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| Washington-Star News cartoon from 1974 |
Amber Wiley, author of
“The Dunbar High School Dilemma: Architecture, Power, and African-American Cultural
Heritage,” is awarded the Catherine W. Bishir Prize for her excellent
contextualization of an important site: the first African-American public high
school in the US. Combining architectural and
African-American history with preservation debates, Wiley
portrays Dunbar as a crystallization of the social, economic, and political
processes that have shaped black experience and education throughout the twentieth
century. Following the 1970s debates between old Dunbar alumni, the Washington
DC School Board, and teachers and students, when the school faced demolition,
Wiley reveals how the building itself reflected and mediated blacks’
understandings of themselves, shaping debates about difference and discord
within the black community. Rebuilt in the 1960s and 70s, but again demolished
in 2008, Wiley concludes “the grandiosity of the new design proposed for the
school reveals an insecurity about the academic and cultural climate of the
institution today, and rests on the belief that architecture has the power to
redirect the course of a school that has a depleted and fractured institutional
memory.” This article demonstrates the wide range of scholarship celebrated by
the VAF, from close analysis of building form to highly contextual synthesis of
a building’s meaning.
Catherine W. Bishir Prize Committee
Sarah Lopez, chair
Michael Chiarappa
Allison Hoagland
