Erasure by Design Book Launch

Join us in launching V. Mitch McEwen's new book: Erasure by Design: Racial Protocols of Displacement, Demolition, and Extraction. Tracking the methods, terms, and racial protocols that continue to do the work of displacement, demolition, and extraction into the present day, McEwen's book asks: How has erasure formed the space around us? How do we come to know it, so that we can design differently? For the occasion, McEwen will be joined by writer Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts to explore these questions and beyond.

More about the book:

This book travels back and forth in time through scenes of erasure at three primary locations—Southwest, Washington DC (displacement); North St Louis (demolition), and South Los Angeles (extraction). Erasure by Design shares first person narratives of growing up in the wake of slum clearance—that is, "urban renewal"—in Southwest, Washington DC, while assembling archival references that narrate racialized erasure and its legal and spatial precedents. It traces a military complex under construction, where St Louis's cleared grounds and blacked out sites are also defined by satellites, body experiments, explosions, and emptiness. It moves through specific grounds in Los Angeles—dirt walls, hills, oil fields, gas lines, and houses in the forest—to trace how those grounds matter and how their holding intersects with maps that plan erasure, inhabitation, and extraction.

Between these three scenes, Erasure by Design takes on the aesthetics of bad design and good design, as innovated within the intellectual domain of modern architecture at the Museum of Modern Art and Philip Johnson's Glass House. Through a curated cockroach at MoMA—and even the humor, rumors, and gossip about this roach—Erasure by Design reads the role that the museum invents for exhibiting, curating, and re-shaping policy, worldview, and the built environment, as well as how protocols of erasure, demolition, and design conscript the modern built environment into the policing of human and subhuman. In this nuanced reading, the Glass House and its twin, the Brick House, stage a haunting allegory of total violence.

"In Erasure by Design, V. Mitch McEwen wanders and invites readers into that practice of trying to see the "surface and protocols of erasure." How do you map a void? How do you mark erasure (of living, of resistance, of planned removal, and more) without producing another erasure? From Southwest DC to MoMA to Los Angeles to the plans for Negro removal and Japanese removal and incarceration (and so much more), McEwen attends to the languages, strategies, and materialities of erasure, and builds a connective web across time, space, and geography that is resonant and capacious and able to show us in astonishing clarity the spatial projects, the design, of total violence subtended by antiblackness." —Christina Sharpe

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V. Mitch McEwen is an assistant professor at Princeton University's School of Architecture and principal of Harlem-based design practice Atelier Office. She is one of ten co-founders of the Black Reconstruction Collective. McEwen's design work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Museum of Modern Art, and the Venice Architecture Biennale. @atelieroffice.nyc

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts has published widely on African-American history, politics and culture. Her book Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2011, a National Book Critics Circle Finalist and cited by BOOKFORUM as the “Best New York Book” written in the twenty years since the magazine’s founding. Her 2015 book for young readers Jake Makes a World: Jacob Lawrence a Young Artist in Harlem (commissioned by MoMA and illustrated by Christopher Myers) was named by Booklist among the year’s top books about art for children. Rhodes-Pitts organizes collaborative public projects through The Freedwomen’s Bureau.

Columbia Books on Architecture and the City aims to expand the ground of architectural discourse. Bringing together designers, scholars, planners, artists, theorists, and curators, often working outside of the expected formats of their fields on books that ask urgent questions about what architecture is and what it does—and work to model different forms of architectural production beyond building. To amplify new voices while reflecting on those who’ve shaped the field in vital ways and to publish books that explore architecture’s intersections, rethink the assumptions and epistemologies of practice, and confront the discipline’s blind spots and complicity in enduring forms of injustice. @columbia_books_on_arch

Head Hi is an organization dedicated to art, architecture and design specializing in publications and cultural programming with an espresso bar located in Fort Greene, Brooklyn by the Navy Yard. We feature a curated selection of publications from around the globe. Working with local and international artists, designers, publishers, community members and organizations in various fields, Head Hi is a space for exploration and interaction that hosts talks, book launches, art shows, music performances and other events.