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Simply off the campus of Virginia State College—a traditionally Black land-grant college south of Richmond—sits somewhat white home. Known as Azurest South, the 5 room, single-story cottage is crafted of concrete blocks coated in stucco with a flat roof and curved steel coping. Glass blocks make up the lengthy, horizontal home windows at two of the house’s rounded corners, and bright-blue accents pop off the principally white exterior. It’s a lauded instance of Worldwide Model structure (extra in the present day than when accomplished), and although it may nonetheless use some inside repairs to get it to the place it as soon as was, it’s a stunning home.
It’s additionally an necessary one, given its creator and longtime inhabitant. One of many nation’s earliest Black feminine architects, Amaza Lee Meredith was additionally an artist, photographer, and the founding father of VSU’s superb arts division. The product of a then-illegal interracial marriage, born in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1895, Meredith fell in love with design and craftsmanship through her father, Samuel, a white craftsman and carpenter who designed and constructed their household dwelling. After highschool, although, when Meredith expressed an curiosity in changing into an architect, her father refused to present his approval, realizing the pressures and discrimination his daughter would face as a lady of colour getting into a subject that was nearly solely dominated by white males. (The primary Black architect in Virginia, Charles Thaddeus Russell, had solely simply acquired his license in 1909.)
Greater training for Black folks was additionally extraordinarily restrictive within the South, with most being pressured to move north to pursue any type of superior diploma. Mixed, these pressures and limitations are most likely what led Meredith to first pursue a profession as a college instructor, then as an artwork educator and professor. (Whereas engaged on her thesis at Columbia Lecturers Faculty in New York—the place she was throughout the Harlem Renaissance, to her delight—Meredith started to develop a curriculum about how and why to show African artwork historical past, which she thought ought to embody the creation of the whole lot from ceremonial masks to utensils.)
A passionate advocate for her subject, Meredith’s life and work blazed trails within the structure world, however her contributions are sometimes unknown or under-heralded in comparison with her white male modernist counterparts. A brand new MIT Press ebook hopes to vary all that, although. Penned by Jacqueline Taylor, a author who tends to give attention to the intersection of artwork and race and gender, Amaza Lee Meredith Imagines Herself Trendy makes use of Azurest South as a lens via which to see Meredith’s life and improvement, all of which Taylor argues have to be seen throughout the context of her expertise as a queer, mixed-race girl dwelling within the segregated South.
Take, for example, Petersburg, Virginia, the place, in 1939, Meredith accomplished Azurest South on a plot of land she bought for $500. The plot Meredith purchased, which borders two former plantations, sits surrounded by properties and buildings constructed within the Colonial Revival model—a mode that pays homage to an period that, for a lot of together with Meredith, symbolizes solely oppression. Is it actually any surprise that for the primary dwelling she designed—a constructing the place she’d lastly get to maneuver in along with her longtime associate, Edna Meade Colson, additionally a Black educator and activist—she’d go for an architectural model that alerts a recent, clear step away from present design traditions and their baggage?
Regardless of authorized discrimination towards Black and queer partnerships on the time, Meredith and Colson lived collectively in Azurest South for 45 years, utilizing it as each a residence and office. There’s no main bed room within the dwelling—simply two similar bedrooms, suggesting the pair’s equal partnership—and the kitchen sits simply off the storage and carport, a transfer that each signifies the significance of the car in trendy life however that additionally reminds that, for Black ladies on the time within the Jim Crow South, having a automotive meant having (typically) protected passage between work and residential, particularly at night time. As Taylor suggests within the ebook, for Meredith and Colson, the development of the Azurest “was a extra sure approach of discovering true safety and stability in a life in any other case plagued by the risks of discrimination, segregation, and racism.”
That’s additionally why Meredith constructed a studio and workspace for the pair within the dwelling, which she outfitted with a novel, curvilinear hearth, built-in window seats, and many cupboard space and shelving. At dwelling, Meredith and Colson may stay in their very own world and actuality, away from no matter hateful eyes may be on them within the exterior world. Late author and activist bell hooks as soon as wrote that within the Black group, with the ability to create or personal a house has lengthy been a little bit of a political assertion, stating that in a world of “radical apartheid, of domination, one’s homeplace was the one web site the place one may freely confront the difficulty of humanization, the place one may resist.”
For Meredith, Azurest South appears to have been that and extra, providing the educator not solely sanctuary, but additionally a spot to specific and discover her passions. As a believer in Arthur Wesley Dow’s “Composition” principle and a lover of pictures, Meredith used her dwelling as a testing floor for her design theories. She cherished the interaction of sunshine and darkish across the dwelling, and the creation of optimistic and damaging house, believing as Dow did that, as he as soon as put it, “The fantastic thing about easy spacing is present in issues nice and small, from a cathedral tower to a cabinet shelf.”
She additionally owned a duplicate of The 1938 Guide of Small Homes: A New Authoritative Information Guide for Potential Dwelling Builders, which was launched by the editors of Architectural Discussion board and featured works like Richard Neutra’s Plywood Home and the V.M.S. Kaufmann Home in Minneapolis, which—not in contrast to Azurest North—used a wall of glass block to get gentle into the house. Meredith was impressed by way of sustainable and reasonably priced supplies by the designers within the ebook and put that data to make use of in her own residence.
What’s attention-grabbing—or tragic, actually—is that whereas Meredith’s dwelling stands as such an distinctive instance of early Worldwide Model, with its streamlined aesthetic and modernist parts, her work was (and nonetheless is) usually neglected in favor of her white male counterparts. Individuals like George Fred Keck, Kenneth Day, and Walter Gropius had been hailed for his or her use of metal, glass block, and industrial home windows in publications like Architectural Discussion board and amongst their friends at architectural conferences, all whereas Meredith toiled away at Virginia State, the place she targeted on enriching the lives of her college students fairly than pursuing the popularity that was most likely at all times simply out of attain.
Although Amaza Lee Meredith Imagines Herself Trendy isn’t a complete take a look at the work of the trailblazing architect, it’s an attention-grabbing one. (Meredith by no means truly wrote about her work, although she did design different properties in Texas and Sag Harbor, New York, the place she helped develop Azurest North, a plot of trip properties purchased and held by middle-class Black Individuals.) Whereas it’s a pleasure to look again at Meredith’s world via the ebook’s pictures and her architectural drawings, what’s extra attention-grabbing and extra productive is utilizing the late architect’s story as a reminder of the segregated and unsympathetic world that Meredith was born into and went on to inhabit, in all her complexity, intelligence, and fervour. No work, irrespective of how necessary, is created in a vacuum, and it’s solely by analyzing the wholeness of Meredith’s life that we are able to actually begin to recognize how necessary she actually was.
High picture of Amaza Lee Meredith driving circa 1920 courtesy of Virginia State College Particular Collections and Archives; revealed in Amaza Lee Meredith Imagines Herself Trendy by Jacqueline Taylor (The MIT Press)
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