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Araya Asgedom
Assistant Professor, Department of Architecture, Hampton University.
E-mail: Arc304@aol.com

Architecture and the Contamination of Memories

Born in Addis Abeba, Ethiopia, Araya Asgedom is an assistant professor of architecture in the Department of Architecture at Hampton University. He holds a bachelor of architecture degree from the School of Architecture, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada and a master of science in architecture from the University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio.

His research interest focuses on two major areas: African and African American sonorous cultures and their potential implications for architecture; and experimental material-based making that could lead towards a non-objective architecture.

His article, "The Unsounded Space: On Ocular and Sonorous Imaginations in Architecture", will be forthcoming from Wiley Press in the book Black Skin, White Paper, edited by Leslie Naa Norlo Lokko.

His essay, "In Search of the Signifyin(g) Mud: Repetition as a Strategy of Transformation", for the First Jazz Architectural Symposium, will be forthcoming in African American Discourse on Architecture, from Practices, a journal of architecture from the University of Cincinnati.

Project Introduction

Craig Barton, is an assistant professor of architecture at the University of Virginia School of Architecture. Through his practice, scholarship, and teaching Mr. Barton investigates issues of cultural and historical preservation and their interpretation through architectural and urban design. He has written and lectured on the interpretation of cultural landscapes and their use in the narration of public history. His recent essay, "Duality and Invisibility", investigates the impact of race on American urbanism and will be published in the upcoming issue of Practices. In collaboration with Marthe Rowen he has completed many projects and competitions, including the firm's exhibited submission to the 1994 New York City African Burial Ground Competition.

Mr. Barton is a principal in the architectural firm RBGC Associates, located in Charlottesville, Virginia. Founded in 1995 by Marthe Rowen, Giovanna Galfione, Maurice Cox, and Mr. Barton the firm pursues interests in urbanism, affordable housing, and community preservation. Some of the firm's recent projects include; a master plan for the town of Bayview, a historic African-American community on Virginia's Eastern Shore; exhibition and administrative spaces for the Philip Simmons Foundation Charleston, SC an organization which supports of Mr. Simmons a noted Charleston blacksmith, and the design of a museum and visitors center for the National Voting Rights Museum in Selma, AL. He has taught at Columbia University, and City College and was a Loeb Fellow at Graduate School of Design at Harvard University.

Miami' s Urban Surgery: Re-invigorating the Site Specific Center of Miami's African-American Culture

Nathaniel Quincy Belcher was born in Philadelphia Pennsylvania in 1965. He was educated a Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and completed his graduate studies at Harvard University where he received Master of Architecture degree in 1992. He is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Architecture at Florida International University. Mr. Belcher has worked in several architectural firms including Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and Gensler & Associates. His work has been exhibited on many occasions including the AIDS Life Center Competition Exhibition in San Francisco, the Free Speech Memorial Competition exhibition at the University Arts Center in Berkeley, California and most recently at the Spreebogen International Competition in Berlin. He has worked to establish the Jazz Architectural Works Shop, an independent research based program dedicated to the development of critical theoretical ideas and the production and documentation of objects/environments which recognize marginalized influences on architecture and its related disciplines. He has lectured on architecture as it relates to African-American culture, modern architecture in Brazil and has served as editor on several publications. In recent studies he has examined the influences of the avant-garde on the "developing contexts" and visa versa. Mr. Belcher is a licensed architect and interior designer. He maintains his office in Miami, Florida where he has begun a community garden development project involving Greenleaves Incorporated and Little Haiti Community Development Corporation.

Daniel Bluestone is a specialist in nineteenth century American architecture and urbanism. He has written extensively on urban parks, the City Beautiful Movement, apartment house design and urban public life. His book Constructing Chicago (1991) was awarded the American Institute of Architects International Book Award and the National Historic Preservation book prize. Professor Bluestone is currently a member of the Board of Directors of the Society of Architectural Historians. In 1998 Professor Bluestone participated in the Getty Conservation Institute's Agora project, a small international panel invited to formulate an agenda of cultural heritage preservation to complement international programs in material conservation. Professor Bluestone is working on a book that surveys the history and politics of historic preservation in the United States. He teaches American architecture, the theory of historic preservation, and courses that survey the methods of site-specific architectural and landscape history and preservation. A highly regarded advocate of community preservation and public history, Professor Bluestone directs the School's historic preservation program. The preservation certificate program offers a series of courses that encourages both specialized work in a students field of study and scrutinizes the general principles and ethics of historic preservation. The program is pursued along interdisciplinary lines and involves students and faculty from architectural history, architecture, landscape architecture, and planning.

Challenging Historic Preservation and the Image of Privilege in the Contemporary African American Landscape: Exploring Change on Eastern Avenue, Grand Rapids, Michigan

Kofi Malik Boone was born in 1970 in Detroit, Michigan. Both his grandfather and mother are professional artists and it is from them that he cultivated an interest in design. It was the declining condition of his hometown that inspired his interest in Landscape Architecture and Urban Design.

After graduating from Interlochen Arts Academy, Mr. Boone attended the University of Michigan earning a Bachelors of Science degree in Natural Resources in 1992, and a Masters of Landscape Architecture degree in 1995. As a graduate student, he led the Project for Community Based Open Space Renewal in the Jefferson-Chalmers Neighborhood of Detroit. This project has subsequently received City Planning Commission's support for park revitalization.

Currently a designer at JJR, Incorporated in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Mr. Boone works primarily on urban projects, often facilitating community workshops. He was the designer of 17 neighborhood parks adopted by the Piston-Palace Foundation PARK Program, and is member of the design team for the Focus:HOPE Oakman Boulevard Project, and Greater Christ Baptist Church Community Village Project.

Mr. Boone has been a featured speaker at the Michigan African American Symposium and The Affordable Housing and Community Design Symposium. He is frequent critic for design studios at the University of Michigan College of Architecture and Planning, and the University of Michigan Landscape Architecture Program.

Dispersed Development: Musical and Physical Organization of the AACM

David P. Brown is an assistant professor of architecture at Rice University. He is currently working on a book, Noise Orders: Jazz, Modernization and Modernity. By examining the work of the AACM, Louis Armstrong, John Cage, Le Corbusier, Ralph Ellison, Rashaan Roland Kirk, Meade "Lux" Lewis, Piet Mondrian, Toni Morrison, and Mies van der Rohe, this work identifies some of the structures and thought that facilitate improvisation and speculates on their potential application to architecture and urbanism. In support of his ongoing research regarding improvisation and architecture, Mr. Brown has in the past received a McKnight Junior Faculty Fellowship. His essays have appeared in Practices and Built Surface, a Graham Foundation funded catalog documenting a workshop that he co-organized with Claire Zimmerman while teaching at Florida A&M University. A design investigation of his research may be seen in a recent collaboration with Bert Samples for, 16 Houses: Owning a House in the City, an exhibition of single family houses designed for Houston's Fifth Ward.

Africa on Park Street: Interrogating the boundaries of Race and Place in Jim Crow Virginia, 1900 - 1910

Reginald D. Butler is director of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro-American and African Studies and associate professor of history at the University of Virginia. He is the co-author, with Gertrude Fraser, of "Anatomy of a Disinterment: The Unmaking of Afro-American History," in Presenting the Past: Critical Essays on History and the Public (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986). His forthcoming book, Freedom in this Place: Free African Americans in Goochland County, Virginia, 1728-1860, will be published by the University of Illinois Press.

Rebuilding Bayview: Community Design as Catalyst for Social Change

Maurice D. Cox, is an architectural educator, urban designer and City Councilor for the City of Charlottesville. He is a native of New York City, and received a B. Arch. from the Cooper Union School of Architecture in 1983. He taught for six years as an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Syracuse University's Italian Program in Florence, Italy. His teaching in Florence was accompanied by ten years of professional practice in partnership with Giovanna Galfione focusing on urban design issues. In 1993 Mr. Cox joined the faculty of University of Virginia's School of Architecture as an Assistant Professor of Architecture, where he coordinates an undergraduate introductory design studio and teaches various graduate seminars focusing on community-based, collaborative processes of urban place making. In 1996 he co-founded the architectural practice of RBGC, Architecture, Research and Urbanism with Craig Barton, Giovanna Galfione, and Martha Rowen in Charlottesville VA. Civic activism and community service characterized his teaching, professional practice, and academic scholarship. He is widely known as an advocate for citizen participation in the important planning decisions affecting a community's life. Mr. Cox was to the Charlottesville City Council in 1996. He serves on the Charlottesville Housing and Redevelopment Authority and was recently appointed as a transportation representative to the Metropolitan Organization.

Places of Memory: Walking Tours of Manhattan

Felecia Davis, is a visiting assistant professor at Cornell University School of Architecture. Ms. Davis received a bachelor of science degree in Engineering and completed a masters degree in Architecture at Princeton University. A principal in the design firm of Felecia Davis Design Collaborative, Ms. Davis began her professional carreer with several architectural and engineering firms in California, New York, and London, including Pei, Cobb, Freed and Partners and Margaret Helfand Architects. Much of her design work and other critical work has engaged in the examination of the intertwining of history and memory in African American culture. Her Memorial and Museum for the African Burial Ground in lower Manhattan and, Goree Monument to Ship Navigation and Slavery in Senegal engaged the boundaries constructed between history and memory in the formation of narratives for these sites. She has constructed an extended context of African American historic sites in Manhattan on the web, which is titled, Places of Memory: Walking Tours of Manhattan, to more clearly understand the significance and meaning of these spaces and the urban fabric.

Clifton Ellis is a native of Tennessee. He received his BA degree from Carson-Newman College where he majored in history and French. He continued his studies at the University of Tennessee and graduated with an MA in Early American History. After a brief career in journalism he returned to school here at the University of Virginia where he graduated with an MA in Architectural History in 1995. He is now a PhD candidate and is writing his dissertation on plantation architecture of antebellum Virginia. Clifton's work has been supported by the Virginia Historical Society in the form of the Paul Mellon Dissertation Fellowship and by the Beehive-Mills Lane Fellowship at the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts. Clifton's work has appeared in the Tennessee Encyclopedia and in Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture. This last year, the Southeastern Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians awarded Clifton the prize for "Best Article on Southern Architecture" for his article "Dissenting Faith and Domestic Landscapes in 18th Century Virginia" which appeared in Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, Vol. VII.

Chris Fannin studied art history and Africana studies at Cornell University after numerous years constructing metal sculpture and other types of installations. Following his studies at Cornell, he became interested in the relationship of culture, construction and design and entered the program of landscape architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design where he received baccalaureate degrees in Fine Arts and Landscape Architecture. Subsequently, he worked in the San Francisco office of George Hargreaves. At Hargreaves Associates, Mr. Fannin worked on numerous award-winning projects including the University of Cincinnati, Byxbee Park and the Guadalupe River Park. After earning a Masters Degree in Landscape Architecture at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, he was appointed assistant professor of landscape architecture at Florida International University. Mr. Fannin taught at FIU for two years before coming to University of Virginia. He currently in his second year of a visiting appointment and is responsible for teaching design studios, technical courses and seminars concerning the role of culture in the perception and experience of space. In addition to continuing installation work, Mr. Fannin is working on projects in Haiti, Florida, New Jersey and rural Virginia.

Africa on Park Street: Interrogating the boundaries of Race and Place in Jim Crow Virginia, 1900 - 1910

Scot French is assistant director of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro-American and African Studies and a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Virginia. He is the author of, "What is Social Memory?," published in Southern Cultures 2 (Fall 1995), and co-author with Edward L. Ayers of, "The Strange Career of Thomas Jefferson: Race and Slavery in American Memory, 1943-1993," published in Jeffersonian Legacies (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993). His dissertation is entitled, "Remembering Nat Turner: The Southampton Slave Uprising in Social Memory, 1831 to the Present."

Negotiated Space: The Historically Black College Campus as a Record of the Postbellum South

Kenrick Ian Grandison is Assistant Professor of landscape architecture in the University of Michigan's School of Natural Resources and Environment in Ann Arbor. He studies college and university campuses in the Deep South, an interest that was stimulated in part by his involvement in campus planning as a practicing landscape architect with Johnson, Johnson and Roy, Inc. between 1990 and 1993. Exploring historically black college campuses as spatial records of the contentious history of race relations in the Deep South in the postbellum moment, he raises theoretical and methodological questions regarding incorporation of multiculturalism in discourses on the built environment. His research hasbeen published in such diverse venues as Landscape Journal, American Quarterly, Journal of Architectural Education, and Appendx. He is currently working on a book that brings together the major lines of his research. Tentatively entitled Landscapes from the Bottoms: The Black College Campus as Cultural History, the book is under advance contract with Johns Hopkins University Press as part of the series "Creating the North American Landscape" founded and directed by the Center for American Places in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Grandison's research has been funded by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the University of Michigan's Rackham Graduate School and Office of the Vice Provost for Academic and Multicultural Affairs.

Accomodation and Resistance: Cultural Expression in African American Buildings

Bradford C. Grant is the chairperson of the Department of Architecture at Hampton University in Hampton, Virginia. He most recently served as professor of architecture at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, California. His research on the status and role of the registered African American architect can be found in The Survey and Directory of the African American Architect (University of Cincinnati, CPSA, 1996), co-authored with Dennis A. Mann. Mr. Grant received his graduate degree in architecture from the University of California at Berkeley. He is a registered architect with experience in universal design and community development projects.

Randall Kenan was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1963, and spent his childhood in Chinquapin, North Carolina. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he received a B.A. in English in 1985. From 1985 to 1989 he worked on the editorial staff of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Publishers. In 1989 he began teaching writing at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University and was the first William Blackburn Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Duke University in the Fall of 1994 and the Edourd Morot-Sir Visiting Professor of Creating Writing at his alma mater in 1995. He has also taught a course in urban literature at Vassar College.

His first novel, A Visitation of Spirits, was published by Grove Press in 1989; and a collection of stories, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, was published in 1992 by Harcourt, Brace. That collection was nominated for the Los Angeles Times, Book Award for Fiction, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was among The New York Times Notable Books of 1992. Mr. Kenan is also the author of a young adult biography of James Baldwin (1993) and wrote the text for Norman Mauskoff's book of photographs, A Time Not Here: The Mississippi Delta (1997). He is a frequent reviewer for The Nation and has written for Spin, The New York Times Book Review, Callaloo, Emerge, and other publications.

Mr. Kenan is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, the Sherwood Anderson Award, and was the 1997 Rome Prize winner from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. During the academic year of 1997-98 he was John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi, Oxford. Currently, he is Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Memphis.

His latest work, Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, will be published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1999. He is now completing a novel, The Fire and the Baptism.

Body.Memory.Map

Lesley Naa Norle Lokko, was born in Scotland, UK of Ghanaian-Scots parentage. She completed her primary and secondary school education in Ghana and studied languages and sociology in the UK and the US. She received her BSc in Architecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture, London in 1992 and her Diploma in Architecture from the same institution in 1995. She has taught at the Bartlett, the University of Greenwich and Iowa State University. Ms. Lokko has worked in professional practice in France, Namibia, South Africa and Ghana and most recently, with Elsie Owusu Architects, an all-black womens practice in London, UK. She is the editor of the forthcoming anthology, White Papers, Black Marks which explores the relationship between race and architecture. She is currently on the faculty of the University of Illinois at Chicago where she runs a graduate design studio focusing on issues of race and cultural identity in architecture.

Earl Mark serves as the Director of Computing Technologies within the School of Architecture and as Associate Professor of Architecture where he is responsible for directing the development of computer-based curriculum and facilities. He teaches, performs research, and has published in the areas of computer-aided design, design stimulation, design research and historical reconstruction. Prior to his appointment, he was a lecturer at MIT, a senior teaching fellow at Harvard Graduate School of Design, and visiting lecturer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH Zurich. During the Spring 1998 term, Professor Mark was on sabbatical leave as the Thomas Jefferson Fellow at Downing College at teh University of Cambridge. He holds a PhD in Architecture with a minor in Cognitive Sciences from Harvard University, as Master of Science in Media Technology from the MIT Media Lab, a Master of Architecture from the University of New Mexico, and Bachelor of Arts in Architecture and Mathematics from the State University of New York.

Wallis Miller is an Assistant Professor in the College of Architecture at the University of Kentucky, where she teaches courses in the history and theory of architecture, architectural design, and the humanities. Her main interest is to investigate architecture's relationship with its immediate context whether local or national; her research focuses on public reaction to architecture and its theories. After living in Berlin for several years, she used that city as a case study for her research. She has published articles about the use of housing projects in West Berlin as a means to elevate the city's international cultural status during the Cold War ("IBA's "Models for a City": Housing and the Image of Cold War Berlin, Journal of Architectural Education (May 1993) and has used Schinkel's Neue Wache to discuss the changing structure of German national memory over the past 175 years ("Schinkel and the Politics of German Memory: The Life of the Neue Wache in Berlin," in A User's Guide to German Cultural Studies, Scott Denham, Irene Kacandes, Jonathan Petropoulos, eds. Ms. Miller has also participated in panel discussions concerning the fate of Berlin's current construction projects. She holds a M.Arch from Columbia University and is currently completing a dissertation at Princeton University about architecture and its popular audience in Berlin during the Weimar Period.

Street Life/Street Corner

Born in the Bronx, New York, Shawn L. Rickenbacker received a bachelor of architecture degree from Syracuse University and a master of architecture degree from the University of Virginia. He has practiced for such notable firms as James Stewart Polshek and Partners and Agrest and Gandelsonas. He is currently operating his own practice with commercial and residential commissions in New York, North Carolina, and Ohio. The recipient of a variety of awards, Mr. Rickenbacker's design work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. He has lectured on such diverse topics as multinational urbanism and the social and racial politics of architecture. His work has been influenced by the phenomena of contemporary culture such as sub-culture media, music, and art. Mr. Rickenbacker currently serves on the faculty of Ohio State University Knowlton School of Architecture where he teaches architectural design and urban and cultural theory.

Elissa Rosenberg is the chair of the department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia. She has been teaching a wide range of courses at the University of Virginia since she began teaching in 1989, spanning technical courses (grading and landform), design studios and theory seminars. Prior to teaching she practiced in New York City and Toronto. In 1993 she received The Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture Award of Distinction for her teaching accomplishments. She has lectured and published on a variety of urban issues such as urban space and gender in the work of Jane Jacobs; public works and public space; and the relationship of landscape architecture and engineering in the city. Her current research concerns the role of grading the in the expression of larger conceptual themes in landscape design. She is currently writing a book entitled "Landform and Design: The Topographic Imagination," which was supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation and will be published by the Center for American Places with Johns Hopkins Press. During 1996-1998 she was a visiting professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning at the Technion Institute, Haifa, Israel.

Kenneth Schwartz has taught courses in design, compositional theory, structures, and typology, and professional practice. He is a partner in the office of Schwartz-Kinnard, Architects, where he has won four national design competitions, each of which explored the constructive force that sensible urbanism can play in rebuilding cities. He has completed numerous private commissions in Charlottesville, Princeton, New Jersey, Rochester, and New York City. For the competitions and early residential work, he was recognized by the Architectural League of New York in their Young Architects Competition and lecture/exhibition series in 1987. From 1995-1997 he served as Associate Dean of the School of Architecture and prior to this appointment, was chair of the Department of Architecture for five years.

Recent work has included a funded research fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities where he published an Internet archive entitled "Charlottesville Urban Design and Affordable Housing". This project led to a commissioned community design effort that Professor Schwartz pursued in collaboration with assistant professor Maurice Cox for the Kellytown Neighborhood Association in Charlottesville.

Professor Schwartz's service activities include national level appointments to various NCARB committees (currently serving on the research committee), AIA Steering Committee for the Educator Practitioner Network, and Conference Chair of the AIA/ACSA Summer Practice Institute in 1998. Along with Judith Kinnard, he served as National Co-Chair for the 1996 Annual Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture. He was appointed chair as and board member from 1995-1997 with the Art and Architectural Review Board for the Commonwealth of Virginia by the Governor. In 1997, he was appointed as a Planning Commissioner for the City of Charlottesville.

He is currently working on the formation of a Design Resources Center for the Charlottesville/Albemarle/University community in association with the Institute of Sustainable Design.

Wrapping the Curtain: Resistance and Identity in the Permeability of Streetspace

An award wining design architect, William Wesley Taylor has had over thirty years of practice experience (twenty-five of those years in principle designer positions) in areas as diverse as Wichita, Kansas; Cincinnati, Ohio; Amherst, Massachusetts; Chicago, Illinois; and Detroit, Michigan. In 1996 Mr. Taylor joined the faculty of the School of Architecture and Interior Design, College of Design, Art, Architecture, and Planning (DAAP) at the University of Cincinnati as an assistant professor of architecture. This apparent inversion of career actually represented a calculated shift in focus from full time architectural design practice and part time teaching to a more theoretically focused, select design practice operating in tandem with full time teaching. Current practice work includes the planning and architectural design of a thirty acre mixed use commercial and institutional service complex, and a major theater, dance, musical, and visual arts center. Both projects are located in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Prior to his appointment at DAAP, Professor Taylor served as an adjunct professor of interior design at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a visiting architectural studio critic at the University of Detroit, and a full time visiting professor of design and theory at DAAP. His primary writing and research focuses on the theoretical examination of existential place making activity. Both his design practice and studio instruction is based on the application of small ensemble jazz based improvisational forms to design process. Professor Taylor currently teaches lecture and seminar courses in architectural theory, experimental improvisation based elective design studies, and is a member of the Senior Theses Architectural Studio faculty at DAAP.

Marking Brown v. Board of Education: Memorializing Separate and Unequal

Amy S. Weisser currently serves as assistant to the president of The American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Ms. Weisser writes on the social and architectural history of institutional buildings including schools, libraries and camps. In 1997, she led a session at the Society of Architectural Historians annual conference entitled, "The Space of Race in American Architecture." She has taught at Yale University where she received her doctorate from the Department of History of Art. The subject of her dissertation focused on modernism and American public school architecture from the Depression through World War II.

Camille Wells is Director of Research at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation. In addition to her interest in the architectural experience and achievements of Thomas Jefferson, she is a specialist in the architecture of colonial and early national America, with particular emphasis on the domestic architecture of early Virginia.

Ms. Wells holds a master's degree in architectural history from the University of Virginia and a doctorate in early American History at the College of William and Mary.

Over the years, she has worked as an architectural surveyor for the Kentucky State Historic Preservation Office, and she also has completed architectural recording projects for the North Carolina Department of Archives and History, the Maryland Historical Trust, the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, and Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

Her teaching career includes terms of service in both the History Department and the American Studies Program at the College of William and Mary, in the Historic Preservation Department at Mary Washington College, and most recently in the Department of Architectural History at the University of Virginia, where she continues to hold the position of Distinguished Lecturer.

Wells has been the recipient of a Ford Fellowship from the American Association of University Women, a Mellon Foundation Fellowship from the Virginia Historical Society, and a duPont Fellowship from Winterthur Museum. She also has been a resident fellow at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

She is a founder and past president of the Vernacular Architecture Forum. She also established the series Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture and edited its first two volumes. Most of her other scholarly publications, all articles to date, address issues of discovering and interpreting the character of buildings and landscapes in early Virginia.

Waiting on Dawn at Demus: Reflections on Historic Landscape Documentation

La Barbara James Wigfall is an associate professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture/Regional and Community Planning at Kansas State University. Her research on African American communities and community empowerment emphasizes the cultivation of cultural elements as a vehicle for community survival, preservation, and/or redevelopment. Projects for Oklahoma City, The National Park Service, The Dallas Historical Society, Northeastern Montgomery County, and Miami, Florida exemplify long-range solutions for diverse user groups. She has co-authored numerous historic preservation manuscripts and lectured extensively. Her most noted publications include: Promised Land on the Solomon: Black Settlement at Nicodemus, Kansas (DOI), and "Black Settlements" Built in the USA: American Buildings from Airports to Zoos (The National Trust for Historic Preservation).

Professor Wigfall holds a bachelor of architecture degree from Howard University and was the first woman presented the Alpha Rho Chi Award from its College of Architecture and Planning. She received a Masters degree in City and Regional Planning with an emphasis in urban design from Harvard University Graduate School of Design. She has taught at Howard University, becoming the first architect to receive an academic appointment in the College of Medicine and the College of Architecture. In addition to faculty appointments at The University of Texas, The University of California/Berkeley, and Kansas State University, her commitment to applied research and cultural education garnered her the first Visiting Fellow for Multiculturalism and Diversity in the School of Architecture at The University of Arkansas-Fayetteville.

Ms. Wigfall is an associate member of the American Institute of Architects and the American Society of Landscape Architects.

The Oakland Church Project

William Daryl Williams is a co-founder and principal of Williams + Pizzini architects (formerly WM-WMs). Founded in 1993, the work of Williams + Pizzini focuses on building Community through design. Mr. Williams received his bachelors degree from the University of Houston, and his masters from Harvard's Graduate School of Design. Mr. Williams recent work includes an affordable house, and a cultural arts center in Houston's fifth ward community, as well as a church in West Oakland. In Addition to practice, Mr. Williams teaches and participates in a number of exhibitions. Most recently, he participated in the 16 houses exhibition at Diverse Works, and the University of Texas. Mr. Williams is currently an assistant professor of architecture at the University of California @ Berkeley, and the Brochstein Visiting Professor of Architecture at Rice University.

Enter between Rooms 306 and 307: Constructing History at the National Civil rights Museum

Mabel O. Wilson is a partner in the New York based design collaborative Architecture et AL with Paul Kariouk. Their most recent undertaking--an installation and book project called an "Away Station"--investigates the architectural spaces of urban migration. Along with the various competitions and projects undertaken with Kariouk and others, Ms. Wilson has written extensively in journals and books on the implications of race and urban life. Her scholarship examines the methods by which various social identities--gender, ethnic, sexual, and racial--form through architectural space. Her written works, in particular a series of essays on the uncovering of Manhattan's African Burial Ground in Assemblage 27, address how the urban public sphere is contested by groups who have traditionally been blocked from claiming space and hence from erecting the architecture of the city. Her article, also on the African Burial Ground in Harvard Design Magazine, examines how emerging sites of memorialization address issues of cultural consumption and tourism.

Ms. Wilson's latest essay exploring how racial formations are embedded in modernism, (specifically through an analysis of Le Corbusier's, "When the Cathedrals were White"), appears in the Anthology of Critical Geography and is entitled, "Places Through the Body". Her installation project, "This is the House that Jackie Built...," for the Wexner Center's "House Rules Exhibition" in Assemblage 24, investigates the consolidation of forces--such as state intervention, racial bias, gender roles, class position--that form domestic space and ultimately shape how neighborhoods and subdivisions are designed in American cities. Her photo essay contribution to The Architecture of Everyday considers what an African American sensibility of materials and form might offer to today's architecture.

In addition, Ms. Wilson is visiting professor at Princeton University and a professor of design and theory at California College of Arts and Crafts. She has taught at the University of Kentucky, Parsons School of Design and Ohio State University and is a doctoral candidate in the American Studies Program at New York University.