This course explores and seeks to codify architecture as a sole discipline and meaningful tool of imagining better futures of African and African diasporic built environments. The exploration employs three types of conversations: discourse, dialogue, and design, respectively representing three phases of the course, in which the codification is documented and presented. The first two phases of conversations are facilitated by lectures, readings, and student presentations where guiding principles of black space design - authored by architect Jack Travis, as well as methodologies of an Afrofuturistic approach in architecture are identified and studied. The third phase synthesizes the first two phases asking the student to reflect and demonstrate design skill in the learned methods and guiding principles.

This course examines the art and architecture of the greater Caribbean connecting people, built environments, and landscapes across the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic coast of the Americas. Performance artist and anthropologist Gina Athena Ulysse defines the Haitian Creole word, rasanblaj as an “assembly, compilation, enlisting, regrouping. This course uses ransanblaj as a method of inquiry to gather together stories of the built environment across the Caribbean and across centuries. These stories cover geographically, temporally, and thematically distinct places in the Caribbean to uncover the many variations and profound commonalities in Caribbean architectural practices from before colonization through to the contemporary moment. 

Visualization research is a course that aims to introduce students to the fundamental skill of data visualization, exploring data selection, collection, evaluation, and effective communication to a broader audience. It recognizes data visualization as both a communication medium and an analytical tool, encouraging students to use it for problem-solving and knowledge generation. Through hands-on experience and collaborative efforts, students will select research topics related to design disciplines and apply their analytical and representational skills to transform raw data into meaningful and easily comprehensible information.

Architectures of the Common Wind investigates historic to contemporary spatial practices of resistance and rebellion of African diasporas in the Black Atlantic. Historian Julius Scott showed how maritime trade facilitated the flow of information about rebellion and freedom on a “common wind” throughout the Atlantic region during the age of revolutions—Haitian, US, and French. What spatial ideas were and continue to be transmitted through physical, atmospheric, and virtual modes of contact between people in the hemisphere? The precarity of Black sovereignty in ongoing racial hierarchies has necessitated spatial practices to defend and protect Black life. These spatial practices have been enacted through construction and destruction, resistance and refusal, occupation and marronage.  

A space dedicated to the spirit - “A Place for the Spirit” as put forth by ACSA’s 2023 steel building design competition. The studio is challenged to explore spirit not only in a traditional manner but also through a cultural lens, through the event of Carnival! A discovery phase engages the study of “Carnival” across three interrelated regions of the African Diaspora, all with strong ties to Carnival - New Orleans, LA (southern USA), Trinidad and Tobago (southern Caribbean) and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (South America). Research, Abstraction, Experimentation, Formulation, Innovation and Reflection are the iterative backbones of each phase of the design process, further investigating relationships between culture, festival technology and architectural space.