Publisher Michelle Komie has acquired World rights to If Architecture Were for People: The Life and Work of J. Max Bond., Jr. by Brian D. Goldstein. Informed by extensive new archival research and oral history, Goldstein’s book will be the first biography of Bond (1935–2009), one of the most prominent Black architects of the 20th century. A designer of the
Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture; the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change; the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among many other buildings, Bond’s life and work offer a new perspective on two sweeping forces that transformed architecture, urban planning, and American culture: modernism and the Civil Rights movement. Bond lived through both, and in telling the story of one exceptional architect, If Architecture Were for People charts an alternate history, showing how race had everything to do with architecture and urbanism in the postwar United States.
About the Author
Brian D. Goldstein is a historian of the American built environment and an assistant professor of architectural history at Swarthmore College. He is the author of The Roots of Urban Renaissance: Gentrification and the Struggle over Harlem (Harvard University Press, 2017), which received the Lewis Mumford Prize for best book on American city and regional planning history in 2019. Follow him on Twitter @bgoldst