Published in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 83, no. 2 (June 2024), 209-232 (download here).
From early in his career, J. Max Bond Jr. (1935–2009) brought the civil rights movement to bear on architecture, insisting that modernism live up to its promise to build a better world. Exemplary of this effort was the first completed work of Bond Ryder Associates, the Neigh Dormitory (1968–70) at Mary Holmes College in West Point, Mississippi. “Modernism as Liberation: J. Max Bond Jr. at Mississippi’s Mary Holmes College” offers a close reading of this overlooked project in the context of Bond’s own encounters with modern architecture as an African American, the realities of Mississippi in the 1960s, and the experiences of the students who made this dorm their home. Bond Ryder shaped a liberatory modernism here especially focused on the freedom and self-determination of the dorm’s Black residents amid ongoing racial violence. In exploring this history, “Modernism as Liberation” provides a novel perspective on the role that architecture played as a force for racial equality and that, in turn, the long civil rights movement played in shaping architectural modernism. While modern architecture had caused much harm by midcentury, the Neigh Dormitory reveals an unexpected source for the rejuvenation of modernism’s social promise: the long struggle for racial justice.
Header image: Dorm Room, ca. 1971, Neigh Dormitory, Mary Holmes College, West Point, Mississippi (Bond Ryder Associates, 1968-70). Photo by Roy Berkeley; courtesy of Ellen Perry Berkeley.
Pictured on cover: Bond Ryder Associates, furniture designs and details for Neigh Dormitory, Mary Holmes College, West Point, Mississippi, 1968-70. Courtesy of Davis Brody Bond.
Lounge, ca. 1971, Neigh Dormitory, Mary Holmes College, West Point, Mississippi (Bond Ryder Associates, 1968-70). Photo by Roy Berkeley; courtesy of Ellen Perry Berkeley.
“With its location at a historically Black two-year college in a Deep South rural county seat tightly interwoven with the civil rights struggle, the project’s significance far exceeded practical goals. The dormitory also exemplified Bond’s effort to shape a rights-oriented architectural modernism at the beginning of his independent career.”