Blackness in Practice: Toward and Architectural Phenomenology of Blackness

While historians have primarily focused on the tectonics and formal attributes of domestic structures of slaves, and the vernacular structures of black Americans have only recently gained attention, the spatial praxis of these environments holds clearer evidence of the cultural transference from Africa to America.-Mario Gooden, Dark Space

During the mid-1990s, a small but dedicated cadre of African American architectural critics deployed the strategies of poststructuralist theory to locate the epistemological sources of blackness embedded within modern architectural debates. This branch of postmodern cultural theory-perhaps most visible in the essays published in the academic journal Append-X-exposed the whiteness of the architectural autonomy debates and challenged the branding strategies of 1960s Afro-centric architecture for a broader range of design techniques.

Davis, Charles L. “Blackness in Practice: Toward An Architectural Phenomenology Of Blackness.” Log, no. 42 (2018): 43–54. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44840727.