A Rage in Harlem: June Jordan and Architecture is the tenth title in a book series based on events at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. An unlikely partnership between Black feminist writer June Jordan and the architect and polymath R. Buckminster Fuller, led to Jordan’s Skyrise for Harlem project which offered a futuristic vision for Harlem that argued for environmental redesign.

In the tense days leading up to the 2020 American elections, design critic and then-candidate for Pennsylvania State Senate Nikil Saval addressed a virtual audience at the Harvard GSD to tell a story about Jordan and a little-known project that resulted from the aftermath of the 1964 Harlem riot. The events of police brutality and community grieving made a lasting impression on Jordan, who, while known for her work as a poet, playwright, and activist, responded with her proposal for a multiple-tower housing design, Skyrise. Jordan was not an architect in the conventional sense, Saval says. 'But in the understanding of someone who sought to propose and build interventions in public space, she was.'

Harvard University Graduate School of Design/Sternberg Press, 96pp, 11.5cm x 18cm, paperback, 2023