by Stephen A. Kliment, FAIA

Summary: Can you spot African identity in architecture when the architect is African American? The topic has been a hot one for years, with some arguing that any architect of any ancestry cannot help but bring in aspects of his or her culture, while those opposed claim that site, program, and budget are overpowering influences that limit the options to express any sort of racial or ethnic personality. A large cadre of architects and interested observers quite frankly admit they wouldn’t know what to look for.

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Here’s the second of two installments on African identity. Last month’s episode ran interviews with familiar figures such as Max Bond, FAIA, of Davis Brody Bond Aedas and David Lee, FAIA, of Stull & Lee. Today’s column gives a voice to William Stanley, FAIA, and Ivenue Love-Stanley, FAIA, of the established Atlanta-based firm Stanley, Love-Stanley, and Zevilla Jackson Preston, of small but vigorous Harlem-based J-P Design, Inc., and relates the phenomenon of the late Sam Mockbee of Rural Studio. You’ll also hear from author and interior designer Sharne Algotsson, who wrote African Style, making a case for producing African identity by observing five techniques and avoiding two others.

William Stanley III, FAIA, and Ivenue Love-Stanley, FAIA,
Stanley, Love-Stanley, PC, Atlanta
Bill Stanley and Ivenue Love-Stanley are among the few leading black architects who have chosen to express African roots in some of their work. To Stanley, African culture is an endless source of motifs. An influential example, because of its size and physical and historical context, is the second sanctuary built for Ebenezer Baptist Church on Atlanta’s Auburn Street. Ebenezer Church, where Martin Luther King Sr. was the pastor and where Martin Luther King Jr. preached, was a logical magnet for African motifs.

Zevilla Jackson Preston, RA
J-P Design, Inc, New York City
Zevilla Jackson Preston is principal of J-P Design, Inc. (JPD), a 13-year-old practice situated in a Harlem storefront on West 131st Street. The office is a single space subdivided by vertical industrial corrugated siding that gives it a gritty, no-nonsense scale. A blond wood conference table is inlaid with African symbols.

Streeter & Associates Architects, PLLC, Seattle
The African American Academy, owned by Seattle Public Schools and designed by the late Mel Streeter, FAIA, offers an African-centered curriculum. Its most distinctive form is the circular dogon containing the library. The dogon has origins in Mali, Tanzania, and Uganda. The barrel roof, which covers and identifies the entry (in background) is reminiscent of many of the roof forms found in Cameroon. The color palette employs rich red and copper hues with black, green, and yellow accents similar to indigenous clay brick and mud materials used in Africa. In its floor pattern the plan portrays a “river of life” that flows from entry to play area and simulates the River Niger, the connector of African nations.

Gail Kennard Madyun
Kennard Design Group, Los Angeles
Another voice in the search for African identity comes from Gail Kennard Madyun of the Los Angeles-based Kennard Design Group, (KDG), founded in 1957 by Gail’s father the late Robert Kennard. KDG seldom uses African elements in its work. One example where KDG did use such elements is an elementary school completed in Watts in early 1971, six years after the Watts riots. The design, says Kennard Madyun, “was reflective of the striving of the community to have institutions which reflect African and African-American culture.”

Sharne Algotsson and African Style
Interior designer Sharne Algotsson wrote African Style (Clarkson Potter, 2000) with the stated aim of providing other designers with ideas on how to furnish houses à la africaine. The thesis is simply that if you want to create an African ambiance, you use Africa-derived objects, colors, textures and patterns. You then assemble them inside a room with the best taste you can muster. Her five hallmarks of African style are continuity, technique, simplicity, spirituality, and flexibility. Two clichés she abhors because no African would do it are combining textures and mounting masks on the wall.

There are other elements identified with the African Diaspora as well, including the culture mix arising from slavery in the Caribbean and the U.S., and the subsequent urban migration of the 20th century. Root elements of African heritage can still be traced throughout those transitional times in various forms of home design, site configuration, and community layout.

Conclusions
You have to accept Africa’s multiple sources of spatial, formal, and decorative components for what they are—ingredients for countless variations and combinations, further modified as they passed through the screens of Caribbean, South American, and Southern cultures. Seeking a pure African identity is about as promising as searching for a unique identity representing Europe or Asia.

On a more practical plane, to express ethnic or racial identity as structure, you need opportunity. But, for black architects, the prospects to do so are, and will likely remain, overshadowed by such reality factors as site, program, budget, schedule, climate, client preference, and user preference. If a black architect is to break through this screen of practicality and integrate, visibly or concealed within the process, such cultural factors into monuments to African identity, it will take a sweeping makeover of our current business culture, which elevates cash flow above style.

Even if black architects were to struggle harder to capture African culture in their work—and there’s no reason why they should have to—there’s always the pressure on any minority grouping, namely, to be accepted in the general architectural community. So they end up designing in the same stylistic vocabulary as majority firms. “You look in the magazines,” argues David Lee, FAIA, “you see what gets published and what is held up as a standard for the profession, and you have to be influenced by it.”