Designing the Great Migration

"Consider the library and dormitories constructed by Tougaloo College, a historically black college just north of Jackson, Mississippi, some fifty years ago. Designed by Gunnar Birkerts and Associates as part of a far more sweeping master plan, the new buildings aimed not only to provide for a projected growth in the student body, but also to inflect the college’s mission by preparing rural African-American students for industrial careers in northern cities. By modeling on campus an orderly urbanity—and by evoking certain aesthetic cues of what was generally understood to be “urban” architecture—the designers aspired to reflect and shape the ongoing Great Migration, a seismic demographic shift in America during which vast numbers of southern blacks relocated to the cities of the Northeast and Midwest."