SUMMARY

This interview of Mabel Wilson covers her desire to integrate her own cultural experiences into her architectural work. At the University of Virginia in the early 1980s, she found the program to be too classical and she described that every project either had to be the circle or the square. A semester at the Architectural Association (AA) in London in 1984 proved to be transformative for her thinking of architecture as she read texts by Foucault and Benjamin in an experimental style teaching that encouraged students to integrate cultural identity into design. This inspired her to pursue further education at Columbia, where Bernard Tschumi was importing the AA’s dynamic. At Columbia, Wilson studied feminist texts with Mary McLeod, Edward Said’s Orientalism with Zeynep Celik, and Kenneth Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier with Robert Bruegmann, where she encountered redlining. These explorations allowed her to explore domesticity, ideas of memory and displacement in her own work. In 1995, Wilson entered NYU’s interdisciplinary Ph.D. program where she studied whiteness theory with Lisa Duggan and read Omi and Winant’s Racial Formation in the United States (1994) and Wiegman’s American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (1995). Initially planning to study the first post-1960s Black museums for her Ph.D., she uncovered a deeper history of African American culture which aided in the creation of her book The Negro Building (2012).