CAMERON A. AVERY

“A prophetic aesthetic calls us to talk about what it means to raise generations of architects with a multicultural sensibility who will think about architecture not just as a profession but who will think about spaces that everyday people inhabit and about our accountability toward making those spaces wonderful and inhabitable space.” — bell hooks, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics —

Black House and Universe: What Can A House Be? — An Exploration into a Black Phenomenology
BUILDING

OVERVIEW

M.Arch.
fall 2024
University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Ravin SoA Student Design Award
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
This project was featured in a faculty-curated end-of-semester exhibition of work from across the Ravin School of Architecture.

This studio analyzed the relationship between architecture and its representation. By translating imagery into fragments, the design process of bricolage tested new approaches to creating a new domestic space, making the imagined explicit.

This project uses Bell Hooks’ essay “An Aesthetic of Blackness—Strange and Oppositional” as a precedent for a journey of Black phenomenology and aesthetic exploration through space. As hooks argues, aesthetics is not organic but an intentional consideration of beauty’s function in our spaces. “Black House and Universe” enters a site a family has stewarded for generations, specifically to explore self-expression, cultural preservation, and beauty. 

What originated as homes occupied by the family and their collection of personal art and generational objects has been transformed into spaces that resemble a cultural center and museum. What began as a fundamental human need has now evolved into an archive of the family’s past, prompting the question: What can a house be? 

The thought experiment was inspired by the stewardship of land my father’s family has owned for generations, a time when Black ownership was largely unrealistic in the South. I sourced elements of these collages from images of my family on their land.

CAMERON A. AVERY