NinaJohnson

By Janelle Zara

At the American Academy in Rome, a Baroque villa atop the Eternal City’s second-highest hill, the recipients of the annual Rome Prize gather five days a week for lunch at 1 p.m. After loading their plates at the buffet, these 30 or so scholars and creatives in residence sit at tables that run the length of the courtyard’s loggia. That community and diversity of expertise is, according to current architecture fellow Germane Barnes, “one of the cool things about being at the academy.” While breaking bread, he muses, you could ask any question aloud, like What were the racial dynamics of ancient Rome? “And an archaeologist might chime in.” (The answer? It was complicated.)

In his own work, Barnes, founder of the Miami-based Studio Barnes and assistant professor at the University of Miami, explores the ways that race and architecture are intertwined. His project during his half-year residency in Rome focuses on the classical orders of the columns—Doric, Ionic, Corinthian—that uphold the portico, antiquity’s precursor to the porch, an essential element of the modern Black American household. His goal is to design a new order (or “column disorder”) that abandons European standards in favor of forms and proportions rooted in Black culture. His research mines the lesser-known contributions of North African migration, past and present, to Roman civilization, as well as the writings of Vitruvius, whom Barnes calls “the foremost authority on how to define architecture for some people.” He continues, “That doesn’t really matter to me. I want to take the rules that he thought mattered, so I can break them.”

Winning the 2021 Rome Prize was a single highlight of a momentous year for Barnes—one in which he contributed to the groundbreaking exhibition “Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America” at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, as well as to the Chicago Architecture Biennial. His projects translate theories and symbols of Blackness into physical, sometimes functional objects, installations, and spaces, breaking with historical, often Eurocentric conventions along the way. The porch chairs that he debuted at Miami’s Nina Johnson gallery, for example, incorporate the construction materials of shotgun houses.

His piece in Chicago, meanwhile, was an homage to the block party. As he wrote: “The block party does not obey traffic regulations, it does not obey permit jurisdiction, and it most certainly does not obey traditional urban principles.” In 2021, Barnes also won Harvard’s Wheelwright Prize, the Architectural League Prize, and an inaugural grant from Theaster Gates and Prada’s Dorchester Industries Experimental Design Lab. Reflecting on this streak, he describes his ultimate goals in two ways. “The superficial version? I want to be recognized as one of the best ever,” he says wryly. “But the thing I’m passionate about and attempt every single day? That’s to add more Black people to the profession.”

At the American Academy, the wall behind the bar provides a bit of historical context. Portraits of previous architecture fellows, including the late Michael Graves and Robert Venturi, show rows of mostly white faces; Barnes is the third Black recipient of the architecture prize since its founding in 1897. Hurdles on the road to diversity weren’t simply a question of representation, he explains, but also of unequal access to resources, and the economic hurdles that undermine success. Having grown up in a self-described “upper middle class bubble” in an economically neglected area of West Chicago, Barnes considers himself fortunate that his parents had the means to support his architectural aspirations from an early age. Beyond talent, “money matters,” he says, “and that’s the honest truth.”

Now as an assistant professor, he abandons the unnecessary financial burdens for the next generation, accepting digital assignments rather than asking his students to bear the cost of printing fees. He also refuses to yell, impose all-nighters, or offer internships without pay. As a policy, Studio Barnes puts everyone’s name on a project, no matter how small the contribution. “That’s the exposure that helps you get other work.”

After Rome, he’s set to return to Miami, where for the past five years his studio has been working closely with the nonprofit Thrive Delray to build projects for predominantly Black and brown Caribbean communities in South Florida. Thanks to recent grants, he’ll continue his column disorder project, traveling to North Africa to see, up close, the building techniques now attributed to Roman architecture. One day he hopes to realize his own columns among the neoclassical edifices of Howard University, the historically Black institution where his late elder sister studied. “Imagine a new architecture of an alternative history, inspired by the people who actually built it.”
germanebarnes.com