This week, Dr. Brian Goldstein sat down with The Phoenix to discuss his new biography of prominent Black architect J. Max Bond Jr., which explores the ways in which architecture can be looked at through multi-disciplinary lenses and Bond’s unique design philosophy. Goldstein is an urban architectural historian and an associate professor and chair of the department of art and art history at Swarthmore College.
When analyzing spaces, Goldstein says that people tend to begin by considering aesthetic questions rather than sociological concerns. He hopes to play a part in changing this approach. Instead of asking “how can people design beautiful buildings,” Goldstein proposes that his readers ask “how can people design spaces in ways that don’t erase certain histories?”
In his new book, published on Sept. 15, “Max Bond: The Life and Work of the People’s Architect,” Goldstein grapples with this often overlooked dimension of the way that urban spaces are created. Instead, he adopts an interdisciplinary approach in his study of the architect’s work, analyzing Bond’s career through the lenses of sociology and the politics of built space.
“Architecture is a very interdisciplinary field,” Goldstein says. “I consider myself an architecture historian trained by social and political historians … [Part of my] interest in Max Bond was because he saw that interdisciplinary aspect [of architecture].” He argues that architects often ignore context when choosing a location: “the architect may have looked [at] the land they were building on, but not the place five blocks away from it.”
The landscapes of many cities today, he argues, continue to reflect the impacts of this increasingly narrow approach to urban design. Philadelphia, for instance, is one of the most racially segregated cities in the United States, with counties such as Philadelphia County and Delaware County having a black-white dissimilarity index of 69 and 70 respectively, higher than the national average of 63, which reflects the uneven distribution of these populations in these areas.
“The built environment is kind of a funny thing, because we all inhabit buildings, and it’s also easy to miss that those are intentionally created spaces that articulate certain values … and part of my job as an [urban] historian is helping people see these embedded values,” Goldstein shares. “[The] Lincoln Center [of the Performing Arts] is quite a thrilling place if you’re a person with means, but if you’re the descendant of one of the Black or Latino families they displaced, then you would see it very differently.”
As for how Bond might respond to these structural issues today, Goldstein imagines that “he would admonish us. [He’d encourage us] to think harder about the impact of actions that are not just about designing space, but about these bigger ramifications.”
During the late 1960s, Bond chaired the Architects’ Renewal Committee in Harlem (ARCH), a community design and advocacy organization that provided affordable architectural planning assistance to low-income residents of the neighborhood. Goldstein explains that Bond viewed ARCH as an opportunity to help Black and minority Harlemites to resist top-down urban renewal and displacement, such as when the 1956 redevelopment plan for Lincoln Square in the Upper West Side of Manhattan forced the displacement of more than 7,000 families and 800 businesses, many of which were of Black and Puerto Rican descent.
Goldstein emphasizes that urban design projects often fail to meet public needs when approached from a distance: “[When] someone hands an architect a design agenda … if it’s shaped by a person sitting at a desk in City Hall miles away who’s thinking very abstractly, it’s going to look very different than if it was shaped by the people who live in [the] community.”
Bond’s approach, he says, replaces the commonplace public architect’s assertion that “This is the house I’m going to design for you,” with the question “What house would you like me to design for you?”
Though Bond was concerned about aesthetics, Goldstein argues that his fellow architects — such as Le Corbusier, whose studio he worked at in 1958 — were more focused on designing buildings that “looked beautiful in photographs; that would look amazing on the cover of magazines.” In contrast, Bond was more interested in the societal impact that architecture could support, asking how his projects would affect local communities, rather than how these projects would appeal to people visually.
“Architecture has often been evaluated based on goodness related to form … that good architecture is beautiful architecture — that it is exuberant or has an engaging image,” Goldstein says. “And Bond often said … in various ways, good architecture is architecture that works well for the people who use it, who espouse their values, that helps them live better lives. That is not typically the way the media has written about architecture.”
Despite his contributions to the discipline of urban architecture, Goldstein explains, Bond has not achieved public recognition on the same scale as many of his contemporaries and collaborators. “It’s partly why I wanted to write [this] book,” he says. “I think it is symptomatic of the fact that Black architects were an extreme minority of the profession, [and] that the social questions he asked were not at the center of the profession. Architecture media was very insular … they tended to publish the same people. [For] Black architects, even someone as successful as [Bond] just did not have the same social network that their white peers had.”
Goldstein found his way to Bond’s work both through his own interests and through engagement with his students. “Teaching classes cross-listed in Black Studies has introduced me to a lot of people engaged in that discipline,” he states. “[They] have absolutely shaped the way I think about questions like identity, political formation, and social movements.”
His teaching, he notes, has broadened and deepened his scholarship in a number of ways: “I’ve had students who have never taken architecture … but [are] very familiar with things like interpreting Renaissance painting, modern sculpture, or socially engaged art. [They] have definitely informed me about how I read [and think] about images. Teaching at a college, there’s always different ideas floating around, and I certainly feel like some of those land in the ways that I [look] at this material.”
For Goldstein, the evolving interests of the rising generation of architectural critics is a source of hope and inspiration. He is glad to see a shift away from the lone prioritization of visual beauty as the architectural ideal, as young people start to investigate the social dimensions of urban design. “I think that’s really exciting,” Goldstein says, “and offers a lot of promise for people interested in those histories.”
