GERMANE BARNES is a designer in residence for the Opa-locka Community Development Corporation and senior lecturer and director of the Community, Housing & Identity Lab (CHIL) at the University of Miami School of Architecture. His research and design practice investigates the connection between architecture and identity, examining architecture’s social and political agency through historical research and design speculation. He is part of a group of architects, designers, artists, and writers who have contributed to Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America (MoMA), a call for architects to reconceive and reconstruct the built environment, rather than continue giving shape to buildings, infrastructure, and urban plans that have embodied and sustained anti-Black racism in the United States. The book, which includes a broad range of essays by curators and prominent scholars from diverse fields, and a portfolio of new photographs by the artist David Hartt, is a “field guide” to the 2021 exhibition of the same name at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
