Alternative Practices: A Case Study of African American Construction

Neglected and abandoned buildings populate the landscape. Many of them remain standing because they have deep meaning to the citizens of a community who have neither the resources to restore the structures, nor the heart to destroy them. This paper looks at a case study of what can be learned from the careful and considered disassembly of one such structure. The study reveals construction practices of African Americans during the post-Civil War period as a continuation of building practices carried forward from slave practices of the plantation era through the Reconstruction era. The study began from the necessary removal of a building that, although once a vital part of the community, had fallen into disuse and was scheduled for demolition. Through our offer to remove the building for the community, we were able to perform the research communicated in this paper, provide a valuable learning experience to the students, and celebrate the life of the building as we discovered it through our slow process of dissecting and disassembling the building. Very few comprehensive surveys of African American building stock have been conducted so our study had to draw largely on observations and first hand accounts of community members. Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery by John Michael Vlach provided most of the background information for the research. The results of our research are somewhat speculative in nature but provide a starting point for future investigations on the topic. The unorthodox methodology of actually performing a building dissection provided conclusive evidence of the additive and adhoc building practices employed by African Americans in the early twentieth century. While it is not the objective of this paper to demonstrate far-reaching patterns, it could be argued that such building practices are typical in many self-reliant communities of the post-industrial world.

Volume Editors
David Covo & Gabriel Mérigo Basurto

ISBN
0-935502-57-2