Skyrise for Harlem

“Architecture is the European art of building…it projects the future, it claims the future…it does not do well with the present at all,” said Columbia professor and architect Mabel Wilson at a lunchtime gathering moderated by Leigh Raiford, a professor of African American Studies at Berkeley, to discuss the poet, activist and sometimes architect June Jordan. “Jordan, by contrast, is about the now and how to build the future in relationship to it.”

According to a 2020 New Yorker piece by Claire Schwartz, after a July 1964 police shooting led to six nights of uprisings in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, Jordan found herself full of “hatred for everything and everyone white.” She nevertheless forced herself to focus not on her hatred, but on what she loved. This led Jordan to team up with Buckminster Fuller to propose a redesign for Harlem: a series of giant conical towers, with ample room for housing, schools, and other public facilities.

While aspects of the plan—the focus on cars (including spiraling highway ramps)—are dated, the plan’s ingenuity was that it was incre…