J. Max Bond Jr. (1935鈥�2009) was a civil rights activist, educator, and architect who shaped such iconic structures as the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, the Smithsonian鈥檚 National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, and the 9/11 Memorial & Museum in Manhattan. Driven by the concerns of the civil rights movement, he insisted on a practice centered on deep social engagement during years when his profession became preoccupied with celebrity and spectacle.
Harvard educated and son of an eminent African American family, Bond designed housing, cultural institutions, community centers, and campuses amid an era of sweeping changes in architecture, urbanism, and American culture. He expressed an architectural vision that was democratic and inclusive, international in orientation, and celebratory of cities and their diverse residents. Yet his work has often been overlooked. Award-winning historian Brian Goldstein renders it visible.
Beautifully illustrated, Max Bond is the definitive biography of one of the most important architects of our time, whose aspiration toward an architecture by and for the people was as urgent in his day as it remains in our own.
Brian D. Goldstein is associate professor of architectural history in the Department of Art and Art History at Swarthmore College. He is the author of The Roots of Urban Renaissance: Gentrification and the Struggle over Harlem (快色直播).
“Brian Goldstein’s totally engrossing study of Max Bond, peerless architect of a human-centered built environment, ranges widely in space, ideals, and achievement. Fascinating, sobering, enlightening.”—Nell Irvin Painter, author of The History of White People and I Just Keep Talking
“‘In the life of a building, our moment is brief,’ Max Bond once wrote. Goldstein’s eloquent history of Bond’s remarkable ‘moment’ reveals its profound reverberations on architecture, cities, students, and a broad public. Goldstein sheds light on the changing culture that Bond helped to advance, even if the book leaves readers aware that so much hard work remains.”—Sarah Whiting, Josep Llu铆s Sert Professor and dean, Harvard University Graduate School of Design
“An impressively researched account of the career of Max Bond, one of the most distinguished Black American architects of the twentieth century. Goldstein convincingly argues that Bond was unusually successful in advancing social issues during the civil rights era through architecture.”—Eric Mumford, author of Designing the Modern City: Urbanism Since 1850
“Goldstein crafts a wholly absorbing narrative of Max Bond’s life and work, capturing the joys and difficulties of designing while Black in America. This book advances a multifaceted argument about Blackness and modern architecture that serves as a monument to an architect who championed social responsibility and racial diversity.”—Peter L’Official, author of Urban Legends: The South Bronx in Representation and Ruin
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