Recovered Ground

“What we think produces what we make and do…. We are less comfortable thinking about our thoughts and the forms and shapes they take,” said J. Yolande Daniels in her conversation with Toshiko Mori at the National Academy of Design in late May. Daniels has helped change the way we think about architecture and urbanism, primarily through gallery installations that thematize the lost settlements of people of color. For example, The Black City: Los Angeles, her contribution to the Museum of Modern Art’s 2021 exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America, wrestled with the urban vandalism carried out by LA officials in the 1960s, including the burial of a prosperous Black neighborhood under a train station. Subsumed, the area simply “became Los Angeles,” she said. Mori praised the room-sized astrolabe Daniels created for the current Venice Architecture Biennale as the exhibition’s only future-oriented project. (The giant maquette, which uses time zones to structure a spatiality of diaspora, is on display inside the Arsenale.) Daniels demurred: “This is about the past.”