Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America,"... explore[s] the ways space and land are apportioned and navigated. Using a combination of analog and digital collage, the [book] depicts dystopian [cities] overtaken by climate change and explores "vanishing urban ephemera and architecture""...succumbing to gentrification.--Editors "Surface"
Supplements [the exhibit's] propositions with texts by prominent scholars and critics that give the project an open feel and cross-disciplinary weave.--Siddhartha Mitter "New York Times"
Reconstructions asks not for full comprehension or memorization, but puts forth the question of what it would take to move beyond presumptions that these architectural interventions are too speculative or verging on the fantastical[...] Reconstructions present these possible futures not as provisional but rather as vital concerns worth pondering.--Sinclair Spratley "Hyperallergic"
Reconstructions proposes a wild imagining in order to push the viewer to engage with an expanded history of architecture. But it does not quite offer enough remove from that history to allow the viewer to envision another world. However, in its many cartographic gestures, a savvy audience may find the map to one.--Jess Myers "Architect's Newspaper"
If architecture can be a "vehicle of liberation and joy," as the statement claims, then the work in [this book] soars especially when it sets aside the instrumental potential of architecture in favor of speculative investigations of Black presents, pasts, and futures.--Jay Cephas "Artforum"
All of these projects reimagine architecture from the perspective of Black people, a mission of the collective -- and a first for the Modern. [...] Which is to say, the Modern itself partly necessitated the Black Reconstruction Collective. The group addresses the bigger question: How can Blackness construct America?--Michael Kimmelman "New York Times"
Unearths the ways in which systemic racism has shaped architecture and how an unexamined whiteness has served as a default in the field. More important, the exhibition -- and its very worthwhile catalog -- presents myriad architectural possibilities framed by the Black experience.--Carolina Miranda "Los Angeles Times"
[Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America] look[s] at contemporary architecture and its role in the systemic racism that has facilitated discrimination and injustice in the U.S. A system that has informed and continues to inform the design of American cities through public policies, municipal planning, and architecture that has specifically impacted the Black community.--Sean Joyner "Archinect"
Heavy hitters of contemporary critical race discourse... An invitation to transform.--Jess Myers "Architect's Newspaper"
Space, land, the ways each are apportioned and navigated--these are the central concerns of "Reconstructions," which includes multidisciplinary work by 10 Black talents, among them artist Amanda Williams and AD100 landscape architect Walter Hood, as well as photography created by David Hartt in response... "It is architecture that is not specifically about buildings, but about how the architecture of certain spaces is emblematic of anti-Black racism."--Camille Okhio "Architectural Digest"