NCID-1037
Craig Wilkins
Lecturer in the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning
University of Michigan
Education/Degree:
1 Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature (University of Minnesota)
About
Architect, artist, academic and activist, Dr. Craig L. Wilkins currently on the faculty at the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. A 2017 Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum National Design Award winner and Hip Hop architectural theorist, his creative practice specializes in engaging communities in collaborative and participatory design processes. He's particularly interested in the production of various forms of space, understanding publically accessible and responsive design can radically transform the trajectory of lives and environments, especially for those on the margins of society. His award-winning design work has been featured in such publications as the Washington Post, Miami Herald, Houston Chronicle, The Atlantic, and Fast Company. A leading scholar of African Americans in the field of architecture, his books, essays, articles, and public talks explore the rich social, cultural, political, historical and aesthetic contributions of oft-ignored practitioners of color with the kind of broad, critical and celebratory insight that comes from over 3 decades of personal, professorial, and professional experience. His essays have been published in the Journal of Architectural Education, International Review of African American Art, Art South Africa, Volume, Minneapolis Star Tribune and Detroit News among others. Recipient of the 2008 Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture's Collaborative Practice Award and the 2010 Kresge Fellow, the former director of the Detroit Community Design Center is the author of?The Aesthetics of Equity: Notes on Race, Space, Architecture & Music (University of Minnesota 2007), ?Ruffneck Constructivist? (Dancing Foxes Press/ICA 2014) and ?Diversity Among Architects: From Margin to Center? (Routledge 2016) as well as co-editor of?Activist Architecture: A Field Guide to Community-Based Practice? (DCDC Publications 2015).
Current Work
In its broadest sense, Wilkins’ work seeks to assist those who love architecture to find a meaningful relationship with Black America while simultaneously encouraging Black Americans to reclaim a similar relationship with the built environment. Trained as both an architect and cultural critic, he explores the intersections of architecture, identity, and justice across multiple platforms in various forms. In a moment dominated by state-mandated xenophobia, the rise of nativism, and police violence that gives us Trayvon Williams, Eric Gardner, Miriam Carey, and Jorge Garcia, among others, Wilkins uncovers and make plain the oft-hidden traces of presence laced throughout our shared spaces, the familiar echoes of participation that shape the places we live, work, and play, the stories of architecture that challenge common misconceptions about who is authorized to contribute to, access, find joy, and sanction in the built environment. In essence, the work is a struggle of memory against forgetting. His current project is an account of a century-long quest to pay homage to the consistent, if often invisible, African-American presence on the National Mall. Despite the plethora of print around the successful 2016 opening, details of its 100-year journey have primarily gone untold, much less understood, in the proper context; one that centers around the unique relationship of African-Americans to the National Mall and the Mall’s singular importance in the construction, celebration and aims of American identity through space, place, and architecture. The project extends his work into unexplored territory for criticism: creative non-fiction, where fragments of memory are not merely represented as flat documentary but written to give a new take on the old, constructed to move one into a different mode of articulation and public discourse.
Research Area Keyword(s)
Architecture, Music, race, space