In the 20th century, Black architects and designers built spaces that were both modern in design and functionality; combining the modern design elements of clean lines and minimalism with experimental approaches to changing how we interact with the built environment. Despite their innovation, however, their work has long gone underrecognized.

To celebrate the work of Black designers and diversify our nation’s architectural history, the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund at the National Trust for Historic Preservation established the Conserving Black Modernism (CBM) program in 2022. A partnership with the Getty Foundation, CBM has awarded $3.1 million to fund preservation work at 16 modernist historic sites designed by Black architects across the country. In 2024, the Getty Foundation renewed their support with a $1.5 million grant, which will be awarded to a new cohort of eight sites in July 2025.

In this conversation, the Action Fund’s Editorial Fellow Shayla Martin, interviews Conserving Black Modernism Fellow, Dr. Charles L. Davis II, to discuss an emerging definition of Black architectural modernity, and detail the selection process behind two of the most recent CBM grantees: the Watts Happening Cultural Center and the Robert T. Coles Home and Studio.

This idea of comparing Black modernism to white modernism came from the work of Houston Baker and his book Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance where he tries to recuperate the creativity that was embodied by the work of the Harlem Renaissance, which at least when he was going to school was thought of as a failed movement because it had not produced works that perfectly emulated the works of European modernists. I feel like in architectural history, we’re just now discovering what Black architectural modernity is and giving it names and labels and contending with how it both adheres to but pulls away from our professional culture.

How would you define Black modernism?

I define Black architectural modernity as the spatial and formal [built] embodiment of the black cultural projects that emerged for African Americans throughout U.S. history. This goes all the way back to the time when they were enslaved peoples and had to adjust to become [free] people living in the United States, through the Civil Rights Movement, through Jim Crow, disinvestment, and carceral projects. Through all of those things, Black people have been forced to think of themselves as human in a world that doesn't accept their humanity.

To me, Black architectural modernity began as a process of resistance and humanization, just living and surviving and learning to become a whole person in this hostile space. It's now become a way of being. It’s a process of both aspiring to and attaining racial uplift, and the ways that our built environments embody this aspiration.

As part of the jury that selects which sites receive Conserving Black Modernism grants from the Action Fund, how do you decide which sites are awarded? Is there more of a focus on physical architectural aspects or the history of the site?

This is a really great question. First, I'll say that the jury is a mixture of practitioners who were preservationists and architects, historians, and museum curators with varying attitudes and agendas, so it was a very complex conversation. One of the main issues that continues to emerge was ‘what constitutes Black modern architecture?’ Is it just the biography of the person making it? Is it something separate and distinct culturally and socially? And if so, is it primarily understood in aesthetic terms and formal terms, or is it understood in social and spatial terms? I was always on the side of seeing Black architectural modernity in terms of social and cultural aims.

The Watts Happening Cultural Center is a really interesting example because the architect, Robert Kennard, looked at that space as what he called “Afro-Western” architectural style. There was a complex spatial and institutional program, and he used European modernist design idioms, so both the program and the space and the form were experimental. The site has a really rich history of actors and playwrights and community organizers working in that space, and they're continuing to do this today.

There's something similar in the Robert T. Coles Home and Studio, a Black architect I actually worked for when I lived in Buffalo, New York. The people in charge of the house want to turn it not into just your traditional house museum, but into a communal hub. A space where high schoolers can come to learn what architecture is about and people can have tours of the house. They're interested in the ways that it becomes an activist and activating space for the local community. I feel like it parallels the vision of the Watts Happening Center; both using the idiom of European modernism but spatially bringing a specificity of Blackness that recalibrates what those forms mean. It's an alternative presentation of what modernity should be for Black Americans.

Do you think that Black architectural modernity or even just Black physical spaces are an aspect of Black history and culture that's been overlooked or under celebrated?

I think that architectural history and architectural practice is so inundated with a Eurocentric white frame that anything outside of that for [design historians] seems to be not legitimate. Then the world forces them to deal with those things and they rediscover and cherry pick things that they can legitimize within their architectural practices, so that it becomes ok to talk about celebrated Black architects like Paul Revere Williams and Robert Robinson Taylor for what makes them modern.