The Politics of Space: An Interview with Mabel Wilson

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the latest
installment of Being Human from the
University of Pittsburgh.
This series is devoted to exploring
the humanities, their connections to
other disciplines, and their value
in the public world.
I'm Dan Kubis, assistant director of
the Humanities Center at Pitt.
My guest today is Mabel Wilson,
architect, designer, and professor
of Architecture at Columbia
University.
Throughout her career, Professor
Wilson has sought to redefine the
terms that people use to discuss and
practice architecture by insisting
that issues like race, class, and
labor should play a central role in
understanding our built environment.
Sometimes this means rewriting
architectural history so that these
issues play a leading role.
This is her approach in important
essays on Le Corbusier, the history
of prison architecture, and her 2012
book Negro Building: Black Americans
in the World Affairs and Museums.
Professor Wilson takes a more
activist stance in projects like Who
Builds Your Architecture?, a
collective of architects and
scholars committed to examining the
connections between labor and
building.
And she puts all this work into
practice as an architect, for
example, in her contributions to one
of six teams selected as finalists
for the Smithsonian National Museum
of African American History and
Culture.
In this work, as in all her others,
Professor Wilson sees connections
between built spaces and social
issues in ways that bring a sense of
urgency to efforts to reform
architectural criticism and
practice.
I began by asking her how she first
came to see these connections and
what convinced her that they were
worth exploring.
I think it had to do with my own
education in architecture.
I went to the University of
Virginia, and I think the university
has a pretty
celebrated history of architecture
because of Jefferson's design for
the university.
It's a UNESCO World Heritage site.
I mean, it's in the history books,
and so being an architecture student
in a place like UVA was
special in the sense of the
legacy of Jefferson.
And yet I never heard anything about
the history of slavery in
relationship to the time of
Jefferson ever.
And then, as
my education went on and on,
I kept hearing examples of, well,
you need to study Palazzo Farnese.
You need to
know English.
I took a class in the history of
English architecture, and I was
getting all of this kind of European
history of architecture, and those
became the precedence that we used
in studio.
And yet, I didn't see my own
experience reflected in the
work. So it's like looking in the
mirror and seeing yourself being
invisible. And that was a big
question mark for me.
Like I kept saying, "Well, why?"
I was interested to see the one of
your first published works was
on Le Corbusier and the way that
race figured into some of his
writings. And I thought that that
might have been an example of you
kind of like taking someone who's
kind of at the center of this
Eurocentric kind of architectural
education and trying to ask that new
question in engagement with his
work. Do you look back and kind of
see that?
Yeah, that came out.
Again, I had studied Le Corbusier
in a seminar that was taught
by Kenneth Frampton when I was a
grad student at Columbia doing my
Masters of Architecture.
My M.Arch.
And I had looked at the radiant city
and was fascinated by Corbusier's
ideas. And I don't even know how I
came across When the Cathedrals Were
White. And then, I read it, and
he talks about being in Harlem and
going to a jazz club.
And there were these Black bodies
and the way he describes them as
being savage, but their energy
would be necessary for the engine of
modernity. And I was like, whoa.
One, why don't we read
this text more?
Why is it considered a kind of
supplemental secondary text
when it seems like it's his
effort at sort of documenting
his own kind of travels to
present his ideas to a public?
And it just raised a lot of
questions. There are also kind of
narratives about women in there that
American women are these sort of
Amazonian figures.
He gives them a kind of Greek
persona. Yeah. And
so it allowed me to kind of ask
the question not only of what Le
Corbusier is saying about gender,
about race, about America
in relationship to Europe, but also,
why was it that we don't read
that text?
Yeah.
Very recently, within the last few
months in Curbed, which is an
architecture site, you were part
of a group of architects talking
about race and architecture.
You commented that "Race in modern
architecture is not about being
inclusive. It's about questioning
racial concepts, how we think
racially, how that is embedded in
the very things, the tools, the
discourse through which we learn and
understand architecture." That stood
out to me because so much of the
way that I think that I have
been part of conversations,
particularly administrative
conversations about diversity and
race, inclusion is always good.
Diversity is always good.
Exclusion is always bad.
And it's kind of that simple, kind
of like binary way of looking at it.
You're saying something a little bit
different here, though.
What was the point that you wanted
to make?
I think it's-- and there are a
number of writers who address this
question about modern
epistemology and ontology, about
what does it mean for the modern
subject to emerge in the world,
and where does that subjectivity
come from? And the really
fascinating research
by semioticians and
philosophers sort of thinking
about the concept of Europe
as a kind of entity emerging
at a moment through colonial
contact, when the understanding
of the world, even though it was
flat, was that you still had Europe,
Asia, and Africa.
And then this thing called the New
World sort of pops up, and
it's just like, well, what does that
mean? And particularly within a kind
of religious Judeo-Christian
framework about how
does one encounter difference. And I
think a lot of that work,
research, conversations around
the emergence of like racial
difference, I think is really kind
of important in terms of
how race emerges
as an understanding of the
engagement with others and how
it becomes definitive of a number of
things, of aesthetics, of the
sciences, of a concept
of history.
It allows the modern European to see
himself in relationship to a world
of others, and it produces an
understanding of liberalism.
It's fundamental to enlightenment
thought. I mean, I teach a class
where we read Kant and Herder
and Hegel in terms of how
they're thinking about it.
But then you can write Thomas
Jefferson, to go back to my own
education, into
that trajectory where they're trying
to figure out why
are these people different from
who we are.
And then by the emergence of the
modern sciences, as kind of Foucault
describes in The Order of Things,
that you have a different way in
which that racial difference
gets instantiated through
anthropology than sociology,
the biological sciences.
And you get things like eugenics
that emerge.
And all throughout that, architects
are in dialogue with these ideas.
And so, in a way, I mean,
architecture, just like art,
history, they're
all in conversation with one
another.
And so I just think the racial is
fundamental to the formation
of the modern world.
Otherwise, we wouldn't be dealing
with these issues.
Right? You know, as a nation-state
or as a world.
Yeah.
Are students receptive to and eager
to try to reframe
the way that they are approaching
some of these questions?
It's great. I think a lot of times
when the issue of race comes up,
there's anxiety.
There's always anxiety because
people feel implicated somehow
in their current circumstances.
And it's true we are all implicated
in terms of how race operates
institutionally and structurally.
That allows some people
to move more easily through
structures, institutions. In
others, it's a challenge if they can
even move through at all or be
excluded. So the inclusion is, I
think, very real.
But I do think that we have to
fundamentally rethink the kind
of intellectual frameworks
through which we sort of understand
the world. And by doing that, the
students all of a sudden are like,
"Oh, that's where that comes from.
Oh, now I see." You know, they'll
say, "Oh God.
I mean, we can't read judgments
in the same way." You know, the
judgments that he does on
aesthetics. If you don't understand
what he's writing about it in terms
of anthropology, how does this guy
who's like in Königsberg in Prussia,
who never goes anywhere,
writing about the world
authoritatively?
And it's just when
they start to kind of think about
the context in which these works are
being done and all of a sudden,
"Oh, okay."
And that's kind of the point of the
class. And the project I'm working
on race and modern architecture is
to kind of say, yeah, this
stuff is fundamentally embedded in
the bodies of knowledge that
architects are working through to
frame the emergence of the modern
discipline and the
profession as well.
Hearing you talk about this, I'm
thinking about the kind of like--
that's a process of looking back
and thinking, "Okay, where do our
inherited ideas about race come
from?" And the question
also that I think you ask in some of
your projects is what can we put
in place of some of the
things that we've inherited?
And I'm thinking here of your
project Who Builds Your
Architecture? That's a project that
deals more with global labor
than race, which race is implicated
in, but it deals with labor.
But that, to me, is an example
of trying to figure out some
things that you could put in place
of a system that is inherently
unfair and that currently exists.
Can you talk a little bit about that
project?
Yeah. I mean, I think it has a
contemporary register because I
don't think these frameworks have
disappeared. They're still very
operative in terms of how they
produce inequalities.
And so I think
it's important to kind of look at
the history of how that comes into
formation. I wrote a piece
recently for a project called Super
Humanity that was for the
Istanbul Biennale, which was curated
by Mark Wigley and Beatrice
Colomina. And
they had all the installations,
which I hear were quite fantastic.
But then they asked people from
around the world to basically
comment on this question: are we
still human?
And they gave us a very interesting
quote by a philosopher,
Boris Groys - I always mangle his
name, but I think it's Boris Groys -
about the emergence of design in the
early 20th century as being
the design of the self.
And he references Adolf Loos.
And I thought instantly,
"Well, that's a certain self
that's assumed to be universal, and
the design is automatically assumed
to be universal.
But we're actually talking about
Loos." Austrian.
Sort of in the middle
of, you know.
A specific history that produced that sense of self.
It's a very specific history with an
understanding of the self that
is not universal. And
if you read Ornament and Crime, I
mean, he sets up a kind of teleology
of civilization from the primitive.
He talks about the primitive body,
the Negro, that
then positions the erudite
well-dressed, Austrian
man at the kind of pinnacle
of progress in civilization.
And I think because that
gets read in so many history
classes, it still has an
impact on thinking.
And it's kind of the subliminal
sense of moving forward, I think,
impacts on how we think about
the world today.
And so, when you think about
laborers working in a place
like Dubai on projects
that are experimental
parametric forms, well, they're
just labor coming from rural
areas in Bangladesh.
But it's important for me to have
my vision of architecture
realized.
But I think it's already kind of
embedded in what we learn.
Architecture must always project
into the future.
It's a very prospective discipline.
Yeah. And one of the things I appreciate
about the field guide that was
recently published as part of the
Who Build Your Architecture?
project is that there are so
many different kinds of suggestions
in it about here are some things
that we can do to try to create a
new way of looking at building
and a new way of participating in a
more equitable building process
as architects.
And I wonder, can you say a little
bit about some of those ways of
going forward in a more equitable
way?
Yeah, I mean, it's similar in the
sense that Who Builds Your
Architecture? was asked again,
well, why is it that we don't talk
about the people who build our
architecture, right?
Why is that left out
of the grand narrative?
And this came about because Gulf
Labor had formed this petition
around having the Guggenheim
initiate fair labor practices for
their museum in Abu Dhabi, which was
to be designed by Frank Gehry.
And so it kind of set up this sort
of battle between the Guggenheim
and this group of artists and
scholars asking.
And we were wondering where are the
architects on that list.
Why weren't architects signing
it? If the artists were like, "We
don't want our work shown in the
museum," why aren't architects
saying, "Well, we don't want our
buildings built with forced labor
and people who aren't paid
their wages and live in
substandard housing conditions."
And it was interesting because
once we started, the comment we
heard was, "Well, that's not our
contract." That's
between the client and the
contractor.
And the contractor can subcontract,
and they can subcontract, right?
So it's this kind of distribution
of risk, essentially, which
is kind of what you want, so that
you're protected.
And yet, what architects
are preparing their drawings,
whatever it is, and
their studios where they're working
and thinking through all these
details, are somehow going to end
up being communicated to that person
on the job site building.
So there is a kind of flow
of knowledge that
is happening.
Right? So architects are implicated
in that process, whether the legal
framework says so or not.
And we felt precisely for that
reason that architects have to think
about who's out there building their
building and what kind of obligation
there is to that.
It's an ethical question.
It's an economic question.
It has social implications.
So that's how we started the
project. And part of what we wanted
to do is just show
how that connection is precisely
because it's now so globalized.
The construction
industry's global supply chain is
so enormous.
And it's not like the iPhone,
which you could say, okay, you could
have concerns and pressure Apple
about labor practices
in the factories because the phone
is sitting in your bag or your
pocket.
So you have a direct, tactile
relationship with it.
Buildings are on the other side of
the world, so those
buildings don't move in the same
way. So the question of
accountability is different.
Well, I wonder if I could talk to
you about your book, Negro Building,
which was a few years old at this
point. But this is a book that
traces the history of African
American participation in
World's fairs and in emancipation
exhibitions beginning in the late
19th century moving up
really to the present day because it
kind of looks forward to the
building of the National Museum
of African American History and
Culture. When I saw the title Negro
Building, I expected I was reading--
I was expecting to learn about this
particular history.
It seemed to me to be a book of
really cultural and kind of public
history and expand well beyond that.
And I really enjoyed reading it and
learned a lot. I thought one of the
most important concepts in it was
the concept you use of the counter
public sphere, right?
You're talking about the all the
participation of the people who were
building in these buildings that
were actually called Negro buildings
in these spaces as creating
counter-public spheres.
Can you talk a little bit about that
idea and why it was so useful
for you in the book?
It was a project again that started
with, okay, what is it that we can't
find or we don't know?
And it was initially my
dissertation, and I wanted to write
a history of African American
museums, mostly from the sixties
forward.
And I was interested in how, prior
to the sixties, it was very
difficult for African Americans to
build buildings and that
these new museums were somehow
the emblematic of a representation
of Black history and culture and
space. And I wanted to understand
what that meant. So it was really--
I was going to look at the
DuSable Museum, the Charles Wright,
and then move forward to the
Underground Railroad and kind
of do this sort of more contemporary
analysis of these institution
and then how African Americans were
claiming space. There's one, I
think, in Pittsburgh, in fact.
And so I was really interested.
But then this kind of historian in
me kind of really kicked in, and I
wanted to know-- there must
have been something before then.
But they would not
have been museums.
And then, I just
started looking at World's fairs, and I
found this Negro building.
One the name, I'm like, what
in the world is that?
And so I found this one in Atlanta,
and then it occurred to me, of
course, it would be at a fair
because it wasn't permanent.
So you could build the building.
You could have the space, the event,
show the exhibit, but under Jim
Crow, you always had to move on.
And so, then I found another Negro,
and I started finding all of these.
And it was just this amazing
untapped archive.
And people had looked at
the different expositions
separately. A number of people had,
but they had not looked at them as a
kind of serial conversation.
Right? That this was an ongoing
conversation around well-known
figures like Booker T.
Washington, Du Bois. You
have A. Philip Randolph showing up.
Mary Church Terrell.
At one point, Ida B. Wells is
involved in a pamphlet for the
Chicago. And then some of the kind
of more secondary minor figures are
really the players who are
constantly staging these expositions
and looking at them as a kind of
counter-public sphere in which the
question of what is constituting
post-emancipation, Black
identity, Black culture, and
also an ethos of history that
emerges through people like Du Bois.
Again, Carter G.
Woodson. Well, he was involved in an
exposition when he comes up with
this idea for the Association for
the Study of Negro Life in History.
And so, it was a kind of
expeditionary culture,
a creative milieu that
just had not been identified.
And it leads directly to the
formation of the museum through
Margaret Burroughs in the 1940s
in Chicago, and then she eventually
founds the DuSable in
Chicago in the 1960s.
One of the things that I enjoyed
reading about here was the World's
Fair in Paris. When you talk about
the fact that in the
space that you were reviewing at
that fair, Booker T.
Washington has an exhibit there.
And then right alongside it, W.E.B.
Du Bois, right?
And there are very different goals
for what African American
participation in American life
should be at the time. But there
they are so that these spaces
that were carved out show
that it really is a public sphere.
It's a broad public sphere.
It's not kind of some monolithic
African American culture at the
time.
Yeah, no, it was highly contested.
And also class.
I mean, that's part of what I'm
trying to say is that you have an
elite emerging clearly upper-middle
class that is educated,
that are debating these ideas
in relationship to a larger
Black population that eventually
will urbanize, will move northward
into places like Pittsburgh
and Chicago and New York.
But it was a robust debate.
And part of what I was interested in
was the sort of spatial and urban,
particularly on the Paris
Exposition.
Shawn Michelle Smith has done an
amazing book about the photographs.
Also Deborah Willis and
David Levering Lewis did an amazing
book about the photographs.
But I think my training as
an architect, I wanted to think
spatially about this issue.
Even the work on the fairs by Robert
Rydell, I mean, it was kind of the
model of how I was thinking about a
lot of this stuff. I think Bob's
histories are phenomenal in terms
of how he's linking them with nation
formation and questions around race,
but they tend to stay inside
the fairgrounds. And what I was
trying to do is think spatially
about, okay, you have this fear, but
it's operating within an urban
milieu where these kind of
questions of immigration--
you have questions of
race, and an emerging segregation
under Jim Crow are taking place.
And how does the fairground reflect
or repress those emerging
struggles and anxieties?
And that's really what I was
also trying to show.
So that's why the urban histories
become significant, first in
Atlanta, and then we start
to see how it moves north.
We see Washington, D.C.,
Philadelphia, and then Chicago,
Detroit, and New York become the
sort of main protagonists in
the later narratives.
Yeah, the Detroit narrative, in
particular, is an exciting one to
me. I mean, that museum-- I've been
to the new Charles Wright Museum
there but did not remember
the story of the mobile museum
that preceded what is now there.
It's a great story, in part because
of how much impact that mobile
museum had on the people that
saw it, on the African American
communities there in Detroit and
surrounding areas.
Can you just talk a little bit about
the transformation of the Mobile
Museum into the African American
Museum in Detroit?
That museum, in particular,
they were very generous.
They let me come in and look at
their archives for several
weeks and really go through Wright's
papers and the kind of formation
of the institution.
And Wright had been directly
involved in civil rights struggle in
the South. He was from Dothan,
Alabama.
He had gone down to
the march across the Edmund Pettus
Bridge. Right? So he was directly--
A doctor. Yeah.
A physician. Yeah. To take care
of the people who had been attacked.
So he was directly engaged in
what was going on in the
south.
And then, also as a physician, he
worked in Detroit in a very
segregated environment, in
segregated hospitals.
And so, for him, this kind of
question of knowing history
was very much rooted
in a necessity for beginning
to be able to imagine,
like, what a future
America would be like.
Like you just said, this has to be--
precisely because Black history had
been excluded.
And he felt like it was a process
that the Black community had to make
itself. He didn't want the
government doing it, which is why he
fought against a national museum at
the time.
And so it was a very kind of
bottom-up effort.
And Detroit, because of how it
had expanded, I mean, it's a huge
city. I mean, I used it for my
design studio in the fall,
and I didn't realize that
Detroit is like having
Manhattan, Boston, and
Chicago all together.
It's enormous. I mean, it's an
enormous footprint.
And so, like, how do you get--
how do you reach populations in a
city that's that big
where populations are dispersed?
And so, I thought it was a very
clever idea to make this mobile
museum, to have this exhibition
that then could kind of navigate
a kind of complex terrain.
In the book, I
talk about how questions
around segregation, blockbusting,
how the contentious
real estate, the expansion
of African Americans into
Detroit was explosive, in fact.
In reading the way in
which the mobile museum - it was in
a trailer in the beginning -
became the permanent structure
that it currently is.
I couldn't help but feel like
you thought that something was lost.
Well, in their own words, there was
a gentleman who was sitting out in
front of the museum. I remember this
was from a newspaper when
the final institution
opened. It finally opened up in a
new building. And I can't remember
whether it was a second building or
then the third building that they
were in. And he was just like
something was lost.
Like he felt like it had lost a
connection to the people.
And he specifically said that the
Black nationalist ethos was gone,
that the formation of it as
a more traditional museum
framework, the board,
conservators, that
this wasn't a step forward, that it
was somehow now disconnected from
the people that it was attempting
to serve by moving
stealthily through the city.
And I thought that was a powerful
statement.
And, in part of what I wanted to do,
I think in the book, particularly
since the African American Museum
was going to open, was to recognize
that the history of
these institutions were political.
I mean, it was really about
debating over like
how do we deal with racial
inequality, social injustice
within the United States.
And that these institutions somehow
played a role as these public
spaces to debate those issues
and not just show people
history or show
artworks. It was to kind
of galvanize and
to engage with very thorny
questions.
This question about kind of moving
from what are temporary spaces to a
permanent space brings
us, I think, right up to the new
museum in Washington, D.C.
It opened in September. It's wildly
popular. Huge, right?
I mean, you talk about it's kind of
like so we go from a trailer to
a museum in Detroit.
Now it's 300,000 square feet in D.C.
Can a museum like that have
the same kind of
connection and impact that
something like this mobile
museum in Detroit did?
Or is it doing something different?
What should we expect from it
with regard to your history
and the kind of history that you
write about in Negro Building?
I mean, I think the fact that you
can't get a ticket, it's
still
doing its work somehow.
And I write about the history of the
museum, that museum in Negro
Building, which is how I ended up
writing Begin With the Past.
I came into the project, Begin With
the Past, as
somebody who had looked at that
history before, but also as an
architect who had worked on the
design of the museum.
So I kind of knew what the building
was, and I also knew the history.
And so, I think that's why they
wanted to do a single-author book
about the building.
But the struggle for that museum
runs exactly parallel
to the history that I was covering
about this kind of struggle to claim
space within this larger national
arena in the case of that museum.
Every time it was thwarted.
Every time they kept trying to do
something, it was thwarted.
It was a hundred years old, right?
Yeah. It was a hundred-year effort
to basically acknowledge
the contributions of
African-Americans to
the nation. I mean, that was the
point.
By the 1980s,
there was this, well, this might
happen.
But one of the early questions was,
well, the Smithsonian as an
institution didn't feel that African
American
material culture was
worth collecting.
So there was no collection.
So the challenge of the building--
of doing the museum, wasn't just
you make a building.
You had to basically build a
collection, which was not true for
the American Indians.
Because the Smithsonian's early
project, when it started
in the mid-19th century, was to
collect everything as the country
moved basically westward.
It was absorbing and studying
everything about the indigenous
populations.
Right? And then that had its own
kind of problematic-- to basically
render them the primitive
and the emergent sense of a white
America as being the vanguard.
So that museum had a collection
that not only had to show, but it
had to redo-- it had to disperse.
It had to give back to those
populations. But the African
American Museum, I think, posed
another set of problems precisely
because there was no collection.
So what I think is remarkable about
that building and about the museum
is not only this extraordinarily
elegant and beautiful building
but the fact that they had to build
this collection. And they had to
think about, like,
how do we tell this American
history, one that hadn't been told
in a way that gets at all
of these thorny questions.
And that's why I think it's
successful. But it built on
all of these earlier discussions,
and it had been something since the
eighties. Mickey Leland and then
John Lewis had been trying to get
this thing funded for,
I mean, for decades, essentially.
Well, you also, along with writing
about the museum, you partnered with
an architecture firm to enter
a design. You were one of six firms
that entered the final list for
designing the museum.
Can you talk a little bit about how
your work as a
historian, as a critic, and as a
writer influenced your design for
the museum?
Trained as an architect, I've always
sort of had a parallel practice with
my scholarship.
I never really realized
how much they actually inform one
another. And so with the
African American Museum, I
was very interested in
that project and had been following
it because I had written about it.
And my uncle called me up one day
and said, "I hear they're trying to
get architects to do this big museum
up in Washington, D.C.
You should be involved." And I
thought, "He's right." And I started
to think about people who I thought
could really engage, colleagues
that I thought could engage that
project. And I thought of Diller,
Scofidio, Renfro. Liz Diller.
And I thought, "God, Liz, it would
be amazing, and Rick
and Charles, too, to work with." So
I sent Liz an email.
We had a back-and-forth, and
apparently it had come up on their
radar as well. So they said, "Okay,
let's collaborate.
Let's try to put together a team."
And we did.
And it was really remarkable, the
conversations that we had about--
we had this program, which was huge,
multi-volume. We didn't have
much time to design.
It was a really fast project.
But to sort of think about how do
you represent and display a very
difficult history, a troublesome
history, a violent history,
a liberatory, celebratory.
It just raised a lot of-- and we had
an amazing team.
I mean, we had really great
conversations.
And I was really
happy with sort of
what we presented in the end.
And I think there are aspects of
what we thought the institution
should be that are embodied also in
the design that won.
And I think, in the end, they picked
a really great team.
David Adjaye, Phil Freelon, the late
Max Bond. And
I think it was a really great team
for the museum in terms of really
getting it through and getting it
done.
Yeah. One of the things I thought
was interesting that connected, in a
way, your design with
David Adjaye's design, which one is
that both of you, in different ways,
were reacting against the white
marble look that were there.
Yours was kind of a cloud-like
dematerializing it.
His had a different-- has a very
different color and a different look
to it as well.
Yeah. I mean, I think there was a
question of the abstraction and
recognizing that there
was already a kind of palette
of moves, of
representations
of what
a museum should be along the
National Mall.
I mean, you get the Hirshhorn.
This Gordon Bunshaft building,
SOM, that kind of breaks with
that.
But I think these kind of white
marble sitting on a pedestal--
and I think the winning
design really gives it an
interesting presence in
a way.
And I think David
and Phil went a step further by
really not just
dematerializing the white box but
turning it brown.
And I think it was a response Lonnie
Bunch always talks about.
What he wanted was a dark
presence on the mall.
And I think it has that.
And has this stunning-- I
mean, I lived in Washington last
year. I was finishing up the book,
and I would run in the mornings on
the National Mall.
And it has amazing kind
of colorations depending
on the light.
And it really has
very interesting changing face.
Yeah. Some of the photos in your
book capture that a little bit.
It can be golden.
It can be kind of a dark brown.
It can be-- I mean, it really--
yeah. It's a beautiful material that
can do all this.
Yeah, I think Alan Karchmer, who
took those images, really sort of
captured the beauty of that building
and those sensibilities.
And it's a huge-- it's a huge
project. I mean, it's an enormous
building. But I think the detail and
yeah. I mean, I want to commend both
David and Phil for doing, I think,
a stunning project that really
has longevity and will really
be impactful to many, many people's
lives and experiences.
Yeah. In reading your book
on the museum, one of the things
that kind of like brought that
brand-new building into conversation
with all the work that you had done
previously for me was looking at the
original mission statement of the
building and thinking about the
first two points of
what was a four-point mission statement. The first one was to celebrate African
American culture and history. The second one, and which was stated as equally important, was to celebrate African
American culture as history as part of American culture and history. And those two things, which don't to me-- they're separate. They're connected.
They're separate. It brought back to me all of the kind of complexity of the representation that African
American experience that you had discussed all the way through your book.
Yeah, I think that this idea
that looking at this history is
going to tell you something about
America.
And I love the way James
Baldwin, who is at a
panel in the 1960s. Charles Wright
was there. Margaret Burroughs was
not. Her husband was there.
It was a hearing for a museum.
I think it was called the Negro
Commission, which was basically
formed to think through
whether or not there would be a
national museum. And James Baldwin
comes, and Betty Shabazz is sitting
there, Malcolm X's wife, and he
says, "You know, there's something
about the truth of America that
frightens White Americans." And
I love that quote.
It's a Negro building.
And I always sort of thought about
that, like, yeah, this is
American history.
The enslaved that built
and maintained University
of Virginia. That is American
history. And you cannot whitewash
it. You cannot just
say the gardens that exist behind
the pavilions at UVA are these
ornamental gardens that would have
been enjoyed. No, they were work
yards.
They were work yards
where property of
the people that ran the university.
They made the ham.
They washed the clothes.
They grew
the food.
And that is a very difficult history
because I think it runs counter to
the narrative of
how the nation was constituted, that
all men are created equal.
Right? And that, again, goes back to
enlightenment philosophy and
the challenge that the slave trade
posed to those fundamental
beliefs around that,
in nature, we are all
born equal. And yet, there was a
rationalization of
enslavement, of the ability to own.
The fundamental undermining of--
Other humans.
Right. Which means you have to
render them subhuman. It's
a dehumanizing process.
But that is the painful truth
of America that still
continues to this day
through the dehumanization
of
people trying to come into
the country. It
hasn't disappeared.
And I think those are the truths
that we have to recognize, that we
have to contend with
the modern project.
And I don't think it's just here.
I think it's worldwide.
The sense of the universalism of
the humanistic project that not
everyone was rendered human equally.
And that's, I think, critical.
Well, and that's a part of your
project, too, thinking on a global
scale of these things, as well as
thinking about the U.S.
Well, what do you-- maybe
we can end just by talking about
what you're currently working on.
Many things.
Do you have one big project that
you're currently focusing on?
I have two.
I have a lot of ongoing-- Who Builds
Your Architecture? continues.
And thanks for the shout-out about
our field guide, which is available
on whobuilds.org.
I can represent that.
And I started a project
that came out of Negro Building
called Building Race and Nation
because I felt that because Negro
Building basically goes from
reconstruction, really
post-reconstruction onward,
the question of race and nation
were already taken for given.
The representations of race in the
expositions. We know what a
nation-state and what racial
difference meant because of
the ways in which anthropology,
the social sciences, sociology, in
particular-- Du Bois was a
sociologist, for example, it was
already given when he said what the
Negro was.
And so, I wanted to understand where
that came from. So I kept thinking.
And Du Bois does this very
strange temple of beauty
at an exposition, which is in
this Egypto-Nubian aesthetic.
And he stages a pageant
in front of it, and it's heralding
a different trajectory of world
history that's moving through Africa
into the new world that's Black.
And it's in front of this thing.
And it's clearly nationalistic
because he writes his book, The
Negro, exactly at that time.
And I was like, why
is he taking-- where is this concept
of nation and race coming from?
So I thought, "Oh, well, then I'm
just going to have to look earlier."
So I became very interested in this
question of, okay, so you have
American civic architecture, you
have these founding fathers,
including Thomas Jefferson - who
sometimes is called the father of
American architecture - imagining
this civic architecture.
And yet, because it's in Washington,
D.C., placed between
two slaveholding states,
it's a fair amount
of enslaved labor that is building
this. And you then have
that labor who's maintaining the
city itself.
And so, I really wanted to
understand how are
you figuring out these
questions of democracy, liberty,
freedom, equality
precisely amidst the truth
of how your life is being
maintained.
So what it does is it looks at a
history of American civic
architecture from the Virginia
statehouse to the formation
of Washington, D.C., the U.S.
Capitol, and the White House.
I'm going to look at the American
Colonization Society.
The Pennsylvania Abolition Society
built a building in Philadelphia
that burned down after a day.
And then end with the Smithsonian
and the kind of project at the
Smithsonian where there was a really
interesting debate about how do we
build an American public
architecture and what style would
that be. So that's kind of an
ongoing project to see how the
concept of racial difference was
under formation in that period.
And that is, again,
a kind of parallel project with
working on this memorial for
enslaved African American laborers,
where I'm working with a really
great group of architects and
community activists, landscape
architects. So it's with Howeler +
Yoon, a really fantastic firm in
Boston, and Gregg Bleam,
landscape architect and a really
great guy, Frank Dukes, who's an
environmental mediator.
And there's a fair amount of
outreach for that project precisely
because the legacy of the
contentious relationship between the
university and the African American
community in Charlottesville.
And they are
the descendants of the people
who would have worked at the
university who would have been the
laborers.
Well, I will very much look forward
to that as I look forward to getting
to know all of your other work.
Mabel Wilson, thanks so much for
joining us.
It's a pleasure.
Thank you.
That's it for this edition of Being
Human.
This episode was produced by Matt
Moret, Undergraduate Media Fellow at
the University of Pittsburgh.
Stay tuned for next time when my
guest will be Rafael Campo, poet
and professor of Medicine at Harvard
Medical School.
Thanks for listening.

In collections

Being Human Podcast Recordings

Order Reproduction
Title
The Politics of Space: An Interview with Mabel Wilson
Contributor
University of Pittsburgh (depositor)
Wilson, Mabel (Mabel O.) (interviewee)
Kubis, Dan (interviewer)
Date
May 5, 2017
Identifier
20230127-beinghuman-0019
Description
An interview with Mabel Wilson, architect, designer, and professor of architecture at Columbia University. The interview focuses on Professor Wilson's life and career, including her 2012 book "Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums." The website for "Who Builds Your Architecture?" is discussed.
Extent
38 minutes
Publisher
University of Pittsburgh. Department of English
Type
sound recording-nonmusical
Genre
interviews
Subject
Architecture, American
African American architecture
African Americans--History
Wilson, Mabel (Mabel O.)
Geographic Subjects
United States
Source
Being Human
Language
eng
Collection
Being Human Podcast Recordings
Contributor
University of Pittsburgh
Rights Information
In Copyright. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).. Rights Holder: University of Pittsburgh
http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Rights Holder
University of Pittsburgh

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The Politics of Space: An Interview with Mabel Wilson

In collections