The story of Syracuse is really an American story-a story
of displacing Black residents when there is a public
infrastructural project happening.
Architecture is essentially about people-about how people relate to each
other.
We're not just interrogating America's history with
Blackness, we're interrogating architecture's history with Blackness.
Public housing, specifically,
is a reference to the longer legacy of Black people in
America.
Our first interaction with this country was that we were
property.
We never had anything that was private for us.
At the beginning of the Reconstruction era was the time when the government
then became mostly responsible for our
wellbeing as Black people in America.
Interrogating our public institutions is a really important aspect
of understanding the Black experience in America.
And Syracuse has one of the oldest public housing projects that intersects
with the highway project.
There are several layers of history of the site that I've chosen in
Syracuse.
There were a series of single family and two family houses in the area
that were all built around the 1920s.
So it was a really dense neighborhood. Before the highway came through,
all of that was developed into public housing.
So Pioneer Homes is one of the first public housing projects in the country.
Then the highway came through and then they tore down some of that development
and moved it aside.
And then one of the developments was torn down again for another new
housing project.
And what's being proposed for the site now is that all of that low-income
housing is going to be cleared away,
as the highway comes down to build new mixed income
housing.
The title of my project is "We Outchea - Hip-Hop Fabrications and Public
Space." And it's taking all of those layers of
history and mixing them, sampling them,
remixing them into something new.
So historical images of that time are now put onto
the new glass surfaces in the new proposal to draw
alignment back to that lost history.
The housing might be mixed income housing, but this public realm,
on the ground surface,
is now the domain of the people who were displaced.
The role of the architect, as I want to redefine it,
becomes someone who is a facilitator,
someone who can create a framework,
a kind of grounding,
a foundation for other people to visualize
themselves to create their own environments.
One of the things that I've done for a long time in my practice is think
about how hip hop as a culture can influence
architecture,
and its ability to see things as layers that are
taken from different places that are sampled, if you will,
and then mixes it with something that's really contemporary - bringing back to
memory what was there before.
So the layering that's happening in the project is not random.
The layering is really intentional.
These intersection buildings would be spaces for commerce,
spaces for public interaction.
And that area is where the idea of "We Outchea" comes in - that
there is a sense that in claiming public space,
in asserting one's ownership of public space
is a really important mode of self-care.
That we are able to form community despite hardship,
despite oppression, despite marginalization.
The way that we use public space
is really the way that we express freedom,
and in freedom is joy,
and in joy is ultimate self-preservation and self-care.