J. Max Bond Jr.: The Unsung Architect Behind the "Blacksonian"

Philip Freelon, J. Max Bond Jr. and David Adjaye designed the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture together, as Freelon Adjaye Bond/SmithGroup. Yet in the decade since the museum opened in September 2016, public attention has focused almost entirely on the Ghanaian-British Adjaye.

A small exhibition on the museum's concourse level, titled A Century in the Making, documents the competition that produced the bronze-colored building on the National Mall in Washington, DC. A panel headlined "An Architectural Marvel" shows the winning team in a photograph — three architects, not one.

The record of coverage tells a different story. A Guardian review called the museum "Adjaye's stunning building." Vogue praised "Adjaye's radically inventive design." The New Yorker described "Adjaye's structure." When the full team name appeared in press accounts, it often appeared only in passing, as NPR's coverage did.

That imbalance matters more now. In July 2023, the Financial Times reported the accounts of three female former employees who accused Adjaye of serious sexual misconduct. As Adjaye withdrew from the limelight in the aftermath, the episode exposed what the single-author "starchitect" narrative conceals: buildings of this scale emerge from collective labor, not solitary genius.

The museum celebrated its 10th anniversary in September, at a moment the author of a new Bond biography describes as both jubilant and existentially threatened — the Trump administration is seeking to narrow, if not erase, the history told in Smithsonian landmarks like this one. The anniversary, the author argues, is an occasion to reconsider the team that designed the building, and above all its least celebrated member: J. Max Bond Jr., the architect who first pushed for the museum.

Bond died of cancer in 2009, just before his teammates won the design competition. A new biography, Max Bond: The Life and Work of the People's Architect, published by Princeton University Press, examines his career. Bond was exceptionally successful as a Black American architect in an often hostile field, but he was never a "star" — and he was deeply skeptical of his profession's obsession with stardom.

"We as architects should question whether or not the 'Star System' serves our interests as a group," Bond wrote in an unpublished 1993 essay.

For Bond, architecture was a process of slow collaboration and incubation, not a flash-of-brilliance napkin sketch. The architect, in his view, was only one of myriad participants in the decades-long shaping of a building. Bond held that architecture demanded not simply virtuosic form but virtuosic function, especially for the benefit of a building's inhabitants.

Like the social movements for racial equality that spanned his decades-long career, Bond believed buildings and city plans succeeded when they were democratic, shaped collectively, and celebratory of people — especially Black people — who had been disenfranchised.

To understand why the "Blacksonian" stands as a profound interruption of the National Mall's monumental status quo, the biography's author argues, one must look beyond its filigreed facade to the tale of collective struggle and resistance chronicled within its galleries — and to the architect who spent his career insisting that the people, not the star, make the building.