Germane Barnes

Recorded on June 5, 2024.

Germane Barnes founded his Miami-based studio in 2016. Originally from Chicago, his practice examines architecture’s social and political agency—specifically its relationship with identity. Barnes utilizes historical research and design speculation in his work, making a point to emphasize architecture’s capacity to tell stories. In 2021 his work was included in MoMA’s show Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America and in the Chicago Architecture Biennial. In the same year Barnes was a winner of The Architectural League Prize, received the Harvard GSD Wheelwright prize, and was a 2021–22 Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. First selected in 2018, earlier this year Barnes received his second Graham Foundation grant. His work has been featured in and acquired for the permanent collections of international institutions such as Milan Design Week, San Francisco MoMA, LACMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture. In 2023, Barnes’s project Griot was included in the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale, Laboratory of the Future, curated by Lesley Lokko. He is also part of B-ARN-S or Barns, a collaborative practice that has worked since fall 2023 with a coalition to transform 1012 North Main Street in Fort Worth, Texas, a building with an important and problematic history into a cultural and community center. Barnes is an associate professor and director of the Master of Architecture graduate program at the University of Miami School of Architecture, where he also directs the Community Housing and Identity Lab.

About I Would Prefer Not To

Conceived and produced by MIT’s Critical Broadcasting Lab and presented with The Architectural League, I Would Prefer Not To¹Herman Melville, “Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street,” The Piazza Tales (1856). tackles a usually unexamined subject: the refusal of an architectural commission. Why do architects make the decision to forfeit the possibility of work? At what point is a commission not worth it? When in one’s career is it necessary to make such a decision? Whether concealed out of politeness or deliberately shielded from public scrutiny, architects’ refusals usually go unrecorded by history, making them difficult to analyze or learn from. In this series of recorded interviews, I Would Prefer Not To aims to shed light on the complex matrix of agents, stakeholders, and circumstances implicated in every piece of architecture.

Transcript

Transcript forthcoming.