508 W Beach St is Brandon Bibby’s (Bibby) earliest memory of a building. The complexity of navigating one’s spatial position in Arkansas was the earliest recognition of the mediation of race and class in the built environment. At Beach St, the 900 square foot home provided the basis for a career in preservation, or “a gift and appreciation of our ancestors’ sacrifices in the intention designed with love for our collective history, heritage, memory, and culture.” “Bibby,” the affirmative name acknowledging his family’s past as his purpose for architecture, receives architecture as an interpersonal affair of preserving and stewarding spaces of the Black diaspora. 

In his own practice, the people and culture are first, and design “happens.” For Black architects, he recognizes a displacement of the “ego-driven” archetype and an acceptance of making space that would not exist if no one else had. The beneficence of these Black architects does not solely impact Black communities but, in turn, has created typologies of design that reflect the spaces of radical inclusion. Bibby’s work with the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund (AACHAF) reflects his belief that architecture has a social good and can make a change for the social betterment of all. The AACHAF is narrating the stories embedded across the country of Black designers and communities forging design excellence through a sovereign craftsmanship informed by their local condition. 

Historically, the exclusion of Black communities from accessing the materials to design and produce space has meant an erasure of our contributions to formalist architecture or the reorientation of our work as “vernacular.” What preservation provides is the ability to assert the nameless designers that exist in the archive of Black history. And to assert these designers with their unique capacities and expert capabilities in making lasting architectural heritage in the interstitial social, political, and economic conditions. Even in the loss of urban renewal and contemporary gentrification, the disconnection of African-American communities to one another has intentionally severed us from a deep connection to place. Preservation means unearthing these connections and holding these memories with us towards change. 

This episode Black Preservation, or how we know what to fight for? is dedicated to intersecting recent historic preservation work for Black architectural works and history, with a sustained realization of the role of advocacy/protest in the design process of Black spaces throughout history. We are seeking to forge a new definition for preservation and design within a Black context and aesthetic to be able to attend to all of the past + that which can be built for the future.

Full Transcript

Brandon Bibby is a senior preservation architect with the National Trust’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, helping them manage the Conserving Black Modernism program. Bibby, ASID, AIA, NCARB, NOMA, WELL AP, is an artist, activist and architect raised in the plains of Arkansas, where the Delta meets the Ozarks. He is a multidisciplinary researcher and designer invested in questioning narrative, representation and access in the built environment and its impacts on memory and behavior for marginalized communities. He is a next-generation preservationist motivated by movement, memory and culture in contemporary Black space. 

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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 Bibby first appeared on The Design Nexus.