Columbia University professor Mabel O. Wilson will deliver the A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning’s inaugural Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial lecture.
Titled “Notes on a Virginia Statehouse: Architecture and Race in Jefferson’s America,” the free lecture will begin at 6 p.m. Jan. 19 in the auditorium of the Art and Architecture Building, 2000 Bonisteel Blvd.
A professor at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Wilson co-directs the Global Africa Lab and is an associate director and fellow at Columbia’s Institute for Research in African-American Studies. She is a founding member of Who Builds Your Architecture? — a coalition that aims to examine the links between labor, architecture and “the global networks that form around building buildings.”
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Wilson also is a member of the design team for the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia. She is the author of “Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums,” and “Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture.”
Sharon Haar, professor of architecture and chair of the architecture program, said Wilson’s scholarship addresses a wide range of contemporary concerns within architecture and urban planning. She added her work fits in with the college and university’s interest in “building a more equitable, inclusive environment both within our campus and in our practices moving forward.”
“Wilson’s scholarship resides at the intersection of space, race and culture, with a particular focus on how architecture is implicated in exclusionary practices both on the ground and in mediated environments,” Haar said.
