An Architecture of Liberation
The Education
When viewed from a larger perspective, Social Factors and the plans for the Talented Tenth were about healing. Furthermore, I discovered a larger pattern that exposed itself, unifying the past with the present and hopefully with the future, when reporting on the Tenth and how it dovetailed with my experience as a counterculture adherent and a student of Social Factors in the College of Environmental Design.
While Social Factors sought the healing of the environment by transforming architectural education, the Tenth’s plans were consciously focused on economic development and unconsciously aimed at healing the Negro. Both failed, but not without leaving behind a story.
I never questioned why I ended up in architecture. Things just happened. The development of Alamo Square has the quality of a dream becoming true.
Critical consciousness and social justice demanded that my grandparents occupy one of the units. This move completes the cycle by re-establishing a presence in the community––a triumphant return with a Hollywood ending. But that conclusion did not materialize. The poetic standpoint is opposed and recommends the tantalizing prospect of poetic justice for its far-reaching future possibilities as reparations for the debt society owed us from the Fillmore experience and as Black Americans.
To end family feelings of resentment, rancor, and bitterness against the betrayal at the hands of the agency, and America in general, poetic perception offers paradise, “garden living” in the islands of Hawaii.
The family achieves peace and happiness with the prospect of more to come through the bounty that poetic justice provides forever and ever.
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