When June Jordan and Buckminster Fuller Tried to Redesign Harlem

In July of 1964, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Thomas Gilligan, a white off‐duty police officer, shot and killed James Powell, a Black teen-ager. Uprisings erupted in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, which lasted six nights and then ignited protests across the nation. In the foreword to her book “Civil Wars,” the Black feminist writer and activist June Jordan wrote that, in the aftermath of the protests, “I realized I now was filled with hatred for everything and everyone white. Almost simultaneously it came to me that this condition, if it lasted, would mean I had lost the point. . . . I resolved not to run on hatred but, instead, to use what I loved, words, for the sake of the people I loved. However, beyond my people, I did not know the content of my love: what was I for?”

Jordan immediately provided an answer by throwing herself into what she called “a collaborative architectural redesign of Harlem,” in which she joined forces with the architect R. Buckminster Fuller, champion of the geodesic dome. Jordan and Fuller called their collaboration “Skyrise for Harlem”: a plan for public housing that was attuned to the well-being of two hundred and fifty thousand of the neighborhood’s residents, most of them Black. The project may have seemed a left turn for Jordan, who came to prominence through her essays and poetry. But she had always conceived of her work as falling under the umbrella of environmental design—“that is,” she explained, “in general, an effort to contribute to the positive changing of the world.”

Architecture, in particular, had long been a source of sustenance for the young artist. Four years earlier, Jordan was an exhausted twenty-four-year-old mother of a toddler living in a housing project in Queens. A friend who was trying to convince her to take a much-needed vacation dropped by with picture books about Greece in tow. It was a “fantastic visual inundation,” Jordan later wrote. “It was in this way that I began to think about architecture.” She began a weekly routine. Once a week, she left her two-year-old son in the care of her husband and took the bus into Manhattan to the Donnell Library, where she sat for hours in the downstairs reading room, poring over books about architecture and design: Le Corbusier, Isamu Noguchi, the Bauhaus, and Fuller, a visionary of affordable, sustainable housing. Jordan wrote, “Fuller’s thinking weighed upon my own as a hunch yet to be gambled on the American landscape where daily, deathly polarization of peoples according to skin gained in horror as white violence escalated against Black life.”

The uprisings coincided with a turbulent period in Jordan’s life. A week after the riots, Jordan’s husband wrote to say that he wouldn’t be returning to their home; Jordan, increasingly destitute, sent her son to his grandparents. She wrote to Fuller, he responded almost immediately, and they spent several months drafting “Skyrise for Harlem,” a plan for a neighborhood where residents had long been subjected to constant policing, cramped quarters, and dilapidated schools. Their plan would transform Harlem without displacing any of its existing residents, who often became the collateral damage of “urban renewal” (or what Jordan and others called “Negro removal”). Urban renewal involves the designation of certain areas as “blight”—a term disproportionately applied to low-income Black and brown communities—in order to justify demolition of existing structures and authorize new building. The practice was exemplified by Robert Moses, whose now-infamous Cross Bronx Expressway, for example, relied on denying the rich cultural networks and microeconomies of East Tremont, which were then destroyed by the highway’s construction.

In contrast with urban-renewal projects that devalued Black and brown populations, Fuller and Jordan’s design sought to transform the environment in service of Harlem’s residents. The plan was ambitious, but drastic measures were required. “Partial renovation is not enough,” Jordan wrote. “A half century of despair requires exorcism.” Columns installed in backyards would act as stilts so that construction of fifteen fireproof, conical towers could take place above existing buildings. These towers would contain new dwelling space—light-filled apartments of twelve-hundred square feet, each equipped with a balcony and parking spot—as well as studios, concert halls, theatres, athletic fields, and recreational space. Parking ramps and suspension bridges would cut through the towers, and green space and collective leisure areas would be expanded. After construction was completed, the residents who lived in the buildings below would simply move up to the improved units. After residents had settled into their new units, the old units would be “converted into communal, open space for recreation, parking and so forth.”

The proposal—with its emphasis on cars and highways and high-rise public housing—shared certain tendencies with Moses’s visions. But what critically distinguished “Skyrise for Harlem” from urban-renewal projects, in addition to its commitment to resisting displacement, was the emphasis on residents’ imaginations. This was a plan attentive to the creative possibilities of interior life and social space. “Every room has a view,” Jordan wrote, noting that views would offer a counterpoint to the city’s density; residents might look onto the river and dream a while.

Under her married name, Meyer, Jordan wrote about “Skyrise for Harlem” in the April, 1965, issue of Esquire. Jordan chaffed against Esquire’s stipulations. “The limitation of 2500 words seems to me arbitrary and acceptable only if it becomes possible to adequately condense to a poetry of form the verbal aspect of the piece,” she wrote to Fuller, emphasizing the project’s allegiance to radical imagination. In the article, Jordan omitted her own integral role in the project—perhaps to seize on the celebrity of her collaborator, who had appeared on the cover of Time the previous year. “Fuller’s design,” “Fuller’s circular decked towers,” “Fuller’s solution,” Jordan wrote. Still, their shared enthusiasm for the transformative potential of design comes through: “There is no evading architecture, no meaningful denial of our position. You can build to defend the endurance of man, to protect his existence, to illuminate it. But you cannot build for these purposes merely in spasmodic response to past and present crises, for then crisis, like the poor, will be with us always.”

Jordan submitted the article under the headline “Skyrise for Harlem,” but the editors replaced it with one of their own, “Instant Slum Clearance,” which encapsulated precisely the dominant urban-planning idea that Jordan and Fuller’s design rejected: that Black residents were a form of contamination who had to be removed for a neighborhood to flourish. The subtitle—“R. Buckminster Fuller designs a total solution to an American dilemma: here, for instance, is how it would work in Harlem”—clinched the project’s attribution to Fuller and reversed Jordan’s guiding question, “What was I for?” It cast the plan from one motivated by the love of a particular place into one preoccupied with a generalized violence.

The check from Esquire arrived on December 24, 1964. “I pleaded with the bank to cash the check, immediately,” Jordan recalled. Then she headed to the airport to pick up her son, who made it home just in time for Christmas.

“Skyrise for Harlem” never made it off the page. Although Jordan insisted that the pair fully expected the plan to be carried out, its fate was hardly an anomaly for Fuller, whose spectacular ideas regularly outpaced his commitment to seeing them through. Unlike many of Fuller’s other brainstorms, however, engagements with “Skyrise” have been scattershot. A few sources have covered the project, without giving credit to Jordan. A 1965 article in the Southern Illinoisan, Fuller’s local newspaper, described the proposal, giving sole credit to Fuller. The Whitney’s exhibition “Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe,” from 2008, included the blueprint by Fuller’s associate Shoji Sadao that appeared alongside the Esquire article, with no mention of Jordan. Jordan wrote about the project’s genesis and her frustration with Esquire’s editorial changes in “Civil Wars.”

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