This project aims to represent the racial trauma that African American families faced during the civil era in the Unites States in the 1960s. The building envelope seeks to provide safety and security for the inhabitants within. The porch was significant throughout the history of the African diaspora as a place to welcome guests, interact with the neighborhood, share stories, gather, and transtion between the public and private settings.

This project uses a strong wooden framework to wrap the home and creates safe indoor spaces and well protected exterior porch spaces. The framework allows for physical safety as it provides a barrier to the outside world. Opening in the framework provide opportunities for visual connection and surveillance of the surrounding areas.

The misalignments between African and European influences in the African American culture appears really clearly in music. The same dissonance can also be found in architecture, between the pre-existing European housing typologies spread all over the US and what could be called « black space ». The objective of this project is thus to highlight and claim this dissonance through the renovation of the American Foursquare typology by creating new experimentation spaces for black culture to be expressed.

The project is made of a double dissonance that reinforces the idea of the hidden meaning and double entendre of African American Culture that appears clearly in music :
– From the outside, the dissonance appears on the additional third floor, that looks like it slid from the existing house to push the roof and extend the interior space.
– But from the inside, the dissonance is created by the new use of the front space of the house.

Inspired by the barber shop and braiding culture, in conjuction with a rich history in entrepreneurship, this project works to celebrate these aspects of black culture by identifying one method of growing a small business and allowing for one to work for themselves. The new structure on the vacant lot is a proposed bike shelter for the mobile barber. The barber has the option to rent out a space to conduct work on the site in between home visits. The house, an existing Buffalo Double, belongs to a family that owns a small hair care business. The house works through a serie of phases to grow into a full business that integrates the barber shop, which allows the bike shelve structure to eventually become a public play space for the community.

The quilt culture is one of the oldest African American traditions that has been successfully passed over the generations since slavery. The intent of this project is to bring back this culture into Hamlin Park, and introduce a housing typology which could be used as a pattern type for such communities.

The proposal is a renovation of the Buffalo Double typology into a new typology that allows the second floor to be used as a maker’s space for making quilts. The first phase of the project consist in renovating the front one-third of the first floor to convert it into a quilt shop which can serve as an income-generator for the family curating the entire house. The second phase includes the removal of internal walls on the second floor and the addition of a hammer-truss system to provide a column free flexible space that can be used by quilters during the day and the community at night for public and private events.