Hosted by the Collins/Kaufmann Forum for Modern Architectural History at Columbia University | Lecture by Independent Scholar Jacqueline Taylor with response by Mario Gooden & moderated by Mary McLeod, Columbia GSAPP

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In the late 1930s, Amaza Lee Meredith (1895-1984), an African American woman from Lynchburg, Virginia, designed and built a Modern style house for herself and her female companion. Situated on the edge of the Historically Black Virginia State College, in Petersburg, VA, the modest structure, built of concrete blocks, emphasizes the horizontal in a cube-like form. A smooth white planar surface is punctuated by glass bricks, has rounded ends, and a flat roof terrace framed by curved metal coping and accessed by means of a steel ship’s ladder. In other words, the building reflects clear principles of Modern architecture. Yet these formal and aesthetic considerations typically, to this day, conjure the designs of the white European male: the slick shiny cube of a Le Corbusier dwelling or the refractive glass and steel of a Mies van der Rohe facade.

In her life and work, Amaza Lee Meredith shattered behavioral norms on multiple levels. The house she designed provides a provocative place to explore the choices she made, the influences she absorbed, and the new norms she desired to reflect. This lecture offers a reconsideration of the Modernist canon, but more importantly, provides a candid lens into the world of the emergent Black professional class of the early 20th century. Asking critical questions to enrich the discourse of race and gender identity politics, while broadening histories of social representation, this presentation illustrates the importance of mining minority histories of material culture, to enhance our appreciation of American history and life in all its complexity.

Jacqueline Taylor earned her Ph.D. in the History of Art and Architecture from the University of Virginia. She specializes in the history of 20th-century art and architecture, particularly with regard to notions of race and gender. In addition to academic teaching, she has worked in public and private practice as a cultural landscape historian, most recently with the City of Detroit Planning and Development Department. She has presented her work internationally and published widely. Jacqueline currently lives and works in Berlin.

Mario Gooden is an Associate Professor and Co-Director of the Global Africa Lab at Columbia GSAPP and Principal at Huff + Gooden Architects. With Co-Director Mabel O. Wilson, the Global Africa Lab received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Architecture in 2019. His practice engages the cultural landscape and the intersectionality of architecture, race, gender, sexuality, and technology. He is a 2012 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, and a 2019 National Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Architecture recipient. Gooden is the author of Dark Space: Architecture Representation Black Identity (Columbia University Press, 2016), as well as numerous essays and articles on architecture, art, and cultural production.

Mary McLeod is a professor of architecture at Columbia University, where she teaches architecture history and theory. Her research and publications have focused on the history of the modern movement and on contemporary architecture theory, examining issues concerning the connections between architecture and politics. She has written extensively on Le Corbusier’s architecture and urban planning, and is the editor of and contributor to the book Charlotte Perriand: An Art of Living. She is also the co-editor of Architecture, Criticism, Ideology and Architecture Reproduction, as well as the new website Pioneering Women of American Architecture (with Victoria Rosner).