27 January 2026
10:00 AM EST / 4:00 PM CET
Constructing Freedom: Slavery, Religion, and Abolitionist Architecture in the Nineteenth-Century South
HAMPTON SMITH
MIT
Respondent: Sonali Dhanpal, Columbia University
The First African Baptist Church, Savannah, Georgia, Front View, from Franklin Square. Rev. E. K. Love, D. D. History of the First African Baptist Church, Savannah, Ga. The Morning News Print. 1888.
In 1793, congregants of the First African Baptist Church in Savannah, Georgia purchased land and began constructing a sanctuary with bricks fired on nearby plantations. The sixty-six years it took to complete the building marked the difficulty of sustaining a “for-us, by-us” institution under slavery, where Black worship was legally supervised and often violently disrupted. Securing a site, materials, and labor outside enslavers’ channels posed further barriers. Under these constraints, the church’s 1859 brick exterior adopted Euro-American proportions legible to officials—a tactical sign of civic legitimacy. Yet behind this façade, the story of its construction reveals underground practices of fundraising, exchange, and labor that contested planter control and cultivated Black autonomy.
First, fundraising drew on the wages of hired-out artisans, surpluses from subsistence gardening,and mutual aid networks. Second, sourcing materials avoided dependence on planter wealth and supply chains. Congregants turned instead to Savannah’s internal market, where enslaved laborers sold goods, sometimes stolen from plantations. Court records from the 1820s allege that members of the First African Baptist Church purchased bricks from enslaved brickmakers at the Hermitage, Savannah’s largest brickmaking plantation, who had taken them “without ticket with permission to trade.” These exchanges implicated the congregation directly in an underground economy that defied planter control and sustained Black community building. Third, the collaborative building process—men and women hewing timber, laying brick, and raising the sanctuary—forged reciprocal social and ecological relationships.
The sanctuary’s later role on the Underground Railroad makes clear that abolition was not only imagined but enacted in the making of the church itself. What authorities read as a brick façade of civic conformity was in fact the material record of an abolitionist practice, carried out in the very process of construction.
***
TRISTAN WHALEN
Brown University
Respondent: Sonali Dhanpal, Columbia University
Prince Hall Grand Lodge, 1630 Fourth Avenue North, Birmingham, AL (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)
This paper argues that Prince Hall Freemasonry—the Black Masonic tradition established in late eighteenth-century Boston—offers a critical lens for examining how architecture has mediated race and human difference in American civic history. Working between two temporally disparate but thematically twinned case studies, I track the dialecticalforces shaping the social and architectural production of Black counterpublic space.
In 1775, after being denied entry to Boston’s St. John's Lodge, Prince Hall (c. 1735–1807) and fourteen other free Black men were initiated into Freemasonry by members of an Irish military lodge, forming African Lodge No. 1.Meeting in Hall's leather tannery near Faneuil Hall, the Lodge became an epicenter of political activism and intellectual life, functioning simultaneously as a secret fraternal society and a forum for civic engagement. Through public charges and petitions, Hall and his colleagues strategically rewrote Masonic genealogy to position Black Americans as the true inheritors of ancient stonemasons' esoteric knowledge, forming an institution both embedded within and positionedoutside the hegemonic social order of late eighteenth-century Boston.
The layered functions of African Lodge No. 1 were later architecturally reinscribed in Alabama's Prince Hall Grand Lodge, a seven-story Renaissance Revival monolith in Birmingham's historic 4th Avenue District, completed in 1924. Designed by Robert R. Taylor, the first accredited Black architect in the United States, the temple provided essential civic infrastructure for Birmingham's Black community of over 75,000, housing the first public lending library open to Black citizens in Birmingham, offices for Black-owned businesses, and a 2,000-seat auditorium. In the 1950s and 1960s, the building became instrumental to the Civil Rights Movement, serving as headquarters for Alabama's NAACP chapter, a staging ground for protests and sit-ins, and a makeshift infirmary during the Birmingham Campaign riots of 1963.
Taking seriously Joseph A. Walkes' claim that "the history of Prince Hall Freemasonry is in reality the history of the Black experience in America," this paper examines how Prince Hall and Robert Taylor—designers of the fraternity’s civic and architectural character, respectively—negotiated the tension between public Blackness and secret brotherhood, between race as social signifier and privately felt experience, and between "traditional" Masonic historyand the reinscription of a distinctly Black Masonic genealogy.
10:00 AM EST / 4:00 PM CET
Constructing Freedom: Slavery, Religion, and Abolitionist Architecture in the Nineteenth-Century South
HAMPTON SMITH
MIT
Respondent: Sonali Dhanpal, Columbia University
The First African Baptist Church, Savannah, Georgia, Front View, from Franklin Square. Rev. E. K. Love, D. D. History of the First African Baptist Church, Savannah, Ga. The Morning News Print. 1888.
In 1793, congregants of the First African Baptist Church in Savannah, Georgia purchased land and began constructing a sanctuary with bricks fired on nearby plantations. The sixty-six years it took to complete the building marked the difficulty of sustaining a “for-us, by-us” institution under slavery, where Black worship was legally supervised and often violently disrupted. Securing a site, materials, and labor outside enslavers’ channels posed further barriers. Under these constraints, the church’s 1859 brick exterior adopted Euro-American proportions legible to officials—a tactical sign of civic legitimacy. Yet behind this façade, the story of its construction reveals underground practices of fundraising, exchange, and labor that contested planter control and cultivated Black autonomy.
First, fundraising drew on the wages of hired-out artisans, surpluses from subsistence gardening,and mutual aid networks. Second, sourcing materials avoided dependence on planter wealth and supply chains. Congregants turned instead to Savannah’s internal market, where enslaved laborers sold goods, sometimes stolen from plantations. Court records from the 1820s allege that members of the First African Baptist Church purchased bricks from enslaved brickmakers at the Hermitage, Savannah’s largest brickmaking plantation, who had taken them “without ticket with permission to trade.” These exchanges implicated the congregation directly in an underground economy that defied planter control and sustained Black community building. Third, the collaborative building process—men and women hewing timber, laying brick, and raising the sanctuary—forged reciprocal social and ecological relationships.
The sanctuary’s later role on the Underground Railroad makes clear that abolition was not only imagined but enacted in the making of the church itself. What authorities read as a brick façade of civic conformity was in fact the material record of an abolitionist practice, carried out in the very process of construction.
***
Prince Hall Freemasonry and the Construction of Black Counterpublic Space
TRISTAN WHALEN
Brown University
Respondent: Sonali Dhanpal, Columbia University
Prince Hall Grand Lodge, 1630 Fourth Avenue North, Birmingham, AL (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)This paper argues that Prince Hall Freemasonry—the Black Masonic tradition established in late eighteenth-century Boston—offers a critical lens for examining how architecture has mediated race and human difference in American civic history. Working between two temporally disparate but thematically twinned case studies, I track the dialecticalforces shaping the social and architectural production of Black counterpublic space.
In 1775, after being denied entry to Boston’s St. John's Lodge, Prince Hall (c. 1735–1807) and fourteen other free Black men were initiated into Freemasonry by members of an Irish military lodge, forming African Lodge No. 1.Meeting in Hall's leather tannery near Faneuil Hall, the Lodge became an epicenter of political activism and intellectual life, functioning simultaneously as a secret fraternal society and a forum for civic engagement. Through public charges and petitions, Hall and his colleagues strategically rewrote Masonic genealogy to position Black Americans as the true inheritors of ancient stonemasons' esoteric knowledge, forming an institution both embedded within and positionedoutside the hegemonic social order of late eighteenth-century Boston.
The layered functions of African Lodge No. 1 were later architecturally reinscribed in Alabama's Prince Hall Grand Lodge, a seven-story Renaissance Revival monolith in Birmingham's historic 4th Avenue District, completed in 1924. Designed by Robert R. Taylor, the first accredited Black architect in the United States, the temple provided essential civic infrastructure for Birmingham's Black community of over 75,000, housing the first public lending library open to Black citizens in Birmingham, offices for Black-owned businesses, and a 2,000-seat auditorium. In the 1950s and 1960s, the building became instrumental to the Civil Rights Movement, serving as headquarters for Alabama's NAACP chapter, a staging ground for protests and sit-ins, and a makeshift infirmary during the Birmingham Campaign riots of 1963.
Taking seriously Joseph A. Walkes' claim that "the history of Prince Hall Freemasonry is in reality the history of the Black experience in America," this paper examines how Prince Hall and Robert Taylor—designers of the fraternity’s civic and architectural character, respectively—negotiated the tension between public Blackness and secret brotherhood, between race as social signifier and privately felt experience, and between "traditional" Masonic historyand the reinscription of a distinctly Black Masonic genealogy.
13 January 2026
10:00 AM EST / 4:00 PM CET
Red Clocks and the Modern Metropolis: the Politics of Time in Red Vienna’s Municipal Housing Programme
JEROME BECKER
KU Leuven
Respondent: Andreas Kalpakci, ETH Zurich
Bildertafel des Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseums für die Ausstellung "Wien und die Wiener" 1927, (Wienbibliothek im Rathaus, B-72974, https://resolver.obvsg.at/urn:nbn:at:AT-WBR-132804 / Public Domain Mark 1.0).
Since the onset of modern urbanisation, significant shifts in the synchronisation of living and working have challenged daily rhythms and temporal patterns of inhabiting cities. These temporal shifts, however, have not evolved without conflict. Until today, time is perceived as a contested resource—whether in struggles against exploitative working hours, in demands for more free time, or in resistance to the gendered and racial division of labour. It strangely belongs to us, yet we have to give it away and trade it, by spending it on others or selling it as working hours. How we use and experience time is not simply a matter of individual choice but a question of social justice. It is always conditioned by how everyday life is organised—politically, economically, and spatially.
This paper examines the reciprocal relationship between the socio-political coordination of urban life and the spatial conditions in which multiple temporalities unfold, focusing on the politics of time within Red Vienna’s municipal housing programme (1919–1934). This historical case stands out as a rare instance in which time was explicitly understood as a matter of political negotiation. Drawing on archival research, policy documents, and discourse ana- lysis, I trace how the Austromarxist movement’s diverse conceptions of time—abstract, projective, and relational— shaped the spatial parameters of the housing programme.
By re-examining this well-studied case through a chro- nopolitical lens, the paper highlights an underexplored dimension of urban politics in Red Vienna and, more broadly, seeks to enrich architectural history and theory by foregrounding the temporal politics of public housing.
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Claims from the Margins: Group Activism in Vienna’s Built Environment, 1870–1942
ULLI UNTERWEGER
University of Texas at Austin
Respondent: Elana Shapira, Universität Wien
Postcard of the Czech School Association Komenský, Featuring the Community’s First School Building. A. Werner, Around 1900 (Author’s Research Collection)
My dissertation examines how Vienna’s three largest marginalized groups—Jews, Czechs, and womenacross class lines—created spaces for themselves in the shifting socio-political landscape of the late Habsburg Empire through the Interwar Period.
Vienna has long held a central place in the canon of Western architectural and cultural history, often framed through top-down initiatives such as the Ringstraße or Red Vienna and the work of individual architects and theorists. Recent scholarship has broadened this picture by highlighting the contributions of women and Jews. Still, these accounts usually focus on professional designers or affluent clients,whereas the experiences of other marginalized groups remain largely absent. My dissertation explores these lesser-known histories by considering the activities of associations (Vereine)—democratically structured organizations that legally belonged to the private sphere but often fulfilled socio-political functions associated with the public realm.
Through five case studies—synagogue associations, a Czech school association, bourgeois women’s clubs, sports clubs, and associations of working-class women—I examine a spectrum of engagements with the built environment, from informal spatial practices to design projects by renowned architects. Three guiding questions shape my research: What strategies did these groups use to establish and maintain spaces for themselves? What role did architecture and design play in their endeavors? And how did architectural professionals—architects, designers, builders—participate in these efforts? My analysis draws on a wide range of sources, including surviving buildings, architectural plans and drawings, historical photographs and postcards, contemporary publications, and materials from private archives.
This paper discusses the methodological challenges and preliminary findings of this approach. By concentrating on associations—entities with stable legal frameworks yet shifting memberships acrossseven decades—it reflects on the possibilities and limitations of writing architectural history from acollective perspective rather than focusing on individuals.