I.

Barbara Chase-Riboud, who received an MFA from what was then Yale School of Architecture and Design, cites a trip to Egypt as a watershed moment for her, when “the cool breath of the Valley of the King’s tombs” whispered that she was fated to make architecture.¹ Like the knotted and bound silk that presses against the polished aluminum frame and leaks onto the floor in her sculpture Time Womb (with cord) (1967), her destiny would also come to involve rending the ideological and material rigidity of the discipline. Across Chase-Riboud’s aestheticization and poetizing of Sally Hemings (an enslaved woman owned by Thomas Jefferson, with whom she had at least six children) and Josephine Baker (a categorical superstar: dancer, singer, actress, and spy for the French Resistance), architecture seeps into fiction, and also into sculpture. Anchored by her familiarity with the discipline, in Chase-Riboud’s work, architecture becomes a mode of thought, form, and feeling central to Hemings and Baker’s critical agency, but only once liberated from the confines of a field that has not dealt with them appropriately.

Hemings and Baker are both present in architectural discourse, yet they have been obscured by white male figures that co-opt them as property or muse—Jefferson and Adolf Loos respectively. Through such examples, we can see how preexisting methods of architectural inquiry have not adequately addressed the Black female subject; it is not that Black women have been excluded from the conversation thus far, but that when we are included it is because of our proximity to whiteness and maleness. This is grossly disfiguring. Chase-Riboud’s novel Sally Hemings, a fictionalized account of the life of Hemings and Jefferson, and her sculptures to Josephine Baker constitute an alternative architectural dialogue. To this end, looking at Time Womb (with cord) recalls the mercenary triangle that reached across the Atlantic: the geometry that signifies the reproductive, intellectual, and physical labors carried out by Black women, which established the infrastructure of transatlantic slavery and preconditioned modernism—architecturally and otherwise. Through Chase-Riboud’s work, this labor conducted by Black women (including Hemings and Baker) can be named as the architecture that it is.

     II.

Sally Hemings is alluded to in Thomas Jefferson’s plans for his plantation, Monticello. When visitors approached the front entrance, they unknowingly passed by the slave quarters, which were concealed below ground, in the sides of buildings, or hidden in the tree lines. Subterranean tunnels connected the South Wing (which consisted primarily of service areas) to the main house’s cellars. From there, stairs were used to reach the main floor that housed Jefferson’s chambers. His designs purposefully reduced the visibility of the slave quarters, allowing him to “architecturally reconcile the paradox between freedom and slavery,” writes Mabel O. Wilson.²

Ultimately, the plantation—built by enslaved people—was formulated to conceal the structural violence of the site within its pastoral condition and democratic promise. Jefferson’s approach to architecture sought to disguise the presence of Black people, including his relationship with Hemings, exemplifying the tactics of spatial oppression used against and around her. In theory, her architectural place is defined by the strategic manipulations of space that imposed invisibility on her person by her white male oppressor. Less attention has been paid to her lived experience. Chase-Riboud’s debut novel, Sally Hemings, imagines how she operated amidst this repressive architectural condition and sought to make sense of herself despite her confinement. It considers the torment but also the softness that might have existed in Hemings and Jefferson’s relationship.

Of Sally Hemings, Chase-Riboud has said that “a novel has a roof and four walls and a stairway, so it’s almost architecture.”³ Like architecture, the novel is a means of organizing and structuring conceptual latitude through which a subject, or multiple, will be seen and ultimately heard. These frameworks must adapt, constantly, to meet the demands of each unique undertaking, its inhabitants, its characters, and its historical context. Chase-Riboud maintains a possessive syntax in how Hemings and Jefferson refer to themselves: “his slave,” “her master,” but she also dares to consider how Hemings might’ve held too a “hunger for things forbidden.”⁴ For Chase-Riboud, the novel is, unlike Monticello’s logic of concealment, an architecture that does not diminish the bounds of Hemings’s life. Instead, the spatial breadth of fiction offers her room that Jefferson’s architecture never could: space in which she might be known on her own terms.

In 1787, Hemings joined Jefferson in Paris as a servant to his daughter Martha, and it was there, according to Hemings’s son Madison, that her relationship with Jefferson first started.⁵ Thinking from Hemings’s imagined interiority, Chase-Riboud proffers that “late at night, when the house was silent and Paris slept, [Jefferson] would tell me of his new plans for Monticello, of changes in the Big House, of redesigned gardens and vineyards with German and French grapes…”⁶ Here, Chase-Riboud suggests that Hemings was privy to Jefferson’s architectural ideas before they materialized. Given her educational exposure in Paris, one can imagine that Jefferson might have trusted her intellect to a greater extent than her peers. In this telling, Hemings is not just a concubine (to borrow the word used by Madison), but a collaborator. Even if it is not true that Hemings was consulted, of which we can never know for sure, we can be certain that the clandestine nature of their relationship would have necessarily reconstituted the fabric of Monticello. The architecture, and their use of it, would have to be adjusted so their courtship could continue on their return to Virginia, undisturbed and with the utmost discretion. If Hemings did not shape Monticello directly by way of her ideas, the fact of her presence, and other enslaved workers, is, nonetheless, foundational to its structure. By way of Chase-Riboud’s novel, then, the fictive figure of a sole architectural practitioner (upon which the notion of legitimacy in discipline is traditionally premised) is compromised.

Chase-Riboud also placed her literary ambitions in architectural terms. With her book, she endeavored to walk Hemings, who prior to the novel was a largely voiceless figure, “through the front door of history.”⁷ Chase-Riboud’s writing sought to verify her relationship with Jefferson long before DNA evidence would confirm what Chase-Riboud already knew and wrote through earnestly. In describing how Hemings “vibrated as the subterranean presence of the eternal Black existence at the bottom of our history,”⁸ the artist writes Hemings in a manner that makes real not only her embodiment of a total breakdown of American mythologies—those of freedom, equality, and justice for all—but her architectural contributions too. Despite not occupying the vaulted rooms of history, Hemings forms the ground on which it is all built.

Hemings’s presence, reproductive and intellectual labor is the mute condition of the story America tells itself, and analogous to the fables of architectural modernism, which is similarly dependent on an invisible Black labor, or erasure. Chase-Riboud traverses all of this in the novel.⁹ She writes about how Jefferson, in his own view, “had created [Hemings] in his own image of womanly perfection, this speck of dust, this handful of clay from Monticello.”¹⁰ Here, Jefferson is not just an architect, he is also God. In her narrativization, Chase-Riboud aligns his egocentric thinking with that of the Enlightenment where false notions of Aryan supremacy, dependent on the built-in exclusion and suppression of Black life, became the drivers of modern architectural theory.¹¹ In widening the registers of architectural discourse, Chase-Riboud’s practice serves as one model of how new critical frameworks for understanding architecture emerge when Black women’s literary and visual practices are treated as central to the production of space.

     III.
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While modernist architect Adolf Loos anecdotally mentioned that they once met, Josephine Baker never confirmed that interaction, nor did she ever speak of the fantastically designed home that he purports she requested.¹² Although the project remains unbuilt, it exists as an attempt to entrap Baker’s person and formalize the spectacle of her body—to render her both hyper- and in-visible. The house sits on a white pedestal, with the exterior surface of the top two floors fashioned in alternating horizontal strips of white and black marble, which diverged from Loos’s stringent anti-ornamental style. The stripes would have set the home apart from its hypothetical Parisian surroundings, thereby conspicuously announcing its imagined celebrity client. In “Ornament and Crime,” Loos writes, “A horizontal dash: the prone woman. A vertical dash: the man penetrating her.”¹³ Perhaps then Baker is the horizontal/woman to Loos’s probing vertical which extends the erotics at play throughout his unrealized project.

The design features a double-height swimming pool enclosed by a series of hallways and windows to allow a lascivious gaze on Baker’s body, positioning her where her intimacy becomes grounds for public observation. Loos exploits the latent potential of the pool because, of course, Baker’s body is never actually there. Rather, it is her very absence that gives the design its voyeuristic lure. As Farès el-Dahdah observes, Baker’s silence around the project “is that of the fetish who never replies to the fetishist’s advances.”¹⁴ In keeping mute, she does not allow herself, as a subject, to be resolved. Instead, she offers room only for conjecture and retains the truth of her person, her desires, and her sexuality despite their implication in Loos’s design. The void of Baker remains absolute. Simply put, she refuses.  

While Chase-Riboud chose to memorialize Hemings through language, she primarily sculpts Baker into space. Unlike Loos’s house where the codified and lustful ideal of Baker’s body becomes the driving force of the design, Chase-Riboud seeks to materialize Baker’s vivacity through abstraction. The first in a series of “Josephines,” La Musica Josephine Red/Black (2021), rebounds emphatically before concretizing its swaggering gesture. The rippled and patinated bronze recalls the effervescent choreography of the sculpture’s namesake, ricocheting from its stage and vigorously swinging upward, as if at each point reached she changes her mind and recoils in another direction. The bronze Josephine reaches an apex, almost like a held fist, a point of tension from which thick coils of red silk pour onto the floor in a cursive scribble. In the unraveling of its posture, rigor makes a path for liquidity. These formal constructions convey Baker’s presence without contributing to the often violent and constraining excess of her celebrity. It honors in its obscuring of her by providing aesthetic relief. The sculpture takes on an essence, and the body can finally rest.

     IV.

Across her practice, Chase-Riboud demands a total subversion of architecture’s austerity. In a text she co-wrote with Sir Reginald Jackson, they exclaim: “We resolve to make sculpture dance. We’ve come to suspect frigid planes and axes.”¹⁵ Chase-Riboud and Jackson go on to declare: “No more columns tethered to a stoic grid. We must evade the architectural to extrude the gestural. Puncture planar elevations... Syncopate!”¹⁶  To syncopate is to command an interruption, force a displacement of convention or expectation. Chase-Riboud’s narration of Hemings’s life syncopates the erasing tactics of Monticello; her sculptures to and for Baker make a case for an architectural abstraction that gnaws at the rigidity of our planar commandments (the wall, the floor, and the ceiling) and syncopate an architectural narrative that exploits her celebrity while muting her vitality. These interventions derange a hegemonical architectural discourse that depends on disciplinary authoritarianism, considering instead what had to happen for architectures like Monticello and Loos’s house to become dominant and the subjects upon which architecture rests, or the diminished absences that make it possible. Through Chase-Riboud’s example, we may glean that Black women’s architectures are not only architecture, but sculptures, fictions, and poetries. The inclusion of these mediums allows us to make visible the deformation and the room for redress where architecture’s Black female subjects are concerned. Alas, a Black feminist architectural theory must syncopate, generating methods through which we might reveal and interpret multiple spatial possibilities in concert.