Modernism as Liberation: J. Max Bond Jr. at Mississippi’s Mary Holmes College

Abstract

Abstract From early in his career, J. Max Bond Jr. (1935–2009) brought the civil rights movement to bear on architecture, insisting that modernism live up to its promise to build a better world. Exemplary of this effort was the first completed work of Bond Ryder Associates, the Neigh Dormitory (1968–70) at Mary Holmes College in West Point, Mississippi. This article offers a close reading of this overlooked project in the context of Bond’s own encounters with modern architecture as an African American, the realities of Mississippi in the 1960s, and the experiences of the students who made this dorm their home. It contends that Bond Ryder shaped a liberatory modernism here especially focused on the freedom and self-determination of the dorm’s Black residents amid ongoing racial violence. In doing so, the article provides a novel perspective on the role that architecture played as a force for racial equality and that, in turn, the long civil rights movement played in shaping architectural modernism. While modern architecture had caused much harm by midcentury, this dorm’s history reveals an unexpected source for the rejuvenation of modernism’s social promise: the long struggle for racial justice.