Recite and Rewrite

Since 2017, the Womxn in Design and Architecture (WDA) group at the Princeton University School of Architecture (SoA) has convened conferences about the work of individual practitioners, some well-known (Zaha Hadid, Lina Bo Bardi), others less so (Norma Merrick Sklarek, Anne Tyng). But in a twist, organizers planned their sixth conference around a nonpractitioner: the poet June Jordan.

The choice was generative and engaged with an ongoing conversation at the SoA about the relationship between pedagogy and practice. By centering Jordan, who built a practice through words that often took the form of pedagogies (such as the Poetry for the People program she founded at UC Berkeley in 1991), and recognizing her as an architect, organizers challenged bedrock assumptions of the discipline. Given the academic venue, this presented some obvious questions—namely, What would an education that produces architects along the lines of June Jordan look like?

The conference kicked off on February 24, in a crowded Betts Auditorium. WDA played a recording of Jordan reciting her “Poem for Nana,” whose text was projected onto a screen so the audience could read along. Invited guests Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Yolanda Wisher, and Sapphire joined in via Zoom to share their poetry and prose. Paradoxically, their virtual presence lent the event a degree of intimacy, with the three of them exchanging heartfelt messages viewable onscreen. (“So beautiful, sis, Yes!!!” “So wonderful to be here with you.”) It underscored a key distinction that cropped up again and again during the following day’s symposium—that between space and place. Through their poetry and mutual sympathies, the performers were able to overcome space to create a shared place. As Gumbs, a poet and activist, concluded, “Words do build, they made this.”

Friday’s conclave unfolded along a series of prompts. During the opening panel, titled “Intersectionality and Space,” the question “How does June Jordan pave the way for the future of architecture?” garnered lively debate. For the architect and historian Ife Salema Vanable, it is the way Jordan broke the line in her poetry, using syntax as a tool of organizing space on the page. Her copanelist and fellow historian Charles L. Davis II quipped that this reading of syntax was too close to architectural modernism for his comfort. He argued that Jordan, as an architect, did not construct geometrical space but rather created place in space through poetic recitation, much like what we experienced the night before.

The “Ecology and Policy” panel focused on Jordan’s 1964 collaboration with R. Buckminster Fuller on the ambitious master plan, Skyrise for Harlem. It was of the utmost importance to both Jordan and Fuller to avoid the pitfalls of urban renewal, which displaced many in the name of economic revitalization. They imagined scattering fifteen high-rises with roomy apartments and plenty of onsite amenities across Harlem; connecting them would be infrastructural links and green spaces. For panelist and researcher Davy Knittle, Jordan “composed Skyrise for Harlem to center architectural method as a primary means of addressing the relationship between environmental and racial inequality.” The effect was to scramble the discipline’s understanding of its own means and ends.

This frame of architecture as method rather than built output carried on into the next panel, “Designing Pedagogy,” which analogized the task to the laying of a foundation. With a base in place, structures and connections can be erected that, in turn, build upon themselves to produce a new total whole. Jordan would have approved of the metaphor; she once admitted that she had become “hooked on [the architecture] way of looking at things.” Panelist and architect Mitch McEwen shared a colorful anecdote about Jordan and Angela Davis having political debates over games of tennis. McEwen claimed that, through the words they spoke there, the poet-architect and the professor-political activist redefined the tennis court as “a place to stage geopolitical intervention,” thus subverting architecture’s assumed role in assigning certain actions to certain spaces.

Picking up on this political thread, the final panel discussed activism’s relevance to architecture. Author Nijah Edwards described Jordan’s geolinguistics of Black English, particularly how its lack of passive voice evades abstraction and forces the centering of a human subject; for example, instead of saying “Black English is being eliminated,” one would say, “White people eliminate Black English.” Jordan’s own words centered the human subject in this way, Cunningham noted. In her poetry, direct address helped the reader position themselves relative to the page. Might the same be done with respect to world-building, of which architects, writers, visual artists, and others all partake? How does this medium help people to speculate beyond categorical confines.

Throughout the conference, organizers and participants alike repeatedly affirmed the notion that “June Jordan was an architect.” As Gumbs said on the first night, it is important to “overstate the under-said,” and by the following evening the phrase had hardened into fact. Its truth was self-evident. In this way, the panel discussions again and again demonstrated the transformative power that words have, not only in shaping architecture (the space around us) but also capital-A architecture (the discipline and its discourse). At the urging of that repeated statement—almost a mantra—architecture was forced to make room, expand its boundaries, and rewrite its own definition.