Mario Gooden

The Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers is an annual competition, series of lectures, exhibition, and publication organised by the Architectural League of New York. For more than 30 years the League Prize has recognised outstanding and provocative work by up-and-coming North American architects and designers. The 2019 competition theme, 'Just', asked entrants to consider the just in how they approach the practice of architecture, whether through experimentation in research and design advocacy or by advancing speculative and applied techniques within the discipline.

This collection of essays by architect Mario Gooden investigates the construction of African American identity and representation through the medium of architecture. These five texts move between history, theory, and criticism to explore a discourse of critical spatial practice engaged in the constant reshaping of the African Diaspora. African American cultural institutions designed and constructed in recent years often rely on cultural stereotypes, metaphors, and cliches to communicate significance, demonstrating "Africanisms" through form and symbolism-but there is a far richer and more complex heritage to be explored. Presented here is a series of questions that interrogate and illuminate other narratives of "African American architecture," and reveal compelling ways of translating the philosophical idea of the African Diaspora's experience into space.