BULLETPROOFING AMERICA’S PUBLIC SPACE: RACE, REMEMBRANCE AND EMMETT TILL Compelling architectural and urban designs like the recent Memorial to Peace and Justice by Mass Design have been erected to aid the public in remembering the historic and geographic scope of America’s legacy of racial violence. As architects, planners, urbanists, and historians how do we commemorate America’s fraught history when recent protests by the white nationalist group Unite the Right at historic sites like the University of Virginia or the need to bulletproof a historical marker at an important site of the Civil Rights struggle tells us that violence still simmers and erupts in the nation's public spaces?
MABEL O. WILSON is the Nancy and George E Rupp Professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, a Professor in African American and African Diaspora Studies, and the Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS) at Columbia University.
Dr. Wilson 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), and the volume Race and Modern Architecture: From the Enlightenment to Today (2020) with Irene Cheng and Charles Davis. Wilson is co-organizer of the upcoming exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America, the fourth installment of the Issues in Contemporary Architecture series at The Museum of Modern Art. With her practice Studio &, she is a collaborator in the architectural team that recently completed the Memorial to Enslaved African American Laborers at the University of Virginia.
