaneously included and excluded from the frame of representation”
Pg. 106
Researched questions
Question from Dark Space (Book) : How can architectural modes of production, then, resist image and representation to translate the black American experience into spatial forms, and to create alternative spaces for creative expression and affirmation of daily life in American society? How can architecture synthesize the subjective spirit and the objective intellectual product to construct a uniquely “American American” architecture borne of black complexity? Pg. 16
Question from Dark Space (Book) : Why does architecture continue to prop up and perpetuate African American stereotypes and “Africanisms” through imagery, metaphors, and cliches? Why do these cultural stereotypes persist? ...... Why does architecture not interrogate this condition to produce architectural work of merit, instead of mythologizing the notion of “Africa” and using skin-deep aesthetics to assert legitimacy and to mark out a symbolic legacy? This lack of critical design and discourse - what wallace calls “the visual void” in black discourse - ironically perpetuates black American invisibility in architectural design. Pg. 116
Themes from Dark Space (Book) : Subjectivity within architecture. Representation vs. REPRESENTATIONAL
Themes from Dark Space (Book) : Focused on architecture as a spatial praxes. Focused on the spatial experience of architecture, and thinking how that can be shaped through a:
recontextualization of identity and subjectivity
“...queering European white male Modernism...even sometimes adopting them for some illusion of protection”
Dark Space Pg. 134
“The exterior wall, with its small-scaled windows relative to the curved surface, acts as a mask that confounds the reading of the domestic interior and spatial relationships between its inhabitants. The exterior wall, with its small-scaled windows relative to the curved surface, acts as a mask that confounds the reading of the domestic interior and spatial relationships between its inhabitants.”
Dark Space Pg. 135
“ The painting is a mash of forms and dynamic lines that transfer ... rhythm ... ”
Durham Armory North Carolina ( Exterior )
*Referenced site for the Sugar Shack painting*
Strategically put on display but also hidden
