This web series details a critical contribution made by the Black architects and builders who helped to shape the American built environment. Season one examines the dozens of Black built environment practitioners who contributed to the design and construction of the nation’s capital. By unfolding this spatial history of Washington, DC, the series aims to tell a new story of American architectural practice, one that extends from the enslaved masons and carpenters who constructed the federal buildings of the emergent democracy (such as the White House, the United States Capitol, and the Treasury Department) and culminates in the stories of the Black modernist architects of the 1960s and ‘70s who fought to bring dignified housing to the city’s poorest residents.

Jay Cephas is an historian who studies the impact of labor, technology, and social identity on the built environment. He is assistant professor in the history and theory of architecture at Princeton University. Cephas is also the founding director of the Black Architects Archive, an interactive repository that documents the physical, intellectual, and creative labor deployed by the Black architects, builders, landscape architects, and contractors who helped shape the American built environment across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Through the Black Architects Archive, Cephas is compiling a comprehensive documentation of the thousands of buildings designed by Black architects and builders in Washington, DC. Cephas was recently named a Conserving Black Modernism Fellow at the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.