Modern at the Crossroads

Image details

Modern at the Crossroads

A.G. Gaston Motel, Birmingham Alabama on February 28, 2010

Credit

Carol Highsmith, Library of Congress

Day One: Modern at the Crossroads

Sessions 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm ET

Our day one pre-recorded sessions acknowledge not only unsung architectural works, but explore their unsung contributions to architectural heritage. Travel in time from Chicago’s first landmarks to its space-age modern and post-modern Chicago buildings that are hopeful to someday become Chicago landmarks while viewing the vast array of innovative architecture that has created this unique modern city.

Each session will consist of 20 minute presentations followed by 15 minutes of a live Q&A. 

Keynote 3:00 - 4:30 pm ET

Docomomo US is pleased to present this year's Symposium keynote discussion, “Modern at the Crossroads,” moderated by Board President Theo Prudon, where we consider how race and the Africian American experience has been impacted by the Modern Movement. We will look at the origins of how history is determined to be significant or valuable, that may in turn lead us to reconsider what we preserve. Mabel O. Wilson will begin with the address with her presentation, "Who's Modern? Blackness and MoMA’s Architecture and Design Archive." Jack Pyburn will build on this discussion with his talk, "What's Modern? African American Environments in the time of Modernism."

Gain new perspectives to considering history, bias, and the resulting formation and reformations of this contextual framework based on new evidence. Explore methodologies that consider and visualize untold histories through built work, not only through sifting out its stories, but in its matching of bricks and mortar.

How can the profession build a more equitable preservation practice that looks both backwards and forwards productively? Are new resources required? How does the materiality that creates the physical presence of a site, connect history, space, and the user? How does privilege play into history and representation? What steps can we take to discover and embrace lost cultural resources to make invisible communities visible to the public?

“Modernity has built its superior culture through its forms, aesthetics, and practices to place it above and beyond the primitive, savage, folk, and the racial other” – Mabel O. Wilson

“Buildings need to be looked at as vessels for an exceptional history” – Jack Pyburn

Keynote Speakers

Jack Pyburn

Jack Pyburn, FAIA is a preservation architect and principal at Lord Aeck Sargent in Atlanta, Georgia. His career, after graduating from Washington University in St. Louis in 1971, started as a planner working with neighborhood leaders to improve the public infrastructure in the African American community of Mecham Park in suburban St. Louis. Since that exceptional formative experience, he has had the privilege of working on a number of buildings and sites important to African American history ranging from slave quarters at Oakland Plantation in Louisiana to the home of Ms. Modjeska Simpkins in Columbia, SC where Ms. Simpkins and Thurgood Marshal planned early and successful civil rights litigation on which the Brown vs the Board of Education decision was based.

Mabel O. Wilson

Mabel O. Wilson, is Nancy and George Rupp Professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, as well as a Professor in African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. She also serves as the Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies and co-director of Global Africa Lab. She has authored Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture (2017), Negro Building: African Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (2012/21) and the volume Race and Modern Architecture: From the Enlightenment to Today (2020) with Irene Cheng and Charles Davis. With her practice Studio&, she is member of the architectural team that recently completed the Memorial to Enslaved African American Laborers at the University of Virginia. She is co-curator of the exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America (2021) at MoMA. She is a founding member of Who Builds Your Architecture? (WBYA?)—an advocacy project to educate the architectural profession about the problems of globalization and labor.

Moderator

Theodore Prudon

Theodore Prudon is a leading expert on the preservation of modern architecture and a practicing architect in New York City. Dr. Prudon has worked on the terra cotta restoration of the Woolworth Building, the exterior restoration of the Chrysler Building, and of a 1941 Lescaze townhouse in Manhattan. Dr. Prudon teaches preservation at Columbia University and Pratt Institute. He is the recipient of a Graham Foundation Individual grant for his book “Preservation of Modern Architecture.” He is the founding President of Docomomo US and a board member of Docomomo International.

Tour 5:00 - 6:00 pm ET

We end Day One at the Illinois Institute of Technology campus, with a virtual tour that reassesses the complicated, sometimes difficult legacy of Mies van der Rohe and IIT within the surrounding African American neighborhood.

IIT Campus Tour: Mies and More

Mies van der Rohe’s Illinois Institute of Technology campus S. R. Crown Hall are icons of the Modern Movement. Yet in order to realize Mies’ campus master plan, IIT displaced and demolished a large swath of the surrounding Bronzeville neighborhood – including the Mecca Flats, whose African American residents fought for twelve years to preserve their community. This tour will explore the history of the campus and several of its architectural masterpieces. The tour will be led by IIT professor Michelangelo Sabatino. As an architectural historian and preservationist, Sabatino has edited a forthcoming book in which the contributors explore the ways in which IIT is working to acknowledge and contextualize its complex past. The tour will conclude with a live Q&A.

Featured Sponsor

Thank you to the TAWANI Foundation for supporting the 2021 National Symposium.

TAWANI Foundation

The TAWANI Foundation is committed to preserving and protecting our architectural and cultural heritage. We support organizations whose goals are to ensure that national treasures, from significant physical structures to museums and arts organizations, are available for the enrichment of generations to come.

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