Memory as Blueprint

Delivered at Columbia University in October 2021, this lecture argues that memory — collective, cultural, material — is not a sentimental resource but a precision instrument. Developed through the Dandaji market, the Hikma Community Complex, and the National Black Theatre proposal in Harlem, the talk moves from memory as active design research, to memory as a trap when form is divorced from the structural logic that produced it, to memory as the mechanism through which architecture can move a community forward rather than backward. The lecture gives its name to a forthcoming anthology in which this argument will be developed at full length. A full essay is in preparation.