Searchable History of African American Architecture Website

Searchable History of African American Architecture Website

Grant:
Lecturers' Professional Development Fund (LPDF)
Academic Year:
2012 - 2013 (June 1, 2012 through May 31, 2013)
Funding Requested:
$1,975.00
Project Dates:
-
Applicant(s):
clwilks
Overview of the Project:
This project will address the conspicuous lack of representation of people of color in the history and discourse of architecture. To date, there have been less than two-dozen books written by and/or about practitioners of color, only one African-American architectural critic to have written for a major metropolitan newspaper and zero editorial positions at the major architectural publications; this, for a history in a field that dates back to the 17th century. In collaboration with other interested faculty, this project endeavors to establish an interactive wiki-type database for the identification, collection, categorizing and distribution of material related to the study and practice or architects of color in the United States dating from the 1600s to present as part of an ongoing effort to situate such work within the historical timeline of architecture and the American society.
Final Report Fields
Project Objectives:

to collect, organize and make searchable the various data, documents and media concerning people of color in the field of architecture.

Project Achievements:

the project has identified over 850 documents (papers, news articles, etc) - many of which are now out of print and date back to the 1700s -25 books, 50 websites and 20 videos, none of which have ever been collected in a single reference location

Continuation:
due to technical isues with the operation of the site and the web designer, the project is still in a beta mode and has yet to launch. it shall be up and running by the beginning of the school year. at that point, it will available to not only the entire faculty and student body of the college of architecture, but the field of architecture in general
Dissemination:
an announcement with a link to the site will be sent to the college as well to other scholars at select schools as well.
Advice to your Colleagues:
even thought i'd collected most of the material for the site before applying for the grant, this was a much larger project undertaking than i anticipated, as material continues to be published and located. i was able to secure a urop student to help catalogue and organize the vast database, which helped considerable. i would suggest that for a project such as this, it may be useful to think long and hard about the estimated time to completion, particularly when you need to bring on a third party servicer.
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