Eggs Frying, Sweeping: A Series of Reprojective Footnotes

Abstract

In her fantastical children’s book Tar Beach, Faith Ringgold writes from the perspective of an eight-year-old girl named Cassie Louise Lightfoot. Cassie could fly, and anything she flew over she could claim and own forever. Her flight took place over Harlem, USA, a nation within a nation, carrying the weight of an age-old collective imagination. Harlem is “the mecca” of Black cultural production that accommodated the heartbreaking ills of racial inequity throughout the 20th century only to watch its buildings become derelict and its property values fall. By the 2000s, Harlem was gentrifying at a rapid pace with new developments culturally appropriating the fragments of collective imagination that were left.

The thesis reprojects Cassie’s flight over one building in particular, the Rennie Luxury Housing Complex. The name of the complex, “the Rennie,” appropriates the nickname of the building that was demolished for its construction, “the Renny.” The demolished building, formally named the Harlem Renaissance Casino, Theater, and Ballroom, emphasizes the tragic, ongoing loss of architectural landmarks for Black communities across America. The thesis responds by proposing a series of architectural reprojections (footnotes) toward the new luxury housing complex to afford communal forms of living and ownership. To do so, the project intervenes within the typological history of the Harlem Airshaft, reimagining it as an architectural sampler bearing witness to Harlem’s sonic lineages.