Rendering of the proposed Woodson African American Museum in St. Petersberg, Florida. The project is designed by Mario Gooden Studio. (Photo: Courtesy Mario Gooden Studio)
Abend Family Visiting Critic Endowed Lecture: Mario Gooden
Mario Gooden is a cultural practice architect and director of Mario Gooden Studio: Architecture + Design. His practice engages the cultural landscape and the intersectionality of architecture, race, gender, sexuality, and technology. His work crosses the thresholds between the design of architecture and the built environment, writing, research, and performance.
Gooden is also a professor of practice at the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) of Columbia University where he is the director of the Master of Architecture program and co-director of the Global Africa Lab (GAL). He is a 2012 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, and a 2019 National Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Architecture recipient. Gooden is the author of Dark Space: Architecture Representation Black Identity (Columbia University Press, 2016) as well as numerous essays and articles on architecture, art, and cultural production.
Gooden is research associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design (VIAD) at the University of Johannesburg (South Africa) and a founding board member of the Black Reconstruction Collective (BRC). In June of 2022, Gooden became the 63rd president of the Architectural League of New York.