On April 7th, 2023, Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin was invited by SCI-Arc faculty and students to deliver an impromptu verbal meditation on a series of topics, including humanity, hope, the individual, collectivity, transformation, strategy, oppression, ungovernability, resistance, the mind, equality, unbuilding, and joy. At the vibrant age of 76 years, Lorenzo did not disappoint, leaving us with the ultimate gifts of blueprint and possibility. Lorenzo was the culminating speaker of the seminar “Do the Poor Weep For Rome? Reading Mike Davis Into the Future” organized by SCI-Arc faculty Thabisile Griffin and John Cooper to honor and invoke the spirit of the late, great historian, urbanist, and activist Mike Davis who was faculty at SCI-Arc in the 1990s and who passed in Fall 2022.

Elder, anarchist, teacher, former member of Black Panther Party and SNCC, and life-long revolutionary, Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin has catalyzed the movement for liberation on many fronts. Agitating against war and racial segregation in the ‘50s and ‘60s, Lorenzo participated in NAACP youth group sit-in protests that helped end racial segregation in Chattanooga. In 1969, Lorenzo was framed for the murder of a KKK leader, but escaped by hijacking a plane to Cuba. Captured by the CIA in Eastern Europe, Lorenzo was extradited back to the US and sentenced to life imprisonment. Lorenzo’s activism did not cease, and in 1979 he authored Anarchism and the Black Revolution, revised and republished in 2021, which remains the original and ever-radical statement of Black Anarchism, empowering and imparting struggle methods to many. An international campaign led to Lorenzo’s release from jail after 15 years, and Lorenzo continued to fight against criminality in the governing regime through Concerned Citizens for Justice, while based in Chattanooga.

With his wife, also a former Black Panther Party member, journalist, and veteran organizer– JoNina Abron-Ervin, he has organized rallies and marches against police brutality, founded the Memphis Black Autonomy Federation, and initiated the Black Autonomy podcast. Lorenzo continues to speak and organize internationally.

Get ready to explore “Beyond the Frame” as we dive into the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures recent temporary exhibition “Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898–1971.” This film takes you through the Academy Museum’s exploration of the rich history of Black participation in US cinema from its beginnings to just beyond the civil rights movement.

SCI-Arc Channel’s “Beyond the Frame” tells the story of how “Regeneration” came to life through curatorial and design decisions and explores the storylines of the exhibition as it seeks to revive lost or forgotten films, filmmakers, and performers for a contemporary audience and showcase the long-standing relationship between film and Black visual culture. Overall, Regeneration highlights the agency many Black artists asserted in their respective crafts despite challenges, revealing their tenacity, immense talent, and unwavering commitment to creative expression.

This short documentary explores Maison de Cartes (House of Cards), a sculptural architectural installation by Gordon Kipping (M.Arch ’95), exhibited at the SCI-Arc Gallery. Responding to the climate crisis, Kipping re-imagines modernist modular construction through the use of mass timber, specifically cross-laminated timber (CLT) and glue-laminated (glulam) beams, as a renewable and low-carbon alternative to concrete and steel.

The film documents a seemingly fragile yet conceptually robust fragment that proposes a structural system of stacked CLT walls and slabs, supporting a universally accessible ramp. Augmented reality technology allows viewers to perceive the fragment as part of a larger architectural whole, hovering between physical and digital space.

To demonstrate its mutability, Maison de Cartes is taken through a geometric progression to become the Hocken House, a residential project currently under development by Gordon Kipping Architects in Toronto, Canada. The Maison de Cartes fragment is to have a second life and support another crisis. The mass timber fragment upon disassembly is reassembled into a cube which is redeployed to provide emergency transitional shelter on an encampment site of the un-housed.

“On Futures” is a series highlighting how designers, artists, curators, and writers envision alternative cultural and architectural temporalities that map out an expansive range of possible futures. Brooklyn-based visual artist Olalekan Jeyifous creates work that critiques the present by looking at the past and the future. Trained in architecture at Cornell University, he blends techniques and skills from the field with speculation drawn from a range of science fiction imaginaries from Afrofuturism to Solarpunk—a genre that envisions possible ecological futures under climate crisis. Best-known for his digital illustrations in the series, Shantytown Megastructures, an imagined Lagos, Nigeria in which contemporary ad hoc construction practices are extrapolated into fantastical vertical settlements, his practice crosses between disciplines and mediums, taking shape as drawings, films, and installations. Jeyifous’ work has been shown at the Shenzhen Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Guggenheim Bilbao. His large-scale public artworks were shown at Coachella in 2017 and recently along the waterfront in Alexandria, Virginia. He is one of the participants in the 2020-21 cycle of Exhibit Columbus and the upcoming MoMA exhibition, Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America.

Darell Wayne Fields discusses recent writings, exhibitions and built work.

Alison Saar discusses her sculptures, assemblages and other works in terms of the Africa-American experience, Greek mythology, and the places they were made.

Victor Jones discusses five projects that rethink domesticity.

At SCI-Arc’s September 13, 2020 graduation ceremony, commencement speaker Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the graduating students, “to ask yourself what are the values and the models that you are developing as you organize your own work, when many of the models and the values in computing, in entertainment, in education, in politics, in healthcare are indeed failing us—they are just insufficient to meet the needs of the majority of people in our society.”

Mabel O. Wilson discusses a career of studying “to see my own history in the built world” from a student design project to MOMA’s “Reconstructions : architecture and Blackness in America”.

After being introduced by Hernán Díaz Alonso, Elsie Owusu discusses in depth a project for “A gallery for returning treasures” (GRT) in Kumasi Ghana. She describes the global movement for the restitution of cultural property and the significance of African artifacts lost through colonialism and theft, focusing on the material heritage of the Astante Empire. She describes how this project is linked to a Kumasi City Hall Complex, currently in development.

At 27:50. Owuso shares “Akrafokonmu / Soul Washer’s Badge”, an audio work incorporating sounds, music and text, inspired by the heroism of Queen Mother Yaa Asantewaa (1840-1921) in the War of the Golden Stool, the Ashanti uprising against the British Empire in 1900.

At 32:30, Hernán Díaz Alonso and Owuso discuss the behavior of objects in terms of political relationships. Owuso stresses the magic contained in “that silent communication between architects, the public realm, and artifacts”.