Brian D. Goldstein, “‘These Contradictory Things’: Max Bond's Harvard”

Join us for “‘These Contradictory Things’: Max Bond’s Harvard,” a lecture that Brian D. Goldstein will give on the occasion of the naming of the J. Max Bond Jr. Room in Gund Hall.

Bond—a graduate of Harvard College and the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD)—was characterized in his 2009 New York Times obituary as a “voice of conscience within his profession on issues of racial and economic justice.” He understood cities as instruments of justice and equality for their inhabitants. “Architecture,” he asserted, “inevitably involves all the larger issues of society.” This conviction that architecture has the capacity to produce a just society was foundational to Bond’s own extensive practice as an architect: as executive director of the Architects’ Renewal Committee in Harlem (ARCH); as a professor of architecture; as chair of the Division of Architecture at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University; and as dean of the School of Architecture and Environmental Studies at the City College of New York.

Bond graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1955 and as an undergraduate was also inducted into the academic honor society Phi Beta Kappa. He graduated from the Department of Architecture at the GSD in 1958. Over the course of his career, Bond became an extraordinarily influential figure in architecture and urbanism. His success came both because of and despite his experience at Harvard. At the GSD, Bond absorbed the idealism of modernist architecture and its promise to effect social change, but his time at Harvard was also marked with racist episodes that included a cross burning outside his undergraduate dormitory in Harvard Yard. On another occasion, a GSD faculty member discouraged Bond from pursuing architecture as a course of study because that faculty member believed it to be a profession suited mainly for white men. That Bond was able to draw on his education at the GSD—its wisdom and its failures—as well as his lived experience of the University community to articulate a new vision for the field of architecture as an agent of social change is as much a testament to his perseverance as it is to his insight and talent.

Naming the largest classroom in Gund Hall the “J. Max Bond Jr. Room” celebrates the enormous influence and breadth of Bond’s career and acknowledges how unwelcoming Harvard was for him and other Black students who were subjected to similar experiences at the GSD. With this dedication, the GSD inscribes Bond’s name on the largest classroom in Gund Hall to give him a permanent home on Harvard’s campus, even if posthumously, and to keep the memory of his experience and the legacy of his achievements alive in this School.

Read more about Bond’s biography and career in architecture at the GSD’s African American Design Nexus.

Host or Publisher Harvard University Graduate School of Design