This project uses biography as a method to explore how an unsung Black American architect, W. Joseph Black (1935–1977), navigated the structural impediments that even today manifest in just 2% of American architects identifying as Black. Invisible Plan: W. Joseph Black’s Black Arts Movement uses archival architectural and literary sources—as Black was both architect and writer—to reconstruct not only a life, but the broad, interdisciplinary scope of Black’s unrealized works, which comprised transformative design plans for Harlem as well as field-altering historical texts chronicling the history of Black builders in America, and which reveal Black’s work as an unacknowledged architectural arm of the multidisciplinary Black Arts Movement. Building on recent efforts to write race into architectural histories of modernism, Invisible Plan offers a form of “completion” to Black’s work, while meditating more broadly on the still unfinished project of Black building and Black architecture in American life.

Peter L’Official is a writer, arts critic, and educator from the Bronx, New York. He is an associate professor of literature and directs the American and Indigenous Studies Program at Bard College, where he is affiliated with the architecture and Africana studies programs. L’Official is the author of Urban Legends: the South Bronx in Representation and Ruin (Harvard University Press, 2020) and his writing has appeared in Artforum, Architectural Record, the newyorker.com, The Paris Review Daily, and other publications. His work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, and he was the project coordinator for “Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck,” a three-year grant supported by the Mellon Foundation Humanities for All Times initiative. He holds a PhD in American studies from Harvard University, and a master’s of arts in cultural reporting and criticism from New York University.