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 incremental; the supporting struts for the cones would rest in backyards, so as not to demolish a single existing building. It was designed with time in mind.

This story—a Black woman trying to use architecture to meet her community‘s pressing needs with a sensitive but bold approach—disappeared when Esquire Magazine changed the scheme’s headline from Jordan’s suggested “Skyrise For Harlem” to “Instant Slum Clearance”, with only Buckminster Fuller credited as its author.

Jordan is now back, joined by key voices in the Afrofuturism and Speculative Urbanism communities. Artist and architect Olalekan Jeyifous shared work he had recently exhibited as part of MoMA‘s Reconstructions exhibit, “The Frozen Neighborhoods.” Brandi T. Summers, of the Berkeley Lab for Speculative Urbanism, shared a set of projects addressing the diminishing Black population in Oakland, California (the Oakland Museum of Contemporary Art also has an exhibit on the topic, Mothership: Voyage Into Afrofuturism). Both Jeyifous and Summers came back to Wilson’s skepticism about architecture‘s European origins: “It is about an imperial, colonial agenda that will go forth, clearing land… [and achieving] dominion over the natural environment,” said Jeyifous.

All of the participants look to Jordan as proof that there is another way—and her mistreatment as proof that this way has always been there, just ignored or suppressed. Said Summers, “Black world making happens all the time.”