An Architect Merges Design With Urbanism, History, Dance, and More

Mario Gooden (GSAPP'90) is a busy man. In addition to being a professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, he is director of GSAPP’s Master of Architecture Program, and co-director of its Global Africa Lab. He is also director of Mario Gooden Studio, which merges architectural design with landscape, urbanism, history, cultural production, and performance.

Gooden has received numerous design awards and citations, and his interdisciplinary work has been featured in such publications as Artforum, Architectural Record, and The New York Times. His projects have also been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Architecture Biennale in Venice.

Columbia News caught up with Gooden recently to discuss his teaching, scholarship, and expansive creative practice.

What is the single unifying thread that runs through your broad body of work?

My practice, teaching, and research all emphasize the fierce urgency of now, and the imperative that architecture must more fully engage the cultural landscape—as well as the effects of modernity, coloniality, environmental degradation, technological acceleration, and extreme capitalism based upon extractivist economies. I feel that architecture must become a liberatory practice in pursuit of spatial and social justice for the planetary majority, including human and non-human species.

You are called a cultural practice architect; what is the difference between that and an architect who designs/constructs buildings?

My work engages traditional architectural practice in terms of the design and construction of buildings. However, I believe that architecture, architectural thinking, and space-making are not limited to the design of form and architectural objects. Fundamentally, architecture is spatial practice. Hence, as a spatial practice, architecture must engage questions of cultural space, social space, the politics of space, racialized space, space and gender, discursive space, and a host of other spatial constructions. Therefore, my work also engages design research, cultural theory, Black studies, gender and sexuality studies, performance, and writing about art, architectural history and theory, and cultural discourse.

What was your path to a career that embraces academia and architecture?

I never envisioned myself as a corporate or commercial architect. My role models and mentors were all practicing architects with their own practices, who were also theorists and teachers. These were people I studied with during my graduate work at Columbia in the late 1980s, some of whom I also worked with. So, in some ways, it was logical for me to become not only a practicing architect, but also a writer and a teacher. Academia and architecture have been intertwined in my work since the very beginning, and now for more than 30 years.

How did you become involved in dance and choreography?

Movement, dance, and performance have long been interests of mine since my days as a graduate student focusing on architecture, but also learning about Merce Cunningham, reading about Alvin Ailey, and attending performance art works in New York in the early 1990s. I have written about the “spatial choreographies of liberation,” in relationship to the ways that Black people in the United States and throughout the African diaspora have creatively appropriated various aspects of the built environment and landscape to invent new uses, programs, and forms of visibility to overcome the exclusionary conditions of segregation and prohibitions against occupying particular space. For Black people, these modalities have always been and remain agile, transformable, and fluid—suggestive of the ways in which Black people have moved through space, negotiated the barriers of social, political, and economic landscapes, and reformulated spatial conditions through migrations and displacements, improvising new ways of being.

This was the subject of my work in the exhibition, Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2021. Recently, the theme was the conceptual basis for my work with choreographer Houston Thomas and composer Jonathan Bingham and our ballet, InterBlack Exit. Our collaboration came about at the invitation of BalletCollective for its 2024 season. I was initially asked by the company to provide a source art work as inspiration for a newly commissioned piece. However, the three of us decided on a more collaborative approach to the overall concept for the ballet. Additionally, I was asked to design the costumes for the dancers.

What are you working on now?

Artist and choreographer Jonathan González, filmmaker Thuto Durkac-Somo, and I are developing a new performance work, Black Holes Ain’t So Black, which uses juxtaposition and collage of archival images, film, video, and simultaneous performance to enact the spatial praxes of liberation of historic and contemporary Black life and architecture. Enacting feminist theorist Tina Campt’s concept of “practicing refusal,” as well as Stephen Hawking’s theorization of the event horizon—the threshold at the edge of a black hole—the work will include the production of a three-channel video installation and a choreographic performance with an architecturally transformable kinespheric scaffolding. The piece will explore Black spaces of marronage and liberation in Black artistic production, architecture, and spatial practices in the American South.

What are you teaching this semester?

An advanced architectural design studio, After the End: On Emancipated Imagination. The studio uses as its intellectual prompt the Forum for Imagining With Others, which accompanied the recent exhibition, Les Frontières Sons des Animaux Nocturnes, at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. I am also using anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s and philosopher Dèborah Danikowski’s book, The Ends of the World, as a foundational text for the studio. Among a number of key insights in their writings, they posit that indigenous peoples in the Americas have already survived multiple ends of the world, and that our perception of the end of the world is based upon a hegemonic European perspective of time and space.

To that end, the studio will research and analyze planetary sites of catastrophe (environmental, cultural, socio-political), and propose architectural interventions—not as solutions, but rather as ways to imagine other worlds to come after the end(s) of the world(s). This design studio is the final studio of our Masters of Architecture program, and the final term of our Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design program.

How do you manage your own work and teaching? Do the two overlap, or do you keep them separate?

Time management is key. However, there are many overlaps between my practice and my teaching. First, the subject matter of my courses at Columbia also informs my work more generally. It is always important for me to have a critical design concept that goes beyond satisfying the client’s program needs. This design concept positions the architectural project as part of the built environment, and hence can be understood in relationship to a number of different scales and cultural conditions. The development of this critical concept and other ideas always involves research, writing, and conceptual work that we foreground to the client.

So the research that I do for my teaching is also for my practice: This is a reciprocal relationship. Finally, my practice is organized similarly to the design studios that I teach, and I have had a number of Columbia graduates work in my practice.

Any advice for students interested in pursuing a trajectory similar to yours?

It is always good to have role models and mentors to not only learn from, but also to observe and study. It is perhaps less about seeking to emulate their specific paths, because timing will not be the same, economic circumstances will be different, social and political contexts are in flux, and opportunities will differ. However, one can learn about a mentor’s methods and strategies. As a Black architect, I learned early on that I would not have the same opportunities as my mentors and even my peers in graduate school.

While my path to academia and practice may be similar to my mentors, there are differences in terms of how my practice has evolved. 

What is the best thing about teaching at Columbia GSAPP?

At GSAPP, architecture is a form of knowledge production, and not about the knowledge of form. We do not presume to know what architecture is. Architecture is not a given, it is not a priori, and it is not a preconceived condition.

Rather, at GSAPP, architecture is a question. This invites our students to push the disciplinary boundaries of architecture, and to dismantle them in order to understand architecture’s relationship to the entanglements between modernity and coloniality, and to imagine alterior worlds to come at the end of the present.