J. Max Bond, Jr. (left) with architects Donald Ryder (center) and Nathan Smith (right), ca. 1969.
Neigh Dormitory at Mary Holmes College, West Point, Mississippi, 2019. The first commission of Bond Ryder Associates, the dorm was completed in 1970 and is today abandoned. Photograph by Brian D. Goldstein.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, Atlanta, Georgia, 2019. Designed by Bond Ryder Associates and completed in 1982. Photograph by Brian D. Goldstein.
If Architecture Were for People: The Life and Work of J. Max Bond, Jr. is the first book-length study of architect Max Bond. Bond, the preeminent African-American architect in the postwar United States, was a civil rights activist, innovative educator, and designer of major commissions across scales. Yet his work remains largely overlooked. Indeed, throughout his life Bond occupied a unique position as both central figure and outlier, professionally successful but always one among a tiny percentage of black American architects.
By tracing this tension across key sites in Bond's life and work, including Cambridge, Paris, Kumasi, New York, and Washington, DC, this book will use the biography of one exceptional architect to chart an alternate history of architecture and urbanism in the postwar era. If Architecture Were for People is, in a sense, a history of modern architecture from the other side of the street. Driven by the demands of the Black Freedom Struggle, Bond insisted on a practice centered on social engagement in decades that saw architecture turn increasingly inward. In housing, memorials, museums, and libraries, among others, he expressed a vision of the built environment that was democratic and inclusive from conception to completion, internationalist in orientation, and celebratory of urban spaces and the people who lived in them. At the same time, Bond’s presence revealed the pervasive and fundamental discrimination that faced designers of color in a profession that espoused liberal ideals. Such constraints ultimately kept his vision of architecture for people at the field’s margins.
Bond’s life and work provide a complex and multilayered answer to a seemingly simple question: what does race have to do with architecture? Viewing the built environment through Bond’s eyes reveals that, in short, race had everything to do with architecture in the postwar United States.
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