“Architecture as a cultural expression” informs the intangible pull for many Black architects, less concerned with the building and recontextualizing architecture as cultural heritage. Narratives, stories, archival work, and politics animate the interests of Cousin-Wilson’s practice of architecture. The parallelism of architecture and curation can be understood in how these disciplines distill, select, and co-manage the production of a new way of existing in or navigating a relation to space. 

As co-founder of The Studio of Contemporary Architecture (SOCA), Wilson has made visible and reinterpreted the cultural ingenuity of material and making across the Black diaspora. SOCA has helped organizations like Black Lives Matter Canada bring their political vision to life through building style and design techniques that evoke the capacity for a structure to bring safety to the expression of Black life. The reflexive approach of SOCA and Wilson to the dialogue architecture contributes and emanates from within contemporary culture and characterizes the essence of their practice. Deep engagement and research with both clients and community groups drive their design process. The outcomes bring intimacy and interiority to the facade of structures, buildings, and housing typologies whose origins reflect a history of Black adaptation. The proof of their design excellence has been in narrating their research around Black specific conditions to illustrate universal aims and lessons for architectures of climate adaptation and mobility in the face of environmental crisis. 

SOCA has placed itself in the moment of the political rhetoric and reckoning to materialize the diverse urban imaginary that occupies the cultural melange that makes up Canada. Wilson’s work is deeply collaborative, not only within SOCA but beyond the scale of the building and into the individual lives of Black designers in the country.  Wilson’s rise in shaping new architectures in Canada emerged from co-founding a collaborative of Black architects and interior designers, BETA, to take stock of and build the ranks of engaged Black designers practicing in the country. Their approach to engaged architecture embodies the rigor of using history to understand the current situation and design, intending to change the physical and relational experiences of the most vulnerable within the built environment. 

This episode, Black Curatorial Practices, is in honor of architects’ growing role in influencing contemporary thought’s material, cultural, artistic, and sonic disciplines through curation, design, and politics. Our goal here is to understand how perspectives from outside of American Blackness are redefining and reconnecting the Diaspora through shared practices of the local role of Black communities in shaping the geologic, architectural, and public lives of our built environments. I ask, how then is ‘curating’ a tool of power and care? How can the process and outcomes of ‘curating’ be a corrective to the architectural canon, and futuring the capacity for Black existence to be a known contributor to innovating material culture, as it develops?

Full Transcript

Tura Cousins Wilson has the professional experience and interest span a variety of scales including exhibition design, multi-unit housing, private homes, cultural spaces, and urban design. He is equally compelled by exploring the craft and intimacy of small scale architecture along with the redemptive qualities of reconstituting existing buildings and spaces.  The Studio of Contemporary Architecture (SOCA) is an architecture and urban design studio dedicated to inclusive city building and the creation of beautiful spaces. Founded on the belief that architecture both shapes and is shaped by the contemporary condition, the studio is deeply engaged in research and the broader discourse of architecture’s impact on culture, the environment and the shaping of cities. The studio is the recipient of the 2023 Professional Prix de Rome in Architecture, a travelling grant allowing the studio to explore sites of Black joy and community globally. SOCA is also a contributor representing Canada at the 2023 Venice Biennale of Architecture and has been awarded the 2023 Emerging Architectural Practice Award from the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada.

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Developed by the African American Design Nexus at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, The Nexus is a podcast that explores the intersection of design, identity, and practice through conversations with Black designers, writers, and educators. The Nexus is produced in conjunction with a commitment by the Frances Loeb Library to acquire and create an open-access bibliography of various media suggested by the GSD community on the intersection between race and design.

The Nexus Season 4 is hosted by Tyler White, a dual candidate in  the Masters of Urban Planning and Master of Design Studies, Narratives program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. The show is recorded and edited by Maggie Janik, and the theme music is produced by DJ Eway.

For all inquiries, please email aadn@gsd.harvard.edu.

The post Tura Cousins-Wilson first appeared on The Design Nexus.