 So let me tell you a little bit about Jerome. He is an architect and educator based in Harlem. After graduating from Yale with a master's degree in architecture in 2010, he worked at Bernard Schumi Architects until 2017, at which point he left the firm to do what so many architects want to do, which is to start their own practice. And he co-founded a practice, Brandt Haffer, which very quickly went on to win some important recognition in the field. Only three years later, they had won the AIU Practices Award. And to get a lot of work, which as an architect is actually very difficult to get to get work. And they were very successful in the Harlem Renaissance pavilion, the first place in housing prototypes side by side in Cleveland, Ohio, and other projects. But I think what really is interesting about the practice is that it's a practice that combines traditional architectural design with really a research component and an intellectual component. And it's that research interest that brought Jerome and his firm into dialogue with historic preservation and why we wanted him to come and speak to our program. Because in his practice, he's managed to establish a dialogue with what he calls non-hegemonic histories, users and spaces. And in that dialogue is done, not through words so much as through interventions, through contemporary work of architecture. And so here again we see the blurring of the boundary between the historical and the contemporary in a new kind of practice that is emerging that doesn't really see the difference between architecture and preservation so much. And so it's very thrilling to see that kind of work being done by Jerome. And being done here at Columbia, because Jerome is actually an Act John professor here at Columbia in the architecture program in the spring semester normally. He is also teaching broadly and has done really interesting experiments in pedagogy as well. In particular, he is in a core initiator of Dark Matter University, which is a BIPOC-led network dedicated to transforming pedagogy and the space of knowledge production. If you dwell on that a little bit, that is quite an ambitious goal and quite a worthy goal to rethink. That really means rethinking what we do here, what we concern ourselves in the university to rethink the way we teach and to rethink the way we learn and what we learn. And so the content of that knowledge is very important, excavating the content of that knowledge, new kinds of knowledge, bringing those into the field. And to do that, Jerome has had to branch out outside of the traditional frameworks and traditional archives that architects usually consult when they do their work and has in fact begun to unpack a new kind of archive that is really informative not just to his practice but to preservation and architecture in particular. And what he's uncovered is that so much of what we do is work that the archive already gently predisposes us towards. And if something is not in the archive, we tend to ignore it or we tend to overlook it or not ask questions about it. And one of the important things that Jerome was making us really focus on is the reality that African-American histories, African-American legacies to the built environment are not part, not just of the archive, but also have been erased from the built environment itself. And that is why he began to work on African-American burial grounds. It's funny because when we talk about burial, when we say we want to bury something, we kind of use that to say we want to make it go away. But a burial is also the highest form of respect that we offer a person, a proper burial, right? And so when that proper burial is denied to a whole group of people that are such an essential core part of our society, one has to take action. And Jerome has really led the field in taking that action. And so we're really thrilled to have you here, honored that you would share your work with us. And I'm going to hand off the virtual podium to you, Jerome. And we will, if it's OK, once you're done, we will return to this setting so we can have a little bit of a Q&A. There's a lot of people online following the lecture. And there's those of us here. So we'll just all enjoy and I'll hand it over to you. Thank you again. For once, we can actually welcome our speaker properly. So please all join me in welcoming him. Thank you so much. Let me make sure that I'm plugged in here. Hold on. Just noticed I'm not. Back to the awkwardness of online. There we go. Now I'm plugged in. Plugged in. OK. Thank you, Jorge, for that introduction. That was so good. I really appreciate it. I really appreciate you inviting me to do this now almost what a year ago after our post-honement. And I'm grateful for the opportunity to try to put together this work into a format like this. It is really going to be a kind of overview cutting across a fair amount of territory and a fair amount of things. So if you see something that you want to revisit, we can try to leave time in the Q&A. And maybe I'm someone, Jorge or somebody, if I'm getting to that 45 minute mark, let me know and I'll just kind of cut things. But let's try to, OK. So let me share my screen. Can I be made host to share my screen? Yes. And while they're making me host, I just want to give a shout out. I see a few people in the online audience. Briani, who is part of the Historic Preservation Faculty, who has been part of this work and also connecting me to you guys. I see Tyron Wilson, who's the head of Arambe Kingston, who are the community group, who are the stewards of the Pine Street African Burial Ground. So thanks, Ty, for joining. I see Connor and a few other folks from that community. And I also see a few folks from City College, my faculty community there, who have been great because some of the design work and research here was done with students actually at City College. So a big shout out to my colleagues there as well. I still need permission. Give us a second. Wait, that might be it. I think you might have something to do with up there. Yeah, from here and participants. Um, let's see. I mean, this game over here. No problem. Um, it doesn't. Here, I'm just able to make it. Okay, there, there we are. Yeah. Thanks. All right. So you guys can see. Yes. Okay. Alrighty. So I will begin and the way the way this is going to, I've tried to structure this and this is the first time I've set this material up from the last couple of years in this format. And I kind of introduce the background of the two sites, and also some of my work. And then I will go into a slightly deeper dive and read excerpts from a written piece, an article that I wrote sort of about the initially the Harlem African burial ground and kind of what it was provoking for me in terms of the disciplines of architecture, urban design, and the built environment in general. So we'll see if that works and if I am a droning on too much. I'll I may skip some of it. And I moved a little bit of it out of order so I hope that works. And then if there's time I hope there is at the end. And there's a short clip that the really the the real team who in Pine Street Kingston the Pine Street African burial ground team have been working on a documentary. And so there's a short clip of that that I that I'll play. And I see also Korean, who is partner at can landscape design is in the audience as well. And I see and tie and Kingston line CA and Harambe, and the Kingston land trust have all been very important. Okay. So, thank you guys for having me. As for a mentioned I'm an architect. I co founder at brand Hafer, which is based out of Harlem, and now between Harlem and the Hudson Valley, where actually I'm right now. I'm also at Columbia GCAP, also at City College, and with DMU dark matter, where I've done a few academic and pseudo academic projects like this trans institutional course, you get to practice which is related to this work. That was taught last year between Yale and Howard and this year will be, I think between City College and Yale. And, you know, I'm really on the architecture and urban design side of things, I suppose, formally, in terms of the courses that I teach usually. But my practice and my work is really a kind of really bridges and includes academia, of course, and the design studios that migrate into other territory that includes activism. And probably you could say preservation and community advocacy work that I find myself doing a lot. And so, I'm going to share today and, and hopefully it's coherent and put on the table, you know how the African burial grounds themselves and more importantly the histories, the modes of living and cultural production. So I'm going to reorient the episteme of architecture, which is what really kind of pulled me further into this, looking at these sort of sites and the kind of cultural practices that that really are absent from our discipline which is a kind of ongoing project that many many many others are also sort of thinking about and reorient not only architecture but also urban design landscape design planning and yes preservation. These sites are kind of a starting point in sort of, again, re-centering all these modes can grow our discipline and our ethics, which has really ramped up, of course, and since last year in George Floyd. And so you'll see kind of spliced in here some work of my practice and this expanded practice, like I was saying, that kind of is then anchored by these two sites that I've sort of researched and then academic studios around and some community advocacy collaborations around the Harlem African burial ground in 126th Street and the Pine Street African burial ground in Kingston, New York. And so this will be really an overview and sort of almost a stream of consciousness at certain moments with images related to that work that I've condensed and doesn't dive into any single aspect or element. But we can, you know, maybe get more into any questions or provocations that you have in the Q&A. And so this is some images splicing the Harlem African burial ground site on the left there and then the Pine Street African burial ground site. So these sites play a role in sort of troubling in the productive sense my practice and they're emblematic of this larger geographic territory that defines my practice and my life at this point. So I'm really thinking about Harlem as the southern tip of a larger kind of Hudson Valley territory that's linked by different actors, including the Dutch reform church, for example, who were the sort of clerical presence and colonial presence that is sort of responsible for the archive of these burial sites. And in that geography, these sites intersect other sites of my architectural practice of my other creative work and kind of various entanglement so you'll see some images of that sort of spliced throughout. And then also intersecting this work. And this is about other disciplines. And this is where I think the theme of kind of critical interdisciplinarity or black interdisciplinarity runs through some of the provocations that I'm interested in. And I think even certain things that Jorge touches on an experimental preservation. I mentioned faculty member briny Roberts, who I gave a shout out to early earlier that are not only influential at the outset of this work. And, and briny who shared the experimental preservation text with me when I was just beginning to come up with the studio a couple years ago for the Harlem site. And also this interest in expanded modes of practice is relevant here, most notably then this edited issue of log titled expanded modes of practice that briny edited and invited me to write on right about the Harlem site for that issue of log which sort of helped to crystallize and formalize some of these ideas. And then the other intersection when starting to research these sites is this is the connection between the work of the work of experimental or critical historians and literary figures who you may know or may not know. This is merely Saidiah Hartman, and Marie supplement is who are really working between the disciplines of literature historiography and others amount of practice and project a project of radically imaging subjects who are absent from our kind of mainstream, progressive or archival database in multiple disciplines. And, and, you know, by chance or maybe not by chance, I met and befriended Professor Marisa Fuentes several years ago while she was living on my block in Harlem, and her work continues to be influential to me, as I kind of trace connections to my discipline or disciplines and hers, and I was really struck by how Marisa really cars this new disciplinary space by foregrounding the role of imagination. And Saidiah that imagination plays within, in their case, historical practice, literary practice, and I'd never really considered that kind of approach to history. And this inspired me to consider the role that kind of historical erasure might have in shaping a speculative creative practice which is honestly what I'm mostly interested in, for instance. Ultimately, one of the big takeaways in some of this work I hope that I reflect on is seeing how that product, how the these sites and that larger project of speculating what an architectural urban design response might be to these sites. And imaging the kind of legacies of these sites that becomes as much a process of invention and creation, as it is of preservation or elucidation of existing history. Capital age. And so something really clicked for me there that the project of kind of imaging or redressing and integrating the subjectivities within any practice or discipline. So including architecture demands rethinking the tools and methods of that discipline. So that's really kind of the critical nugget here. And so then turning to the two sites. And there are now more sites like this in my orbit that I'll touch on the Harlem site in a dense urban context, the Pine Street site in a sort of residential neighborhood context. The engagement has been similar in both sites, and the constituents and stakeholders are different but there are overlaps, like I said for one being the history of the Duck Performing Church, and their presence in Harlem, and in the Hudson Valley. And I engaged both of these community driven activist processes as an architect and academic and academic and involved in both cases, my practice as a space of support for design ad hoc design consultation and a space of community engagement. And then also involved design students so in both of the burial ground cases students from city college, conducting to design studios to supplement the work of the task courses we're doing. You see here an image of the Harlem African burial ground task force to produce additional content for these efforts to utilize in their creative process and their advocacy process. And then finally as a stakeholder I live, you know walking distance from the Harlem site. I bike by it, and on an almost daily basis from my architecture office. And I'm now also a resident partial resident of Ulster County, which is the county that the pine street burial ground and Kingston is in. An image of a kind of after hours visioning workshop we did with some local cultural stakeholders in our studio around the Harlem site a couple years ago. So what, and you'll start to see here some images of some of the student design work kind of speculating around architectural and urban responses to these, both of these kind of negated sites. And, you know what emerged for me as being kind of at stake in these two projects beginning with the Harlem case was that this typology of the living memorial, I think became more the focus in the Harlem site studio and research. And how that typology is experiencing and a growth and transcendence and how so how that typology begins to transcend the limits of built form, or even the kind of typical memorial scope, right and begin to inform new modes of practice, new forms of realism, pedagogy, and even kind of legal practice on a site around the conditions of the site and civic structure, like zoning and mutual aid environmental systems, public services, even ownership and stewardship. Again, in both cases, then how the ground and and architecture, and then becomes the medium, right, the ground and the land becomes a brokerage of those processes. And how do we kind of radically six away our work that sort of like amplifies that. So the kinds of preservation, experimental preservation and archaeological practices that are occurring on the site also shaped the process and have a lot of instrumentality and agency within the sort of layered on forces. So these things become debated debates, how to how to preserve a site we'll see in the Pine Street case, you'll see a house that exists on the not very overall site. And so there was a lot of discussion of whether to preserve the house, maintain it, use it, or get rid of it. So these are just more images of one of the student projects for the Harlem site. And I'll just note here. I think this project was really looking at a kind of the agency of sort of living matter. And so how the plantings on the site might begin to sort of constitute almost like a legal status. That would kind of transcend the confines of the specific burial outline. And then in the Pine Street case, this is an example of a student kind of speculative student project from the Pine Street studio at City College. I think the questions became even more focused on these sort of meta structural questions turning to how the burial ground and the kind of ethics and the sort of erasure and violence begins to provoke questions of land ownership. Stewardship and just transition and even reparations. And so what really inspired me about what's happening at this site, aside from questions of kind of aesthetics, the interpretive architecture, and all that was the sort of community processes that were being actually fabulated, created to allow for new kinds of just transition of this property to happen. So, you know, the Kingston Land Trust Harambe and some of the other actors in this case actually found themselves at the forefront of just transition work, having to create a new process. So again, this idea of the create the act of creation that comes out of this work in order to steward properly ensure that this site would be stewarded will be stewarded into the future. And so this is just an image of these these design studios that we're looking at in particular at these sites and then there was a third in in DC, the Howard Divinity School campus of African and indigenous dispossession. And it's just to note that, you know, some of maybe the content of this talk now post George Floyd maybe might seem a little bit repetitive or redundant, but this was like a year and a half before George Floyd, when it's amazing how fast some of the the evolution has been in some of our discourse but at the time, I was really kind of just starting to ask some of these questions for myself. And, and, you know, kind of where not only my own sort of ancestry fits within our discipline but also what what what these sites provoke for our larger kind of ethics questions of our our canon as a as a discipline, etc. And then these are some more courses that have followed since then. Here at GSAP, some of them that are expanding this work and kind of expanding it into the Hudson Valley and elsewhere. And again to give a also a note here that I met the Kingston folks through the urban design studio here at Columbia, which had been looking for many many years at the Hudson Valley and employing an interdisciplinary kind of stakeholder model which I think is really important. And so these are just more images of a quick overview of the Pine Street site, which is a neighborhood. We're by a residential neighborhood here in Kingston, small city about two hours north of Manhattan, and some of that historical imagery, which you may see again. The, the kind of approximate outline from some of the archival maps of the location of those burials which we now know are much more extensive and difficult to quantify the. This is a sonic imaging map that that was done of the Pine Street site in Kingston, again, kind of nested within that residential territory so this is just a quick little diagram here. Beginning to kind of get at that question of, you know, what are the expense of this site and you know, the, the kind of the questions that are provoked begin to question the kind of private ownership of this site and of these lots and and what that might mean for kind of community with this sort of modern overlay of sort of parceled territory. And here is an image of the protagonists were the Pine Street site in Kingston. You've got again members of Harambe of tie in this image, and just showing some of the events that have been happening over the last several years, including, you know, large community events and ceremonies. The kind of some of the other folks that have been really involved in this and were involved in some of the collaborative design work exercises. And the African Roots Center, the Kingston YMCA, who helped to facilitate this high school youth design process, which, which together with can landscape design, landscape office out of Kingston actually produced a design that is now actionable for the, for the Memorial on the site, although it's being always tweaked and revised and changed. And this is an image of one of our kind of mixed design, design sessions with the Harambe youth in Kingston, and with some of the city college students in Kingston, this was just before coven in 2020. And this is this is some drawings of the of that of those high school youth design effort. You know, channeling again the sort of history of the site, their reference points and attempting to kind of reimage the kind of cultural material into a memorial strategy which you see a drawing from can landscape design on the right of one of the latest iterations of this memorial and an interpretive site at the Pine Street location, which again there you'll see more images of this includes a house that was built many years later, over top the remains. And then a series of kind of meditative spaces that would ideally culminate in a kind of interpretive center there. There's a little flyer from one of these kind of community design meetings that that we did following some of the academic work to present that work with the community. And these are just a couple images of some of some more of the student projects I think I brought these ones because in this case, this, and I'm sorry this image is a little blurry. This project by walking really took on this issue of a kind of collective ownership of the site, and what that might mean in terms of a kind of architectural infrastructure and sort of civic infrastructure. And then this was this is another project that was really invested in some of these questions of territory of ownership of property that emerge in particular at the pine street location. And so our friend friend Fernando was kind of speculating, again, sort of speculating into the future, a kind of new sort of territory that might emerge that would be sort of collective for that, for those other sites. And so I'll segue here to a little bit of other work. I'm fast forward that that I've been doing kind of, you know, drawing more upon some of this cultural material modes of cultural expression. And I, I want to, you know, all of the spaces that were that I'm that I'm looking at in one way or another. And this body of work, including the obviously the African burial sites are black landscapes, which we, my office, dug deep into that meaning over the summer because we did this project for ongoing Walter hood. That is that some of these slides are about here. And, you know, you know, this is, you know, I'm kind of using this as a way to sort of share a little bit more work of my multidisciplinary design practice, but also get a view into one of the more persistent spaces this is not either the African burial sites, but it's very near the Harlem one, this is Marcus Garvey Park. But this is, this is one of these more persistent spaces that has shaped my practice, even more than the burial ground sites, and it of course is interwoven and entered and tangled with those sites in terms of a kind of larger land, landscape of black landscape that makes up Harlem and also the Hudson Valley though the black presence in the Hudson Valley has been sort of historically marginalized. And so these are just some images of the kind of generative nature of that of this material for our practice and to show a kind of recent project of this installation and event design that we did for this architectural president's medal ceremony this past summer in Marcus Garvey Park, which again has a ton of layered history of many different kinds, you can see Walter hood on the celebrated landscape architect there on the left with some others. And I think it's good. I think it's important and fitting to sort of to sort of start here or kind of introduce Walter. As someone who's really mounting a kind of multidisciplinary architectural landscape art practice, which challenges the discipline sort of through the lens of blackness. And he was doing it at a time when that marginalized his practice, and he's now finally being recognized. And in many ways, for, for that groundbreaking work and how he, and I think his work really mounts a sort of living historiography to the approach and a kind of deeply cultural approach, which I think I cite some of his comments about black landscape He says, you know, black landscapes matter. This is an image again of Marcus Garvey Park, very close to Columbia. They matter because they can be born again. They exist all around us, and are continuously resuscitated doing so requires care and how we assume and resuscitate these landscapes to ensure that their resonance and power is not lost. So again, this language of exhumation of resuscitation and of living sort of archival presence, kind of interesting. He's using there. And he goes on to say in the system. These are some images of Walker's work. Black landscapes matter because they are renewable. We can uncover, exhume, validate and celebrate these landscapes through how new narratives and stories that choose to return. Through new narratives and stories that choose to return us to origins. The contested and the forgotten landscapes renewed through a myriad of expressions can give us incentives to obligations for years to come. So, this language, kind of melded with some of the things already sort of germinating when you look at a site like Marcus Garvey Park which we've been looking at in previous projects and my practice, and sort of melded with more recent examples of kind of marginal, historically marginal modes of cultural production into kind of really generative work, generative spatial work that I'm just kind of showing here as is still ongoing for our practice so this is an image of kind of template for those communities which became a kind of archival project of sort of resuscitating some of the images of the Harlem cultural festival. And so this become became an ode to kind of Marcus Garvey Park as a black landscape. So these are just some more images of that. These are the archival images which again, this is again this is not one of the burial sites but related in that, you know this was a, this is images of the Harlem cultural festival in 1969, a major major milestone huge event it was called the black and the Simone play here, and it was essentially forgotten largely forgotten, and only recently were was this material and there's a lot of film footage rediscovered from this event, and then quest love did the summer of soul that was recently put out. So again, you know it doesn't have to be a burial ground site per se, to still have some of these issues of kind of erasure and sort of marginalized forms of expression. And still be relevant. And then these are just some images from our design practice, which include an earlier pavilion project on the left, and then some other design work. And all kind of around in and around New York City of varying degrees of permanence. But even the top middle project was looking at actually the literal land of Marcus Garvey Park, and just showing that this is a kind of generative, generative site for us. So that product that in that earlier work, which is called seizure was also a kind of archival project, which was attempting to draw attention to the sort of very precarious and ultimately successful renovation dismantling the renovation and real erection of the Harlem fire watch tower which sits at the top of the Acropolis that you can see in the process of being taken down when we were putting up that art piece. And there was a kind of double archival aspect to this you could say, many other things you could say we worked with a media artist, Jessica Feldman, who kind of together composed this project that resonated with excerpts from sort of historical speeches that had been given near the site or we're very related to the site. That also was sort of a varying degrees of cultural knowledge or currency. So you can see some of those excerpts there and I just played for over a year. Okay, so I will now get back to the two protagonists here, the two burial ground sites. And I'm going to now read a little bit from this piece that I wrote that has the same title of this talk, called an archaeology of architecture that I kind of worked out while I was involved in some of these design charrettes some of these community advocacy projects, beginning with the Harlem site, but then I work in the Pine Street site and I think it all but the piece was really focused on the Harlem site. And so here is this is some excerpts of Marisa Fuentes, the historians, really groundbreaking text that she was completing when I met her in 2016 called Dispossessed Lives, in which he uses these tools of kind of critical fabulation you could say in the terms of Saidiah Hartman, but really has to reach across other disciplines and invoke a kind of imaginative process to image the lives of in particular enslaved women in Barbados, who only enter the archive, and vary in very scant ways and always through the lens of the master and always through the through the lens of violence. And so on this work became kind of very, very inspirational from another field for this for this piece so I will start here. And roll along some images of the two sites and of some of the creative work while I read here and if it gets too long I'll just cut myself off. When historian Marisa Fuentes, that out to find and document individual voices from the lives of enslaved Africans in the Americas, she found the archive so lacking that it was impossible to write a standard historical text. Almost always these individuals enter the historical record through instances of violence, with a hand and gaze of the oppressor. When confronted with thin and fragmented even non existent records, Fuentes initiated a creative form of scholarship in order to generate a living subjectivity out of the very impossibility of her site. Her book Dispossessed Lives became the vehicle for chronicling these individuals. The process for restoring their subjectivity. In the chapter on Jane and method, for example, Fuentes uses a runaway slave advertisement, who meticulously constructed vignette of Jane, one of the names given to unnamed enslaved individuals in the ground breaking text, subverting the archival discourse of that space and time. Only examining how the machinations of power have operated. Is she able to portray the subjects themselves. As Fuentes puts it the problem of the archive transcends time and plays out 250 years later, when one still cannot even write about these figures, these figures who were not meant for history, at least not in its current practice. Neither of these figures easily represented in architecture in its current practice, the archival of this that surrounds their history. Dispossession subjectivities poses both a practical problem of memorialization, how do we memorialize these histories or representation and a pedagogical problem that centers around violence and more so repair. How do we architects do what Fuentes does in our discipline? How might we mirror her active scholarly resistance and mount architectural resistance to our own disciplinary forms of violence? Then I was asking this in 2019. We're asking this a lot more now. We might identify how architectural violence parallels archival violence and how this violence works. Second, we need creative forms of pedagogy and practice that not only allow for the marginalized imaginary to speak, but reframe our discipline and suspect the conditions for violence and erasure are destabilized. And finally, we need to build up knowledge and new ways of interpreting architecture that allow for these forms to be understood and valued. So I'm just going to just a clip of one of those late advertising, some archival material on the left from the Harlem site on the right from the Times Street site. More recent material, again on the left, these are the existing conditions, more or less the Times Street site has begun to change a lot of those two sites. This challenge is brought to bear at a site of particular significance. The New York EDC Economic Development Corporation has plans to develop the immediate surroundings of a recently unearthed African burial ground in Harlem into a mixed-use housing complex, complete with a cultural center and living memorial at its heart. The plan to construct an everyday urbanism around this highly symbolic site is a starting point to interrogate this development where building anything at all is questionable and raises yet more questions. Can a memorial be ephemeral? Can it be a set of ethics or programs that pervade an entire site? What tactics are there to create an architecture that supports new archival practice? The implications of this work extend beyond a single site or individual set of narratives. These questions have been bolstered by the extensive work of historians and community members as well as the design students whom I've worked with on this and related sites. We have inspected several territories of the architectural discipline. I'm the grind and the archive pushing ourselves to reconceptualize them in new and unconventional ways and testing how each is involved in generating a new imaginary, a lot of historical and architectural layers. The long terminus of the RFK bridge, the busy 120s on your point of this street, commercial corridor becomes a terrain bag of vacant lots, city vehicles and police presence, and infrastructural hogs that includes a nondescript bus depot building that you see there on the right, just to the north. The context and first between this decommissioned bus depot's concrete foundation lies a 17th century African burial ground. Until its excavation in 2015, few were aware of its existence, even communities in Harlem. The prehistory of the site is intimately related to the nearby Harlem River, having been known as a trading ground of the Lenape, the indigenous inhabitants of what is now Manhattan. Historical accounts of the site's designation as a cemetery began during the low ducts Church of Harlem, and what was then the village of New Harlem, when the area was mostly farmland sites that would have been designated for such a purpose were usually left over spaces such as this one. Land near the water's edge land vulnerable to flooding and disruption. From the mid 1600s onward, both free and enslaved blacks used to the site as a cemetery. However, during beginning in the 1830s, the nearby Ingram estate began to lease the land for farm animals to raise beginning the long process of neglect and erasure. A wave of interventions contributing to the sites near complete physical and historical expungement began following the church's sale of the burial ground in 1853, which allowed the redivision of the land into private parcels without special recognition of the burial ground. Following this repurposing of the ground, new buildings were designed, foundations were laid. Beginning with an entertainment, an entertainment complex were on the site, complete with a carousel and then a casino. World War One saw the buildings converted into barracks. After the war, the Hearst family purchased the evolving complex for conversion into a movie studio. Eventually the movie complex was torn down and in the 40s, a quality now bus depot that still stands today was constructed. Thus, the initial mistreatment and erasure has been compounded by subsequent architectural and environmental disruptions that continue to the present. The history of neglect towards the site extends into a state of neglect that characterizes the site today. The related and mingled histories of indigenous and black inhabitants of Harlem and the details of their respective mistreatment and dispossession are key to understanding how we might enact a project of repair. That if the effects of which might stretch beyond the limits of this particular site. Reflecting on the evolution of the Harlem site and its many incarnations, the importance of the ground itself cannot be overstated. The land of the burial ground contains the literal repository of remains and artifacts are registering on many times disturbed and eroded, but the multi dimensional power of the ground does not stop there. This is an image, early image of the bus depot that still stands on the site. The building indexes layers and layers of political power and environmental violence, the establishing and redrawing of the lot lines and their eventual change of ownership played a pivotal role in the erasure and the loss of agency to the resident, including those whose ancestors are buried there. In 1811, we all know there was a massive rescripting of the topos of New York City to realize the commissioners plan, the capital driven grid based urbanism that would often prove antagonistic to other forms of community that may have flourished in the past there were collective farms that were here. Once upon a time, up to now the burial ground remains a blighted and polluted area, its future threatened further by a rising flood zone, I showed the map of earlier. You will leaked by vehicles on the site has added to the toxicity of the ground homeless shelter under the overclass and makeshift structures. This is some work by artist Abigail Deville. Attempting to chart and navigate the historical interface between blackness environmental degradation, the disruptive shoreline that France historical presence of water conjures the work and of artists and thinkers like Abigail and for quasi Dyson. And so by understanding and embracing the ground is constructed as mutable as contingent, as well as a public and civic surf surface will be a critical theme in the ongoing and transformation and redesign of this landscape. And this isn't this is a clip from the stakeholder and architect presentation of some of the student designs that I will play very briefly here. And that is the reverend efforts of single Terry who is the head of the task force for the Harlem fight. Because what I believe that I'm seeing is that they're securing the land in the landscape to make sure that doesn't get destroyed again. And I see that purposes not for community engagement as for preservation and preservation in the sense that what had happened to it in the past through developers or you know, or just environmental changes. They're saying with this. We can secure this memorial. So whatever happens in the future. We have a way. That's what I see. I think to living memorials. So, so she mentioned the memorial there. And you know this emerging typology of living memorials, not so emerging anymore, embraces temporality and participation in collectively working through memory, perhaps more salient than the specific formal expression of the design is the more teachable concept inherent in this project in many which in many cases, extends the effect of the work beyond a single moment in time, and or beyond a single site, one of the most effective recent examples is the National Memorial for peace and justice in Alabama, designed by mass design group that you see here. The memorial spatializes the ongoing practice of restorative justice, a large portion of the memorials ground is dedicated to the symbolic markers, waiting to be transferred to every county in the United States with known lynching sites. And doing this, the memorial is not only a site of remembrance but also an active agent in the restorative justice, and the future memory of the site. This is some of this, again, the student work that the Reverend was commenting on in that clip breeze through. Continuing with the ground as a political surface, one can imagine the configuration of lots and parcels that allows for the creation of communal spaces of diverse size and character, taking cues from earlier uses of the site, the ground can be also deployed as a reactor, or a more radical proposition that the zoning or rezoning of the ground is not only latent in this history but also being proposed for the plot of land outlined in the 1820 map at the Harlem site that you see there in black. So what does it mean to reason the zone. Essentially, a piece of New York City in perpetuity. So then in tactical moves like this open up possibilities to rethink ownership and repair, and to imagine a new set of ethics for this and future sites to bringing in just some images of the student work for the pine street site. So, I'll kind of start to wrap up here because I know I'm over time. That's at stake what's at stake. In terms of thinking about, I've gone back to now design and sort of our disciplinarity at stake and unlocking a new architectural imaginary is the unlocking of a new pet new pedagogies and new epistemologies for architecture and teaching I think becomes another site of design repair imagination for architects and educators working in this disciplinary space. I approached this, given Audrey Lord's paradox of dismantling the master's house with the master's tools. One place is to test these methods out in the design studio which we did. We're in this case a kind of critical race perspective becomes the foil to prompt even the reshaping of the studio or the space of instruction, which later, you could say we see in projects like dark matter university which we've started since George Floyd. Again, these are just some images of that of this very speculative kind of format that some of the students took for the pine street studio that I'm kind of wrapping up with here. So when attempting to build a subjectivity for the voiceless and dispossessed lives. One place back to Marisa went this work, found it necessary to draw upon the language of other disciplines, including architecture and urbanism, but also law, literature, even geography to an adequate lens of interpretation. In a similar way to flentes architects are challenged to incorporate other languages into our pedagogy and practice, such as zoning laws, narrative fiction and marginalized or less institutionally valued mediums of filmmaking, such as weaving dance, etc. and forms of knowledge production such as oral history in the growing movement to acknowledge and spatialize America's indigenous and black histories, and the local lived experience in general the rediscovering and development of these sites this is the pine street site. There's some images of the of the house that has been now restored that I'll end with here. It's a significant and sobering opportunity for architecture to engage the process of placemaking justice. The work starts with our own daily practices on packing this site through written text alone as its minutes. The program has been there for centuries propels us to reexamine the way that cities are made, and the role that capitalism, urbanism, and racism have played in that making the critical histories within this context problematize our prevailing models of architectural pedagogy and practice in addition to architectural form and apology. If we mind the historical layers of a site as a series of practices and ethics that organize communities and are shaped by built form, when the more nuanced approach to history is available to designers, architects and indeed everyone. I'm ending here with a few slides from that high school youth design process where the students themselves actually produce design work that got translated into sort of Memorial concept. And these are then some final archival images of the pine street site. This is some more recent images of the, the private, the once private residence that was constructed on top of the remains there was has now been deemed a valuable resource and converted into a space of learning and community space for Harambe to utilize for various different functions to serve its kind of immediate community. Initially there was there was a lot of talk of demolishing the structure, and so that was reflected in the initial kind of design for this interpretive site but they've sort of, they're kind of adjusting and and working with that building. Okay, if I'm not going too too far over, I'm going to play at just a short two minute clip. And I think that, and they're created by the team there in Kingston, that maybe we'll do a better job than I have kind of summarizing some of this process here. Let me share that. Are you hearing and seeing this. I can show you the area that we did it. We talked about hundreds of greens just in this area. So you could imagine what we got out there, you know, that we haven't even touched yet. The neighbors here, most of them, they all know that this burial ground is here. They do know. My dad used to tell us that it was there. There was a burial ground behind our house. I'm like, I always thought he was kidding. It makes me like very shocked that that burial ground was here. It's an African burial ground in the middle of like Midtown Kingston. I would think the most surprising thing that I experienced was learning about the slaves and how many there were in Ulster County. It was just shocking. The project means a lot because it could be like my ancestors that like could be like buried in the burial ground. I didn't even know it existed. I wish I didn't know how many slaves were where I live and the history behind where I live and my ancestors and stuff. And I'm kind of upset that I didn't know before and that they didn't teach it in school. It's kind of crazy because on my mom's side, I know like everything about our heritage. But on the other side, my dad's side, I know nothing. You can do a lot of things in life but very few people can say, oh yeah, I restored an African burial ground. Shows like hope, I think like to show our appreciation for what they did. It feels empowering to be a part of one of the very first burial youth teams ever in here in Kingston. You just get this like very spiritual feeling that you know people are there. Okay, I think that's where I will. I will end because I'm out of time. Thank you. I know that I was fast. I got it. I got it. It's two years worth of material. So it's a lot to get to get out. So we have a little time for Q&A. Yeah, sure. Thank you so much for such an amazing presentation and introduction to your work. This kind of relationship both of both sites and if your perspective and attitude towards the existing urban environment is different between both sites. I really love the pieces of work that look like they kind of create a sort of like a universal back porch in the fine street location. And I'm curious if there's a similar attitude on our location. It's a little hard to hear, but I think I heard your question. You're saying, are there similar attitudes towards the kind of design responses at the two sites? I would say yes and no. And again, these were, you could have many different attitudes. I think. You know, I think there are definitely some similar things that maybe began in the Harlem site just because that was the first one I was looking at. And then about a year later was looking at the pine street site. I think the Harlem site still was a little bit more concerned with this typology of a living memorial. I was starting to question like these metastructural issues of like property and sort of civic resource. But then those became more explicit in the pine street studio just to be even more kind of speculative also because there was a kind of more hard lined design already in process so we wanted to sort of amplify and not like duplicate that work. I see the attitude was similar in terms of being speculative. I think the Harlem site maybe felt more urgent to propose maybe more coherent architectonic imaginaries. That would be like forms of sort of resistance at the scale of like this huge million square foot project. Whereas the pine street one felt at least for the students I was working more directly with like an opportunity to speculate even further into the future. If that helps answer your question. Thank you. Another question. You've been also from the audience. That's virtual if anybody wants to jump in. And from the virtual group just on mute and go ahead and ask. Maybe what people think I don't know if you can hear me. Is that. Yes. Is it better. So again thank you for your for your talk. It was really wonderful to see your engagement at all these levels you know from your and also the blurring of the lines between your practice and your pedagogy you know and how they feed into each other. That was very refreshing to see that. There's a number of questions about how one translates methods and techniques that have developed in history and historiography, you know, David, which deals primarily with archives that are textual. How to translate that into essentially built environment and the profession of the environment. And so you you raise the possibility of critical fabulation. And I was thinking, I mean, I was really struck by the words of the reverend in the film that you presented. She plays such an emphasis on the idea of securing a gesture that would secure the existing and she's worth preservation as you know, how can we act upon the existing built environment. So as to secure it so that in the future we know that this kind of neglect is kind of erasure is not done again or or that this place is not lost. And so now you raise the issue of the legal frameworks. You know, how do we make this a legal designation. So she's not talking about that she started like design get design something that is going to make this now the typical way to do that in the past has been money. And that's how you know you put up a monument there. I was. So, with that in mind, I'm curious about your own processes and methodologies. So, in addition to your interest in textual, you know, history, how do you translate that and knowing that every gesture is highly symbolic. Even for example, you should have worked with her was nice and who's been exploring both the geometry of the body but also the color, you know, her paintings are all black. Right behind me symbolic. So, to, to what extent are you concerned with it and I'm sorry, I'm working my way to work on pre question but to what extent do you consider and are concerned with questions of materiality of color in their symbolic content as you work. I'm just pulling up. If you see this, are you seeing this. I think the project this was a student project that the Reverend was referring to was this one by city college students are Rifa Jordan and the linker. And I think, I think, Jorge the kind of the, the bottom line answer to your question is that I think I'm interested in several different things at once. And in terms of the critical fabulation stuff. I was really, I was really struck at the time, because it resonated with this need to grow our own discipline, and to use like imagination as the radical tool to do that. So, I think some of that comes merges with these interests and like materiality and like, and more kind of that textural design in this kind of image here on the left, where these three students actually ended up inventing a new material for the project. And that was kind of drawing upon this African mud or called Latterite, this sort of like rammed earth, and but they then they merged it with some different aggregates, and created this new sort of like wall construction for this climate. To kind of resist some of the environmental decay, but then also work with the river and actually be like an aquatic material. So, I don't know, this is maybe an example where this are kind of coming together a little bit of like the need to invent, but also to sort of preserve and you know, yeah. Super. Another question. It's interesting to see how, you know, something that is so important in the culture. This appears but then, but then reappears. And in a way that it was interesting to see your use of maps and mapping. Oh, somebody's complaining. I want to say something. Yeah. So, yeah. Okay. I don't want to, you know, I'd rather hear from you. Is this some Tyrone, somebody that. Yeah. Hi. How do we unmute him here. Am I a house. There we go. Hey, Jerome. And thank you so much for that. This was, this was so great. And I just want to touch on a little bit about the differences. I think that was asked a little bit because I'm actually fortunate and lucky to actually be and also being a big part of the burial ground here in Kingston, New York. And one of the, one of the differences that I recognize real fast, it is a, it is a cultural differences, even though we are still talking about the same culture as far as being of African descent. But the community culture is really different. And, and, you know, as you heard the young lady on the video down in New York, who said, you know, I think she was kind of talking about not it be not, not having a site be like a public, you know, type of, you know, burial ground. And that's common, you know, and, you know, down there and, and, and all this stuff. And up here, we're kind of changing that narrative just a little bit to say that this needs to be a community space of education. And in the feeling of what actually come into a burial ground, you know, is type of clean, you know, the type of cool field of coming to a burial ground right. And a lot of people that come to, you know, usually go to a burial in a cemetery or whatever, you know, it's a, it's a really a different field there. When you come to Pine Street here. It's a different field of community space. Acknowledgement of our ancestors. As you saw the building there, we, we, we was, we was in discussion of removing the building. But the reason why we didn't remove the building is because the community access not to. We had to figure out a way that's, that's the house. It doesn't look like that no more, but that's how the house used to look. So we had to figure out a way. Yes, that's how the house looks now. So we had to figure out a way to accommodate with the community one, because one of our commitment was this was going to be a community space. And so this is kind of changing the whole narrative of what an enslaved burial ground looks like, feels like when you come there. We have a, we have a garden not too far from it in this building is a community with talks and, you know, type of all types of events that the community can utilize. And I kind of want to ask you this because you've been in part of both. And it's really, you know, you got your eyes on both sides. And have you really experienced, you know, that part of it to where you can recognize, you know, I do myself but I just want to ask you for that you actually recognize the different cultural take. And in both, you know, parts of these, you know, these, these sites. Yes, I think that, you know, it's a smaller, it's not what I did notice. Pretty early on, when I started working with you guys in Kingston was, of course, it's a smaller town. The context is a residential neighborhood, but there's more of, there's more than just the scale difference from the Harlem site and the Kingston site. There was a more coherent sense of community. And, and like you said, there was a sense of this could be, there was a more maybe some other possibilities on the table. The things that you spoke of. I think in Harlem it's such a, you know, I think that there's, there's a lot of different folks here that I wouldn't presume to be able to speak for for all of Harlem. But I think there's more maybe more. I think the pain is more visceral here. Perhaps because of the state that that site is in of degradation. And just the state of the conditions of life that are affecting many people in Harlem is much more viscerally present. And so I think some of those concerns are more kind of you are more perceptual. I would recommend checking out Abigail Deville's documentary which I showed a couple stills from where she talks about the kind of refuse on the Harlem site, and how, how do we make something out of the refuse. And I think she's channeling how people feel about that site here in Harlem. But yeah, I definitely noticed a difference. I hope that speaks to that a little bit. I'm out of ideas. Thank you so much. Thank you for your wonderful presentation. Thank you for sharing your ideas and your work with us really inspiring to see these projects and to see your investment in both of them and really in rethinking the discipline at large and the connections between architecture and preservation. So thank you for that. And we owe you a drink. So, yes, soon enough. Thanks guys have a good evening. Thanks. Thanks guys for coming.