Historian work is incredibly important in keeping our history and educating future generations through our voices and lens. It is powerful to challenge our profession to evolve while leveraging one's platform to elevate others. This is why I am proud and excited to share that two books were recently published that captured my advocacy work and my mission in making the profession more equitable and just!
(Left) Architects After Architecture: Alternative Pathways for Practice
(Right) African American Architects: Embracing Culture and Building Urban Communities
If you are interested and want to support please click the links below to purchase a copy.
Architects After Architecture: Alternative Pathways for Practice
Edited by Harriet Harriss, Rory Hyde, Roberta Marcaccio
You can find my contributions on pages 138-141
What can you do with a degree in architecture? Where might it take you? What kind of challenges could you address? Architects After Architecture reframes architecture as a uniquely versatile way of acting on the world, far beyond that of designing buildings.
In this volume, they meet 40 practitioners who have used their architectural training in new and resourceful ways. Together, they describe a future of architecture that is diverse and engaged, expanding the limits of the discipline, and offering new paths forward in times of crisis.
African American Architects: Embracing Culture and Building Urban Communities
Author, by Mr Melvin Mitchell
You can find the section featuring me on page 146
Melvin Mitchell believes that the 2016 opening of the NMAAHC signals either a black architect renaissance or the demise of the black architect-practitioner corps in the U.S. by 2040 if not earlier…along with the demise of Black America’s cultural, political, and spatial beachheads in America’s big cities. He argues in this book that America’s perennial housing crisis - most acutely manifested in Black America’s accelerating displacement from America’s cities – must be countered by a new progressive 21st century movement that re-invents the revolutionary construction-based architecture modus operandi deployed 100 years ago by Booker T. Washington. Mitchell believes that Washington completed the build-out of the Tuskegee Institute campus as a counter to America’s building of the “White City” aka the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair-Columbian Exposition 600 miles to the north in Chicago, Illinois. Mitchell argues that the centerpiece of a new “architecture” must realign with the needs of Black America for major increases in home and business ownership and wealth creation. That requires a massive “Buy the Block”-type redevelopment in urban Black America. Today that must entail nothing short of the literal building of at least one million new affordable housing units in urban Black America by Black America between now and 2030. The means to accomplish such a moon shot are there in existing and emerging progressive legislation. The American Housing and Economic Mobility Act, the Green New Deal, and the Opportunity Zones Act must all be harnessed with the trillions of available public dollars, private equity funds, and black nouveau rich wealth to create and sustain an African American-dominated urban affordable housing industry. That may not be the answer but is most certainly one of several heretofore missing pieces.
Pascale Pages
If you are wondering why I chose to send you this email, please know your support means everything to me. You are a part of my community and someone I aspire to make proud.