Building Community

Four contemporary architects whose work reflects on social and environmental issues

- Troy J. McMullen

THE LIST OF awards bestowed on architect Germane Barnes is long and growing. Winner of the 2021-2022 Rome Prize for architecture, the Chicago native also captured Harvard’s Wheelwright Prize, an international competition for early-career architects, and the Architectural League Prize for young architects and designers, an annual competition juried by distinguished architects, artists and critics.

Though pocketing prestigious honors is nice, Barnes makes clear that collecting awards isn’t what drives him. An assistant professor at the University of Miami’s School of Architecture, he says that examining architecture’s social and political agency through historical research is a far more powerful motivating factor.

“It’s about investigating the connection between architecture and identity,” the 37-year-old founder of Miami-based Studio Barnes says. A vocal advocate for tackling what he calls the structural inequities of architecture as an industry, he strives to explore the ways in which race and architecture are intertwined—or, as he says, “examining how the built environment influences Black domesticity and by extension how we interact with architecture and history.”

Some of those influences can be seen in Barnes’ award-winning Rock | Roll installation, which he unveiled in Miami’s Design District during the city’s recent Art Week. Still on display, the multiscale work draws on the vibrant visual language of Miami Carnival to honor the communities that have shaped the city’s polyethnic culture.