Horace King, Ethel Madison Bailey Furman, Julian Francis Abele, Elizabeth Carter Brooks, Amaza Lee Meredith, William Wilson Cooke, Norma Sklarek, Georgia Louise Harris Brown, and Calvin Thomas Stowe Brent are just a few among the many Black people who made significant contributions to the built environment. Few people are aware of the many buildings, bridges, and parks in their neighborhoods that were built by these and other Black architects, landscape architects, contractors, builders and engineers. Structural racism kept many of these built environment practitioners from being publicly acknowledged for their works and, in some cases, from even being paid for them. For some of these practitioners, the knowledge of their contributions has persisted only in the memories of their descendants.

The Black Architects Archive surfaces these and other under-represented built environment practitioners across history by mapping the impact of Black intellectual and physical labor on transforming the American built environment. The Archive helps to diversify the spatial history of our towns and cities while also serving as a public history resource that documents the impact of Black spatial practices on American history and culture. Recognizing that many Black builders were marginalized in history because they could not be formally recognized for their contributions due to racial discrimination, the Black Architects Archive relies on crowd-sourced and community-based contributions to grow its repository of Black shapers of the built environment.

The Black Architects Archive has been supported by funding from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts; Northeastern University's College of Arts, Media, and Design; and NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. The project was initiated and is currently managed by the Data Humanism by Design (DHxD) Research Group.


Jay Cephas, PhD is the Director of the Data Humanism by Design (DHxD) Research Group. Jay is an Assistant Professor in the History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University, where he conducts research that explores the relationships between labor, technology, identity, and the built environment. Jay served as a 2019 W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was co-editor of JAE 76:2 Pedagogies for a Broken World.


Current research fellows

Ladi'Sasha Jones
Jeremy Wolin


Past research fellows

Ellen Bechtel
Sophia Berkofsky
Josie Cerbone
Jonathan Chery
Annalee Fuller
Surya Malladi
Sanket Pimple