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

This transcript was created using speech-to-text AI software and was lightly edited for continuity. The text may not accurately capture all information or aspects of the conversation.

Ana Miljački  00:24
Hello and thank you for tuning in. I’m Ana Miljacki, Professor of Architecture at MIT and Director of the Critical Broadcasting lab. And on behalf of the Architectural League of New York and the Critical Broadcasting Lab, I welcome you to our architecture podcast series titled I Would Prefer Not To. This season of the podcast is supported in part by the Graham Foundation. I Would Prefer Not To is an oral history project conducted through audio interviews on the topic of perhaps the most important kind of refusal in architects’ toolboxes, refusal of the architectural commission. By definition, the topic of refusal stays hidden from public scrutiny and thus also hidden from history. Withdrawals of this kind tend not to leave paper trails and are not easy to examine or learn from, and yet the lessons contained in architects’ deliberations about and decisions not to engage are politically relevant and urgent. Decisions to not engage a commission, or types of commissions, or commissions with certain characteristics inevitably forfeit potential profit, placing other values above it, at least momentarily. Today, I’m talking to Germane Barnes, principal of Studio Barnes, thank you for joining me, Germane.  

Germane Barnes  01:39
Thanks for having me.  

Miljački  01:40
Germane Barnes, a proud Chicagoan, moved to Miami in 2013 and three years later, in 2016 founded his own Miami based studio. His practice examines architecture’s social and political agency and specifically its relationship with identity. He does that through historical research and design speculation and by insisting on architecture’s capacity to tell stories. 2021 was a very important year for Studio Barnes and Germane himself. His work was included in Moma’s show, Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America, as well as in that year’s Chicago Architecture Biennial. He also won the Architectural League prize, received Harvard GSD Wheelwright prize, and was a 2021-22 Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, and he is a Graham grant recipient this year in 2024. His work has also been featured in and acquired to 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. His project Griot was included in the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale, Laboratory of the Future, curated by Lesley Lokko in 2023. He is also part of a collaborative practice B-ARN-S or Barns, working since the fall of 2023 with a non profit coalition, Transform 1012 North Main Street to indeed transform the building on that address in Fort Worth, Texas, a building with an important and problematic history into a cultural and community center. Germane 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. I’m really interested in finding out more about the work currently going on in the studio and in its collaborations. But as always in this program, we will start by talking about the work that you have not done or would prefer not to do. So, have you ever had to make a decision not to engage or to drop a commission? And if that has not happened yet, can you imagine it happening, and on what grounds? 

Barnes 02:17
Yes, it has happened. So first I want to say thanks for the invitation. And it’s always weird when you hear somebody list off your accolades, because when you’re doing it, you’re like, wait a minute, I did all of that?! It’s kind of, you kind of forget, because in architecture, your head’s always down. But it’s funny that even with all the stuff that I have done, there’s quite a few things I have not done. So I think one of the biggest proposals, and I’ll keep the client’s name private, is in South Florida. There’s a community group that asked if I could replicate the work that I did in Opa-locka in their neighborhood. Meaning, do the community sourcing, community visioning process, ingratiate myself with the neighborhood and the residents, and then take some older, underutilized spaces and then revitalize those. And everyone would assume I’d say yes, because that’s the kind of work that we typically do at the office. But this particular group didn’t want to pay for the community process, didn’t really value the community process, and just wanted to do it from a sort of surface-level, like, hey, we checked this box of getting the information from people in the neighborhood. And I think they just assumed I would still take the commission, because it was a hefty commission. I was like, Nah, I can’t do that. And they’re like, Well, why? I was like, Well, my entire reputation is based off of truly thoughtful and methodical community sourcing and gathering and making them a part of the process. And if you don’t actually have the bandwidth to do that, or you don’t actually want to do that, then you’re just being a predator, and it’s completely extractive, and that I can’t do. So they were a little surprised that. I said no, especially considering they specifically sought me out. It was a private project, so it was mine, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it. 

Miljački  05:57
I’m excited by the fact that you said there’s a lot of work that you said no to, but we can start here, and then if other things come to mind that you’d like to share, please do. But maybe, so you started actually telling us a little bit about this, but I wanted to ask you, how has work come your way so far? And maybe, can we relate that to your move to Opa-locka, from what I’ve read, that was both your arrival to Miami and part of an early collaboration with Jennifer Bonner and Christian Stayner, which is now coming full circle in the Dallas project? But it’s still a little opaque from what I read, so it would be great…  

Barnes 06:38
Yeah absolutely. So Jennifer and Christian were my graduate school professors, and they were also my thesis advisors. So Jennifer was my main thesis advisor, and Christian was my secondary advisor, and the two of them were going for quite a few public art proposals and architecture proposals, and they would get past the first round, get to the second round, but never won a commission, and I’m not sure what was happening during those moments, but then they reached out to me and said, Hey, we’re working on a project. We made it past these couple stages. We think you might be good as a project manager for this, plus you’re also pretty good at the public speaking. Perhaps you can help us shore up some of this process? And I’ll never forget that we were on an airplane to Miami, and I was coming up with what we were going to say on the airplane with Jennifer and Christian, we get to Miami, we do the pitch, we win, and once we win the pitch, I have to now move to Miami as the project manager for Bonner Stayner. That was 2013. So a year goes by, and during that time, there were quite a few changes happening with the developer and nonprofit. Some of the funding fell through. Some of the housing and projects we had were quite a bit more difficult to pull off than we thought. So Jennifer and Christian had to pursue other opportunities, because at a certain point you begin to lose money if you end up waiting too long. But for me, like, I moved here, I can’t just, where am I supposed to go? So I stayed, and everything sort of worked out from there. And then now go full circle, 11 years later, we have the opportunity to team back up, because now we’ve all got our own name by ourselves. I’m no longer the project manager after that first year, I’m now fully fledged, same level as they are. And so this time, the B-ARN-S name was actually a joke. It was a pure joke, because Jennifer’s last name is Bonner, Christian’s last name is Stayner. My last name is Barnes, e-s, and one of our assistants just jokingly put B, capital B, the R, and then the s, and then put an actual barn for it. Because what we realize is, when you want to go for cultural projects, in order to get those, you have to have such a high level of previously completed proposals and stuff, like everybody always asked me, showed me the five other performance halls you’ve done. Show me the eight other 2 million dollar projects you’ve done. So as a result, we’re like, we don’t have this separately. What if we pull the one I have, the two you have, the one you have. Now, we’ve met the requirements, and that’s how we’ve now ended up, that full circle, where we’re now all design principles in our own right for that. 

Miljački  07:36
So would you say that this is typical of how work comes to you? 

 Barnes 09:09
Nah, so work usually, I’m gonna be totally honest with you, Ana, work usually comes to me very easily. It just comes via email. Like, I wish I had like, I wish it was complicated, but I could honestly say the projects I’ve gotten, the Dallas project aside, people just write me emails and say, Hey, big fan of your work, been trying to get a hold of you because I’m notorious for not answering emails. And then they’ll say, Hey, would love to have you do this pavilion, or hey, we have this amazing opportunity, or hey, we have this project or here is another project, and we just want you to do it. And so then I get to say yes, or I get to say no. So if you want to go back to the ones I say no to, I say no to every residential project that comes my way. 

Miljački  09:14
Mhm. What’s the thinking on that? 

Barnes 10:03
Oh, they’re the worst! They’re the absolute worst, like, those are the projects, like to tell my students: architects are expensive hairdressers, because ultimately, it’s your head, right? Because most clients its their house. I can’t tell you how to live in your house. I can suggest things. I can say you shouldn’t do this, you shouldn’t do that, but at the end of the day, it’s your house, and I’ve had too many times where a client has said, but this is the cabinets I want. I’m like, but it doesn’t match, but these are the cabinets I want! Then you do the cabinets, you’re like, oh, take these out. These are gross. Like, I told you this! I told you that was going to happen. Or it’s: but I really like this bathroom design because they saw it on Pinterest, and I’m like, yeah, that bathroom was four times bigger than yours. You can’t fit that in your house. You have to have a smaller portion of that. But they… everybody lives in a house, or everybody who’s fortunate enough lives in a house, and so they believe that they know what a house should be designed like. And I don’t have time for that, so I have absolutely… I’ve even turned out my mom’s house! My mom has asked me to design the house, I keep, I’ve been putting her off for three years now.  

Miljački  11:03
Not getting involved in that one.  

Barnes 11:05
She’s not gonna listen to this, so it’s okay! 

Miljački  11:07
But I would like to keep probing this question about commissions and maybe the nature of the work. You have said that you work on everything from the scale of a doorknob to a chair to a sofa to a building itself, to a landscape, and you’ve also said that you’re interested in your work being understood by a wide audience. And in a lecture recently, you described it as having an if-you-know-you-know quality. And maybe I’m combining too many things here, but I would like us to begin talking about the relationship of commissions and institutions and agents who commission your work and send those emails. And the qualities of that work: there’s a kind of playfulness as a mode of address, a kind of gregarious form and color in some of the work, for example, for the Chicago Biennial and for Miami’s Design District, and some of it persists in your design for the Bahamian market. So maybe, do you agree? And can you tell us more about this dimension of work, or any dimension of work that you think in a way, relates, ultimately, to how people are coming to you, or agents are coming to you to ask for it, right?  

Barnes 12:21
I saw some pink, but okay. Everything started with the Graham Foundation grant back in 2018. Yeah, 2018, that’s when everything took off. In 2018 I got the Sacred Stoops research grant from the Graham Foundation to go look at porches. And when I got that, there’s a woman in the Department of Cultural Affairs who saw my work and said, Hey, can you do exhibition design for us for Miami Art Week? And it was an all-women collective, and they were doing a show, no men allowed, period. And so I came up with this idea of the exploded staircase from the porch research. And it was brightly colored. It was pink, it was magenta because I partnered with an elderly woman in South Florida who does these amazing paintings, and she came up with the color palette. And so we transformed that color palette onto the facades of the staircase, and that was the first time we ever did something super colorful. Mind you, if you see my wardrobe, it’s not very colorful. Everything is like, it’s blues, it’s white, it’s blacks, it’s grays, like, that’s it.  

Miljački  12:27
I saw some pink, but okay.  

Barnes 12:29
That’s another story, that’s back when I was in high school! So there’s a thing. And so as a result, from all of that, people started seeing the color and the work as a way of talking about happiness and joy. Now that has always been in the work, just because I feel like being black in America is hard enough, so if I can find ways to make the work fun, I’ll do that, as opposed to trying to find inspiration in despair, which just makes me sad. Like, I don’t want to do that, you won’t see me going to see a slave movie, something like that. Like, I don’t want to sit for two and a half hours of torture. I can’t, it does something to me negative, and I can’t do that. So instead, all the stuff I do tries to celebrate, but I’m also conscious enough to understand that blackness in America is so diverse. So I’m not trying to be comprehensive for everything, because I don’t have that capacity. But the capacity I do have is Great Migration, the South to the North. American born, grandparents American born, great grandparents American born, great great grandparents American born, that lineage of true America, that part I get. So I’m able to tell those stories and weave those stories together. And the reason why it comes in so many different forms is because Ana, I get bored. That is the honest answer. I get bored. Architecture bores the hell out of me sometimes, because it takes so long to do a building, from the programming phase to schematic and the million revisions and schematic the design development to the construction documents or the code enforcers, who just want to be pains in the ass half the time, but by the time you finish there, you’re 24 or 36 or 48 months down the line, and you still don’t have a building yet, and you have to really be rigorous to stick with it. And sometimes I just get frustrated. Whereas I can do, I can design a chair and be done with it in two months or in three months. I can design the shelf, be done with it in three months. I can do a pavilion, be done with it in six months. So for me, sometimes I get more out of it that way. 

Miljački 15:26
How would you tell us, or how would you describe the way that you organize the practice to enable you to do that? Because I think there’s probably a lot of people who would side with you on this kind of characterization. So is there a way that you can describe the kind of mechanics by which you can hop from these different kinds of work or around? 

Barnes 15:49
Yeah, I have a terrible business model, absolutely, probably the worst business model in architecture. I pay my employees what they’re worth so, so I barely make anything. That’s the honest, that’s the honest truth, like it’s done because I have an amazing team who enjoy the work that we do so they’re compensated properly. And if that means that my take home is minuscule, then I just, I’m okay with that. And to be frank, some of that comes with some financial privilege that I have from my parents that makes it easy. So I know that’s not replicable for many people, but it works for our practice, and I think that’s what allows us to be so nimble as well, because we can just easily pivot. And then I make sure that the people that we put on the team have adaptability within their skill set, because if this idea is that you’re only going to work on construction documents, oh, that’s not how we work. You might be on construction documents Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, we’re building a house. You better go grab the drill,  go grab the level, you better know how to dig a trench, because we’re gonna have to do stuff. And then Thursday, you might be doing a photo shoot, because the client might say, Hey, we want to get all you guys in the certain clothes that we have to show the work that you’re doing. So I think that makes it fun, because this happened to us in New York. We had a project for HP, and it was for global Earth Day. It was about recycling, and we took a bunch of their old materials, we made all these big, massive art and architecture installations. And the team was like, So what are we doing? I was like, We got to go to New York, like, tomorrow. They’re like, wait, what like, but we have to finish up the project first. I was like, that’s got to wait. We got to get on a plane. We got to go to New York. Your room’s already comped. Your flights already paid for. We’ll see when we get there. We get there, we work three straight days. Get the whole thing installed. Then HP is like, we need a photo shoot. Everybody get ready, and they’re like, but wait, we’re not dressed properly. Like, I told you all, this is how this is going to go! Then when they’re finished, we’re on a plane back. And then we’re back now doing work for the Emmett Till Foundation in Chicago. So it’s like, that’s kind of the way we have to be nimble.  

Miljački 17:48
You’ve already started telling us, really what your, the various things that you’re working through in the furniture, installation architecture pieces. These are the categories that are on your website as a kind of typology of the work. But maybe tell us more about if-you-know-you-know, quality. And I realize you can just tell us if you know you know, in response to that question. But I just think it would be useful to give it a little bit of a grounding in this conversation. 

Barnes 18:14
Now that I can absolutely explain. It’s the piece itself that I won’t do the explanation about so I jokingly, again, in the black community, one of the joking things we say is, if you know, you know, and it’s like you show up, and you might say things like, who’s going to be there, or something like that, you just inherently know certain phrases and stuff. So when it comes to gatekeeping the work and making sure that the people that observe it, the people that pay for it, the people that want it in their collections aren’t doing it from a predatory sense, but from a celebratory sense. And so if they have to ask me dozens of questions about the meaning of something, I’m like, Oh, you don’t know. So now I’m not explaining it to you, like, this isn’t for you. However, if you can walk up to something that we’ve made and immediately get it, then you already have that inherent knowledge, and you don’t need the explanation. There you go. If you know, you know. So the MoMA was a great example of that, because when all the work was put up, I had friends texting me, or I had people’s moms, they’re like, I saw this in it. I was like, Cool. You got it. None of you have architecture degrees, none of you have architecture backgrounds, urban planning, but you understood what was going on, because they have that embedded knowledge. Others were asking me, and I was like, I’m not explaining it. I was like, Sorry, can’t do that. Read the brief on the wall, if you can’t get it from there, I got nothing.  

Miljački 19:28
Maybe this is sort of related, but for the reconstruction show, the work at the Academy in Rome, as well as for the Griot project, you describe research, or maybe speculative design and research, both as entailing forms of mining of history. And so we wanted to ask you about the role of history in the work. Is it a repository, an audience, material, or it does it have to be any of these categories? Obviously, but how would you describe it in the context of the work? 

Barnes 20:05
Sure. So the reason, the word mining is intentional, because so much of architecture with blackness is absent. So you’re constantly discovering new stuff and things that maybe the local culture has already known, but the broader culture does not so when I’m looking up stuff in Italy, or I’m learning about North African contributions to classical architecture, I’m like an archeologist. I’m discovering this stuff for the first time. By no means does that make me an expert, because I am not, but I am coming across like a rich history that hasn’t been told, or just flat out was refused to be told. So when we say mining, architecture is political and social agency, we mean that because we’re going to, it’s like for the American Academy in Rome, all the stuff I found about architecture was not in the architecture department, it was in the archeology and anthropology departments. And I was asking myself, why is that the case? Why would I look for or find things about tectonics, things about architectural processes, and it’s not in architecture, it’s because of the author. And so from there, that’s sort of where that came from. And so we always go back through history, just because so much of our history hasn’t been told or has been told improperly or just flat out ignored. And it’s frustrating when you’re an academic as well. And so now it’s like, not only is this my responsibility to now try to fix it, I also gotta to go discover it at the same time. So you’re both discoverer and now you are expert which, who wants those titles? Like who wants, sometimes you just want to just grab a book and it’s already found for you. You want to just be able to reference it, go to the index, put it in your bibliography, and be done. But when you have to be the writer, you have to now create the sources that other people source. It’s an insane amount of pressure, Ana, I’ll be honest with you, it’s an insane amount of pressure.  

Miljački 21:47
I hear you. I mean, there is a quote from W.E.B. Dubois that talks about voice being a responsibility, or sort of the relationship between those two. But maybe it would be useful also, at this point to talk about the project for Venice, which I know you started in a way, in some ways, at the Academy. And I am imagining the current Graham grant will enable further mining or making.  

Barnes 22:20
Yeah. Most things with me start as a joke. Most things don’t start seriously. I have these moments where I’m just like, I wonder if they’ll give me money to do this, and then I’ll just write it and see. And sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. That’s literally where it starts from. So this started the same way. I was like, I wonder if they’ll give me money to make a new column. And I said to myself, why would you even say that? Because then you’re going to have to do it. And are you prepared to have to do that? And I wasn’t. I wasn’t. But after eight months in Rome and searching through Italy, Palermo, Amalfi, all these different places in Italy, I was then prepared to do that. And so that time when I came up with the column, Griot was the name of the installation. It is not the name of the column, however. So we all know Doric, Ionic, Corinthian it’s the triumvirate that we were all, it’s like the foundation we all started with, right? It’s like, you learn architecture in the western context, you learn these three damn column orders. It’s your fundamental architecture, course, arc 101, whatever your course calls it. The problem I found was they skipped Greece, and then before Greece, they skipped Egypt. And it’s like Egypt had columns before Greece had columns, and then Greece had columns, and they were adopted by the Romans. So why the hell are we starting with the Roman orders? Why are we starting with Tuscan and Composite and all this stuff when we completely skip by the Papyrus order that Egypt had, which I find far more beautiful than some of this other stuff. So it just goes back to this idea of, Why are we always skipping Africa? Why are we always skipping the continent? And so when I was in Italy, I kept noticing three things about black people in the area. Now, many of them were migrant, meaning they weren’t American. They were just black. They were from the continent. They might have been from Sudan, they might have been from Nigeria, but they were absolutely black. Majority of them worked in food delivery. You saw this ubiquitous global bag, this big yellow backpack, which is like their version of UberEATS everywhere you went. So that was Labor. Every time I saw it I was like, well, there’s another worker, there’s another worker. And it wasn’t until I went to Bologna that I saw what I call regular, walking around, tourist black folk that weren’t like of this second class of doing food service and being treated as such. Second thing was identity, because you can see there were small, little enclaves that many of them lived in. And so that’s where the second column, and that’s the one that was in the Venice Biennale, the Identity column, that’s the one that was based off of hair, bodies, pushing, pulling. And the third was Migration. That’s because many of them, you were either there illegally, because unlike some of the other locations in Europe that were dealing with mass exodus, black bodies were not welcomed. Other places we’re given shelter. Other refugees were saying Oh, here’s, I have a spare bedroom. When the black people were trying to move, it was like, no, no, we don’t want you here. It’s like, so what’s the difference? And so that just told another story about when there was forced migration during the transatlantic slave trade. So the column orders are Labor, Identity and Migration, which are my columnar disorder, which pushes back against ionic Corinthian and Doric. So the Venice Biennale Griot show was everything, because griot means storyteller, as I was trying to tell the story of the column in that space. 

Miljački 25:44
Thank you for that. So maybe, a little bit from there, in an interview with Iker Gill… 

 Barnes 25:52
That’s my boy! 

Miljački 25:52
Haha, you go in detail describing the emails that came from Venice Biennale crew, and it seemed like an intricate dance for a minute, at least, and I thought we could talk about that, but also really how you would characterize your relationship to institutions that have commissioned your work. So we’ve heard a little bit about landing in a neighborhood in Miami, but some of these other emails that you’re getting, maybe it would be useful to hear about. And then I do want us to also connect to Lexus as a client. They also seem to have come to you with a commission, and I heard you describe it with laughter, as a kind of Yes, however. So I’m wondering if we can talk about a spectrum of yeses, maybe of qualified yeses, which I think is really interesting in the whole body of work. 

Barnes 26:51
Yeah. Okay, so we’ll start with Iker’s point about the email. So I do this weird thing where I’ll make end of year goals, here’s the things I want. I was actually looking at this maybe yesterday morning, and in 2021 Venice Biennale was on there. So was the Chicago architecture Biennial, so was the next Progressives Award, which I didn’t even apply for, but it was just a bunch of stuff. I was like, these are the things I want to go for. Venice Biennale happens. I’m in Palermo, doing my research, when I get the email from Venice. And so I’m like, this is incredible. This is what I’ve been working towards. This is the biggest stage. This is the one that Leslie’s doing. It’s the black one. I’m like, hell yeah, this is the first one I want to be in. Like, let’s rock. And just to find out that I wasn’t even in yet, I was like, What the hell type of thing is this? I got, I was like, I have to propose something? It was like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. You opened up a chocolate, you got the gold wrapper, but then you have to go to the factory and then do more stuff to win. It’s like, No, I thought just getting the wrapper was enough. It wasn’t. So that was how that went. But then other museum commissions, like recently, we finished the pavilion last November for the Museum of Art and Design in Downtown Miami. That’s one where they just select themselves. So the curator, Isabella Villanueva, had been trying to track me down for like, eight months, apparently, and I was just skipping all the emails. And then eventually she got in touch with me through my gallery, and said, Hey, can you please tell Germane to answer his damn email? And so she hit me up. And I was like, Oh, I thought that was fake. And then I answered the email, and it was like, No, we have this massive amount of money for you to do our version of a pavilion, some pavilion, would you be interested? And so I said, Absolutely, provided I can do it the way I want to do and that’s always the catch. I’m always like, you guys have your rules, but if I can’t do my thing, then I’m not going to waste my time. Can’t do it. 

Miljački 28:38
This is why, to me, it sounds like kind of a qualified yes: yes, however…  

Barnes 28:44
Yeah  

Miljački 28:44
Which I find really important to sort of explore, at least as a way to think about commissions, commissions that come, commissions that you take, commissions that you don’t take, and a No is maybe when, that However, it doesn’t pan out. 

Barnes 29:03
Yeah, because sometimes they’ll push back and say, here’s our thing, to which I’ll say, then we can’t, we can’t do it. Right now, the installation we’re doing is for the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami. That one was a, we’d like you to do a summer piece. And so we came up with this idea of the shotgun home, which is so prevalent in black communities, but as a playscape, didn’t have to do a However, for that one, it was just, let’s go for it. So we’re in the midst of building that, it opens up in a couple days over in Miami, from June 10 until early November. You can come by and see that at the museum. But then, when it comes to Lexus, Lexus happened because of Chicago. So the Chicago Architecture Biennial happens, and the curators found out I was from Chicago. They went, wait a minute, you’re from here? I was like, Yeah, born and raised, born and raised. I went to all public schools, I am 100% Chicago bred. And so they took that and was like, Alright, he’s one of the ones we’ll interview, because it’s like, local kid comes back home because I had won the Graham I mean, I won the Wheelwright I won all those prizes already. They’re like, he’s ours. We didn’t realize he was ours. They thought I was from Miami. I’m like, I’m not from Miami. I just live there. So I’m doing the interview, and I’m doing the interview, the interviewer likes me. So they’re like, Hey, you’re a good interview. Well, you want to do another one? And I’m like, I guess, sure. So now we fast forward to the actual opening, and they brought a whole bus of press around, and we talked about the project, because we threw a block party as a part of the project Block Party. So press loved that, too. So when the show was over, the same communications director was working for CAB, Chicago Biennial and Lexus. So they were like, Hey, would you be interested in putting together a proposal for Lexus? And I was like, hell yeah. Why would I not. Sou Fujimoto did this a few years ago! Absolutely, I want to do this, let’s go. And I sent in my proposal, and I’ll never forget, I got an immediate No. The first thing, I got an immediate No back, and…  

Miljački 31:10
A reverse no 

Barnes 31:11
Yes, it was so funny, because I came up, it was, my idea was flora and fauna. I was like, we could do this really cool thing where there’s a bunch of grass and everything’s, it’s about renewable energy. It was their first electric car. I was like, this is all about the environment. So we’re in fauna. Let’s go anywhere in Miami. It’ll be colorful. This would be perfect. I was told the communications director for Lexus hates vegetation. I was like, All right, got it. He said, but he thought it was a good idea.  

Miljački 31:39
But he loves cars!  

Barnes 31:42
But he said,you can do another opportunity. He’s like, try again, so I guess, like, it was a good idea, but he’s just like, this, no, no, we’re not doing this, tell him to come with something else. So this time, I come up with the wireframe of the car. And when it happens, he says back to me, you need to have the car in the show. If you don’t want to have the real car, we can ship to you the immobile version of the car that just sits there. It has like a golf cart motor in it, not a real motor, just for, literally for presentation quality, to which I said back: But the car I’m showing you is the real car. It’s full scale, it’s one to one, it’s just a wire frame. Can we do that instead? And lucky for me, two of the people that work for the big director saw the vision and was like, we think we should let him do it. So this wasn’t a, he just was blown away. He was still skeptical, they convinced him. And then when the thing got built and we sent the first pictures of the In Progress model, he was 100% in. He was like, Oh, this is going to be fantastic. Then when it was finished and it was installed, we finished two days early. So they were like, not only are you, does it look good, you finished on time! You finished ahead of schedule, you’re done, and this thing is gorgeous. It was the first time that they took it from there to Tokyo to Milan. No other people before me had ever done anything beyond just the design Miami booth. 

Miljački 33:17
In these interviews, I try to discuss the specific mechanics of collaboration. And so I would love to discuss that, both in terms of the kind of collaborative practice, but also in terms of how you, the Studio Barnes actually operates with clients, users, contractors, fabricators. And for me, what’s particularly fascinating in this body of work is that there is a kind of, maybe the collaboration involves both aesthetic and operational dimensions of the work, and in a way you just described it from the point of view, or this story in Lexus, but the idea that the work will be accessible to many seems an important dimension, or at least key to some of these collaborations. 

Barnes 34:04
I like to say I have co-conspirators, and I’ve always been the one who tries to give credit to all the people. If you came into a meeting and you said, Oh, man, that’ll look better in blue, and it was the tiniest detail, and we shifted it to the blue instead, I’m gonna write you on the credits. That’s just because when I was an intern and I was an assistant, I never got credit for anything, even though I’m like, I came up with that entire thing. I’m like, You didn’t do anything. But then that was when I was on the other side. I was like, oh, you know, just getting the work is already hard enough, just getting somebody to say, We want you to do this commission, that is absolutely valuable. But when I was an intern, I didn’t care about that. I was just like, I did all the work, bro. Why is my name nowhere? I couldn’t get even a shout out. That’s not fair. So I always made it my mission that if we do work, I put everybody’s name on everything. So if you just came in one day and you’re like, Oh, that looks good, that doesn’t- you get added to the credits. People are like, How’d your name get on there? Like, hey, they saw something. They said something. So we always try to make sure we acknowledge people in that way. Then separately, if we have other people who do the build, we always give them credit too. So we have a few fabricators we work with a lot. One of those is Matchless Build out of Portland. They’re the ones that did the Lexus car. Those are my homies. They do a lot. They do amazing work. And then we have another team called Altbld based out of Atlanta. They do a lot of our stuff, too, the big scale stuff that we try to do. So they did the past pavilion Ukhamba. They did the Miami Design District stuff. Or we just build it ourselves. 

Miljački 35:30
That’s what, I was gonna go there. You were just talking about holding a drill and or putting something together.  

Barnes 35:34
Yeah man, we build things ourselves too. 

Miljački 35:52
So one of the things that I, or one of the constituents that I imagined in this notion of collaboration was, the community, and so I thought, or the users, and I like the idea that they, too, are co-conspirators. But I thought we should talk a little bit about this kind of fact of embeddedness, from Opa-locka to maybe the project in Dallas, but maybe the question is, what are the techniques for listening and talking in your studio and in the collaborative B-ARN-S group. 

Barnes 36:24
So the biggest thing that we do when it comes to community sourcing, visioning, listening sessions is we, one, don’t use jargon. We don’t talk like academics. We don’t use insane architecture terminology that like five people know, you will never hear us reference Kant in a lecture or talk. You’ll never hear us talk about some sort of amazing Zaha building or Francis Kere, because the clients don’t know any of that stuff. They’ve never seen it, never heard about it. All they care about is their community and what they think will help their community. So that’s the first thing. The second thing is, we remove any type of expertise hierarchy. So even though we know we are the professionals, just because we’re the professionals of architecture doesn’t mean professionals for that neighborhood. We’re not from there. We don’t know how things operate. They’re the professionals. They’re the experts. So we lean on their knowledge. And then last, we empower them to give valuable feedback. We empower them to give their original opinion, because we’re sourcing them for information. So when it comes time to do design thinking, or things of that nature, we’re like, no, no, tell us how you use the kitchen. You’ve been in the kitchen for 30 years. You know more about the kitchen than I do. So how about you just tell me what type of things you’ve seen or things you hate about the kitchen that don’t work well or do work well. And then we use that knowledge, and when it’s time to show it, they’re like, Oh, that’s my kitchen. I was like exactly, because you knew more about it than I did. That’s how that works. So those are things that we do, and it requires architects to one, shut up. It requires architects to two, be humble, and it requires architects to three, to put their ego aside. And it may, the final product may not be the thing they originally wanted, but it makes the community happy, and ultimately, that’s why we’re supposed to do the work. 

Miljački 38:18
I thought we could talk a little bit about that Bahamian market, for example, in relation to that, if you can connect those for us.  

Barnes 38:28
Yeah. So that’s one of the ones, we had finished the Opa-locka project. And Delray Beach is maybe, like 45 minutes north, it’s in Palm Beach County, of Miami, of Opa-locka. And the client there was like, Hey, we saw the stuff we did in Opa-locka. Can you do it here in Delray? And I was like, it’s two different neighborhoods. I have no idea, but sure, we can go try to figure it out. So we go. And the reason why we took the project is because the two women that lead the nonprofit Thrive, they’re from the community, they’re from the neighborhood. They have a host of meetings, like three times a week. They’ve done the work, so it’s not predatory. It’s like, no, no, these are our neighbors, as opposed to, we’re just trying to jump in and jump back out. So we started with them doing a pop-up porch. We took an old shipping container, turned it into this, like mobile thing that would happen. And then from there, they were like, Hey, we just got this big grant. We got some, we got some churches they were working with, what if we did something bigger, to where all of them can now share collective resources and help preserve their historical community? And I was like, man, sign me up! So when we started doing it, the first hurdle we had was nobody believed I was the architect, because all of the elders there, they’re like, Man, are you my nephew or you my grandkid? I was like, no I’m from Chicago, but you know, it is what it is. And then they don’t believe you have the technical expertise, because I don’t have that many gray hairs, so they are like, kid, there’s no way you’re the expert. And then I’m like, no, I’m actually, I’m pretty good at this stuff. Trust me, I’m kind of good at architecture. And so the first couple meetings was just that feeling out process, gaining trust, and then realizing, oh. He’s not kidding, because I never tell people my credentials when I first meet him. I just like, hey, what’s going on? My name’s Germane, whatever. And then afterwards, they usually to look me up, and they’d be like, I didn’t know you did this, or I didn’t know you did that, or I didn’t know you did that. I’m like, see, you should have just believed me when you first met me, but it’s okay, we’ll get to that point. And then there were a couple of rocky moments, because you have some people that are rightly skeptical, because so many promises get made and then not kept. So I get it, but those are the kind of things that don’t scare us. It’s pretty normal. We deliver on the stuff that we say we’re going to deliver. There’s never been a project that we didn’t finish. Only time we had a project that didn’t go to completion is because the client said we lost funding or whatever, and so they had to pull out. There’s never been situation where we’ve said yes to something and not delivered the thing we say we would do. And again, I stand by that. I want to keep that streak at 100%. So afterwards, they’ve really understood how it worked, and the market came from leaning on their history. Because there’s a huge Bahamian community that helped settle South Florida, helped settle Delray Beach. 

Miljački 41:01
Maybe we can talk a little bit about storytelling. So, you know, you mention it, it is a kind of a hallmark, at least in all of the explanations of the work. But could you talk to us about all of the various ways that storytelling works, from furniture through architecture to projects like a Spectrum of Blackness and the Griot?  

Barnes 41:21
I think they’re all the same. I think they’re all the same storytelling techniques. It’s just the fact that I try to use architecture as narrative. And I actually learned that from Jennifer when I was in graduate school. She was my studio advisor as well. And I hated that class, I hated it with every ounce of my soul. I was like, she has it out for me. She doesn’t like me. She’s trying to just, she is really just on me, not stop. And we have this running joke today, because she’s like my big sister. So we have this running joke. Whenever we see a fish farm, she’ll send me a picture, because for the studio prompt, other people got regular buildings. I got a fish farm. And I was like, What the hell am I supposed to do with this? How am I supposed to design a fish farm? Why can’t I do an actual building? And she’s like, nope, not changing it. You have a fish farm. Good luck with that. And so, through that, through that process of trying to design it, I got super uncomfortable. But she kept saying, tell a story. Tell a story. Tell a story. Tell a story. Tell a story. Like, what the hell story I’m gonna tell about a fish farm? It doesn’t make sense to me. So one day I just get pissed, and I’m like, you know what? I’m gonna just make something to make her upset and whatever. So I come back to class with these robots. I don’t know if you watched Power Rangers or Voltron or these things with big, giant Gundam mecha robots, I grew up on that kind of stuff. So I was like, You know what? I’m going to make these things. The world is dystopic. Everything’s been destroyed. And the fish live inside of these mecha robots, and that’s how they move around. They’re autonomous fish. They became sentient. They’re smart. They run their own thing. And I came to class with the sketches, and she was like, this is great. What is this? And in my head I’m like, what the hell do you mean? Is this great? This wasn’t supposed to be, this wasn’t supposed to be serious. This is me just trying to make you upset because this isn’t a building. And she’s like, what story are you trying to tell me? I’m not trying to tell a story. I was just trying to make a project. She said, Well, clearly there’s a story here. So then I made this whole narrative. I made this whole thing. I was like, well, these are mecha robots, I laser cut them. I had little robots and everything that was there. It’s so funny, because one of the guys that was on the review, this is back in 2010, I saw him, like, a year ago. He remembered the robots. He was like, You’re the kid that had the robots, right? I was like, I did. He was like, great project. I was like, Funny. you know, that started completely tongue in cheek. And so from there, I was like, oh, you know what? What if I just start every project with, what is the story I’m trying to tell? And then if I do that, I have to figure out, now, how do I best tell it? And that’s why everything isn’t a building. Because sometimes the best way to tell a story about porches is through a chair instead of a porch. Sometimes the best way to tell the story about North Africa is through a column, not through something else. Sometimes the best way to talk about blackness in America is through a spice wall, as opposed to talking about legislation, because the spice wall will help people understand how we’re different, but how we’re alike. It’ll talk about issues of gender, issues of race, issues of space, and it’ll get us into a much larger, broader context that isn’t just architectural. So everything starts with storytelling, and then we figure out what’s the best way to tell that story, using design.  

Miljački 44:27
Perfect. This question now may seem a bit redundant, but let’s try it. So I wanted to zoom out to the relationship between research and practice, and you have researched stoops and cooking in terms of local, specific black diasporic adaptations and manifestations of these, as well as architecture’s classical columnar order and its speculative futures, and these are expressed in the work through drawings and material artifacts. And I thought we could, or you could, help us maybe expand from this work to practice more generally. 

Barnes 45:19
I would be honest with you and say a lot of the stuff that we do on research doesn’t really inform the technical stuff that we do in practice. However, we do have this project in Memphis, Tennessee, which is the big tower project, which is pretty awesome. And with that one, we’re able to do some of the really cool stuff that we’re trying to figure out, because we got this awesome collective of young black people who bought this massive property. It’s about 20,000 square feet, plus a tower that’s 200 feet tall. And I’m like, Man, I got my first tower at 38, let’s go. And it’s not a tower that my parents bought or had some sort of relationship with it’s like, dude, just through the hard work. And that was an email, an email that came in and said, We want you to be our design architect. It was that simple. I thought it was fake, but I answered it, turned out it was real. And right now, we’re finishing the contract, and we’ll be starting a schematic in a couple weeks. So it’s pretty awesome that we’ll get to do that, and I think this will be one we get to test some of the stuff we do in research at the scale of a building. And I’m looking at that through materiality, and looking at it through physical objects, that those objects will become much larger spaces. 

Miljački 46:24
But it seems to me like the kind of questions about the black diasporic identity in the US and elsewhere do play out in almost everything you do, right? So maybe this is not a technical solution or in research in that sense, but seems like an important research that starts from something like being embedded in a community and talking. So maybe we can go with that a little bit to Dallas, and you could explain to us what this project is in Fort Worth. 

Barnes 46:55
In Fort Worth, Texas, there’s a building on transform, I mean, on 1012 North Main Street, that’s the address of the building. It used to be a pecan factory, like pretty nondescript. You drive past it all the time. It’s the last building before you go over the bridge into downtown Fort Worth. You do a little digging, you find out that was once the second largest KKK headquarters in the country. It had a gallery hall that can hold 4000 people. So imagine 4000 people in a space spewing hate, no more than five minutes away from downtown, with the courthouse, the major businesses are probably the same damn people. This amazing collection of eight nonprofits came together to purchase the building, and did an open call. And that open call was to find a design architect, to be able to do a renovation of the building into a space of hope and community, togetherness, which may not even be necessary, right? Because people might just say, burn the thing down, there’s so much hate that was spewed there. Why should we want to be inside of it? Can you feel that energy like, I don’t know how much sage you have, to sage the building to get whatever bad energies out of it. But then you find out through the community process, it’s 50/50, half the community says keep it so you don’t lose the fact that it really happened, so that people don’t think we can erase that from history. Other half says, burn it down. We don’t need that energy around. So you find yourself somewhere in the middle. Fortunately, our team was selected as the winners, which I wasn’t expecting at all until we got there, because they had this amazing process where instead of submitting five buildings of similar capacity, you submitted a statement of values, like, what does your office stand for? To show if you’re right for it or not. You can have 10 projects like that, but if you don’t have the right ethos, you’re not the right person for the project. And then, instead of a CV, you can submit a video. So you can submit a video showing your personality. And so we did all that, and it allows us to go to the second round. And second round was a flight to Fort Worth, where we met with the community over the course of four days. And the fourth day we did a public presentation. So think Project Runway, but for architecture and at the public presentation, but everybody was showing off their buildings. We didn’t show a design. We said we how can we design it? We haven’t talked enough to you yet. We haven’t figured out what the thing is. We just show you our design process, like, here’s how we might think through the building. And they loved it, and so we were selected, and we actually had a call earlier today, which is actually about it, and showing some of the initial sketches and stuff and things that we’re thinking about. So it’s moving forward, and it’s pretty cool. It’s one of those once in a lifetime type projects that happen, and we’re fortunate enough that we were selected. 

Miljački 49:32
I’m looking forward to that one.  

Barnes 49:34
You and me both. 

Miljački 49:35
We’re almost at the final few questions. So your office, at least the last time you touched your website, listed three current employees or team members. And I heard you describing in the recent lecture, a kind of brainstorming about what you wanted to do in the studio. And so along those lines, there’s a question about, do you expose the office or the studio to the realities of running it, and do you invite your team to think collectively about commissions that you will and will not take? 

Barnes 50:11
We actually have our first full time employee. Before I would always split it. I would do like 2 20-hour employees so that I can give more people opportunities, but we’ve gotten so much work. I was like, I need somebody else that’s also full time so that I can do multiple things. So her name’s Frankie. She’s awesome. She’s from Florida, but then went to USC, so she’s my number two. And then we have two other people that we split 20 hours, 20 hours. So we have two full time equivalents, but three people, and they get to help ideate, they get to help make design decisions. Because there’s so much stuff going on, I can’t do it all myself, which is why everybody gets credit. Sometimes I’m like, I haven’t seen that project in a month. I have no idea what’s going on with it. I did a couple sketches in the beginning. We talked about it a couple times, but Frankie you should be asking, not me. She’s been doing all the work. Or ask Santiago, it’s his project. It ain’t mine. I’m like, or ask Noel, don’t ask me. Ask me about how does it get paid for, or how do they get paid, like, that kind of stuff, I can tell you. But they’re the ones that are doing the day to day. They’re the ones that are on the meetings with the people. And I know sometimes clients get pissed because they want to have me on the meeting. But I’m like, I’m a professor.  I don’t have time for anything, so the little bit of free time I do get, I’m not jumping on another call. But this is something that maybe one of the assistants can do. If it’s absolutely mandatory, I’ll jump on but otherwise I’m not doing it. So I say all that to say there was a project that we recently were approached, and it was a single family home, and there was a client that was like, has this amazing building in Overtown. Overtown is a historically black neighborhood in downtown Miami. And she’s like, I got this old church I want to convert into a duplex, exposed structure, I’m like, oh, man, that sounds great. but I don’t do residential. So I told Frank I said, Hey, Frankie, you want your own first solo project? And she’s like, What do you mean? I’m like, I’m not doing this. I know these types of projects. This is not going to go well. I’m not wasting my time. But if you want to do it, I can advise you on it, on how to work through it. This would not be a Studio Barnes project. This would be a Frankie project. So you got to figure out your own insurances, all that kind of stuff. But if you want it, you can have it. Otherwise, I’ll tell this lady, you gotta go find another architect. And she’s like, You think I can do it? I was like, probably not, but this is the way you learn. This is the best way to learn just by doing, like, just my first few projects, I wasn’t prepared for them, I was an intern. But then when you’re on your own, you figure it out, you don’t have a choice. And to me, that’s the best way to learn, as opposed to constantly just waiting and waiting and waiting. So she’s like, all right, fine, I’ll do it. So she tells the lady. The lady’s like, Yes. After like two weeks, she’s like, Oh my god, this is the worst. I was like, Well, I saw that coming already. I tried to warn you, but it’s still good for you. And her going through that process of now having to find her own engineers, having to go through revisions, having to know when to tell the client, I’m not doing any more revisions, knowing how to be able to pay the people. When do you get paid? All the things that go into your ARE exams that you might not get a chance to do. She’s doing them all right now, which then makes her even better for studio Barnes, because she’s like, I don’t need to be here for certain things. She’s like, No, no, we’re not doing that. That doesn’t work. We’re not doing this. Sometimes she’ll argue with me, and she’s like, No, Germane, you’re wrong. Now look, I’d be like, No, you’re right. I am wrong. And then we keep going from there. But that wouldn’t happen if she didn’t take that project on.  

Miljački 53:20
Did you or your studio ever regret taking or not taking a commission?  

Barnes 53:27
We have never regretted not taking a commission, fortunately. Knock on wood a little bit. You know, we’ve been fortunate enough to do the ones… I have regretted taking a couple, not because they were bad, but because we were stretched so thin that it just like we shouldn’t have said yes. We just didn’t have the time. And the projects all turned out well, but it was at the expense of me seeing my family or them seeing their family. I’m like, it’s not just you in here all day. I’m in here with you. But then it’s like, do I really want to be here, but I’d rather be in Chicago because my niece is going to graduation. Like, I can’t go because I’m here doing this thing that I said yes to that should not have said yes to  

Miljački 54:02
So one of the final questions we ask, or the final question maybe is, are all commissions equally exciting? Are there ideal commissions, or are there ideal circumstances for a commission for Studio Barnes? 

Barnes 54:18
They are not all created equal. I’m gonna be totally honest with you, the client makes it, and you have a really cool client, that make that shit fun as hell. When you get a bad client, you just like, Oh my God, I hate this project so much. Even if the idea of the project is still really cool, the client makes or breaks it. And I’ve been, I’ve been very fortunate that I have, like, a 85% hit rate of fantastic clients, and a 15% rate of ones that are just like, can we please be done with this so that I can move on to something else? And a couple of those I deal with because they’ve been pivotal in the development of my career. So it’s my way of paying some of it back. It’s like, sure I got you, I’ll help you out with this thing, because I would not be here without you. So for now I’m like, we square now, we don’t ask me to do anything else. I’m not doing it again. 

Miljački 55:09
Is there anything else you would like to put on the record?  

Barnes 55:12
Yeah. September 21st 2024 Art Institute of Chicago, my first ever solo show in a museum. It’s called Columnar Disorder. The Graham Foundation grant I just received, it’s helping to fund that. We got some really cool stuff that’s coming up. I won’t reveal anything, but there will be a lot of columns at multiple scales of multiple materials, Labor, Identity and Migration in this space. And nobody except for my team and the Art Institute have ever seen Labor and Migration. Everybody’s seen Identity because of Venice. Nobody’s seen the other two. So if you want to see other two. September 21st. 

Miljački 55:50
All right, excellent. Germane, thank you very much for talking to me today. And listeners, thank you for listening to this episode of I Would Prefer Not To 

Barnes 56:02
It was an absolute pleasure.