Review: Dark Space: Architecture, Representation, Black Identity, by Mario Gooden

Abstract

Mario Gooden. Dark Space: Architecture, Representation, Black Identity New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2016, 144 pp., 21 color and 26 b/w illus. $20, ISBN 9781941332139 “Identity is passe.” It was 2002, and the words stung. As an undergraduate applying to doctoral programs, I was searching for the vocabulary I needed to talk about the issues in design that were important to me. Identity, I determined, was one of them. The words came from a senior scholar I respected at a program I was pursuing, and suddenly what I envisioned as my academic trajectory seemed trivial and faddish. However, in the current political climate, with the 2015 Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges , the recent campaign of the first female candidate of a major party for the U.S. presidency, increased xenophobia and Islamophobia, and the continued visibility of grassroots movements like Black Lives Matter and the 2017 Women's March on Washington, it has become clear that identity is anything but passe. Mario Gooden takes on the issue of identity in architecture and wrestles with the notion of subjectivity throughout Dark Space . For him, how design contends with, reflects, directs, and responds to individual and collective identities—historical, present, and future—is an issue of utmost concern. The centering of identity—viewed through the lens of investigating subjectivity—within this design discourse is both paramount and timely. This book is one of only a few texts that deal with the history, theory, and criticism of the question of an African American architectural tradition.1 Most texts that emphasize race in relation to design are concerned with the historical consequences of inequity in the social construction of race, and how it has affected individuals and communities.2 Other texts address the interpretation of race, either in museum and monument design or in historic preservation.3 Finally, some texts strive to recognize the contribution of individual African American architects in an attempt to elevate their status and, perhaps, even make …