Confronting Erasure by Going Beyond Hope and Goodwill
Join the New York Chapter of the National Organization of Minority Architects (nycoba | NOMA) and the AIANY Diversity & Inclusion Committee in celebrating the 10-year anniversary of the founding of the J. Max Bond Jr. Lecture. Established in 2010 as a joint collaboration, this annual design talk honors the memory of J. Max Bond, Jr., FAIA, NOMA, an architect, advocate, teacher, and trailblazer of his time. The Bond Lecture addresses issues that were important to Bond: equity, inclusive design, communities, and global cultures, in particular Africa (Ghana).
This year’s speaker is June A. Grant, RA, NOMA, Founder and Design Principal at blink!LAB architecture, a boutique research-based architecture and urban design practice. Disturbed by the current trend of light-touch paint urbanism, with no investment in community amenities such as libraries, homes, bus stops, street lights, and beautiful spaces for our bodies in celebration, Grant has been exploring self-directed projects as a method to initiate catalytic change that celebrates local culture through form. Grant invents design strategies aimed at the sustainable regeneration and conservation of African American communities. Her multi-disciplinary design approach is a desire to give shape to the impact of migration and its resultant layered social patterns as fundamental to understanding local context. Grant will present realized and envisioned projects from the domestic to the building and urban scale that examine the interrelatedness of the human experience. For this 10th-anniversary lecture, attendees are invited to consider how they can participate in leading the transformation of environments and urban systems by embracing their own impatience as agents of social change.
