Drawing on archival research and oral histories, Black Architectures: Race Pedagogy and Practice 1957–68 traces how Black architects and planners developed new forms of architectural knowledge through their engagement with Civil Rights and Black Power movements during the 1960s. The project identifies a participatory framework for architectural knowledge production that emerged at a moment when urban planning policy in the United States dealt with widespread racial uprisings through community development reform and participation mandates. The project tracks responses to these federal policy changes in architectural proposals that foreground community organizers, political activists, and formerly incarcerated individuals as the primary producers of spatial knowledge through shared ideas and practices in Black communities. In doing so, Black Architectures places previously overlooked archives—including unbuilt work, collective organizing initiatives, and participation guides—at the center of architectural history. Such expanded interpretations reveal how these materials function as documentation of a participatory framework that reshaped the discipline from an instrument of spatial control into a tool for Black self-determination.

Rebecca Choi is an assistant professor of architectural history at Tulane University. Her research considers how movements for racial justice have had a pivotal role in the making of urban America. By focusing on social activism and community organizing as they relate to housing rights, land ownership and the city, her work considers protests, boycotts, sit-ins, and rebellions to be insurgent “hacks” in the ever-changing codes of an anti-Black world. Choi holds a PhD in architectural history and a master’s degree in urban planning from the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the recipient of several research awards and fellowships, including the National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research Grant, and the 2020–23 Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta) at the ETH in Zurich. She has contributed writing to Perspecta, gta papers, the Journal of Architectural Education, the Avery Review, Ardeth, Places Journal, and Harvard Design Magazine.