Soon after arriving at Harvard College in the early 1950s, J. Max Bond Jr. ’55, M.Arch. ’58, found a favorite building. “The undergraduate library here, Lamont, is quite modern,” the 16-year-old wrote to his parents, “and is really beautiful.” Designed by Boston architect Henry R. Shepley, A.B. 1910, Lamont opened in 1949. The pert red brick box, a departure from the Georgian and Georgian Revival style that rooted the Yard in the seventeenth century, showed Bond how architecture could push beyond a past in which he did not see himself reflected. For a Black freshman increasingly interested in the built environment, the possibility of making the world anew promised not just physical change, but social change, too.
Bond would go on to become an internationally prominent architect, designing buildings in diverse sites, from northern Ghana to rural Mississippi to Harlem to the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Many of the structures he created helped honor Black history; all offered a humane vision of architecture’s broader responsibilities.
Bond’s upbringing primed him for that role. Born in Louisville in 1935, he grew up across the South, spending time in New Orleans, Atlanta, and Tuskegee—with a stop in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. His parents, educators and civic leaders, taught their three children to insist on their fundamental equality as Black Americans. (His father, J. Max Bond Sr., served as president of the University of Liberia in the 1950s.) At only 13, Bond graduated from high school and was admitted to Morehouse College. His parents decided he was too young to go; they instead sent him north to the Cambridge School of Weston for further preparation.
From there, Bond went to Harvard, receiving a National Scholarship from the University and becoming part of the College’s then-largest cohort of Black freshmen (15 in all). Soon the Yard offered a second lesson in the power of designed space. Although housing discrimination was no longer College policy, segregation persisted. Nine of the 12 Black freshmen living on campus were housed in the corner of the Yard defined by Hollis, Stoughton, and Holworthy Halls. This fact attracted the interest of some classmates—identified by the College but unnamed to this day—who, on the night of February 5, 1952, set a cross on fire in front of those dorms.
When the event went unacknowledged by the College and the press, Bond and fellow student James Boone Jr. wrote about it in a letter to the Crimson. “Some of the onlookers cheered when, after ten minutes, the cross was knocked down, but we are sorry to say that others expressed indignation at its destruction,” they wrote. “A Negro student passing thru the Yard was hailed with remarks such as might be expected in the Klan-dominated States of the South.”
Bond did not let the racism of the cross-burning, or other subtler acts that followed, discourage him. He concentrated in architectural sciences and then pursued a master’s degree at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. While there, he was told by a professor that there had been no successful Black architects—so Bond spent a summer working for the most successful Black architect in the world, Los Angeles-based Paul Williams. Frustrated with classrooms that taught Eurocentric architectural histories, Bond traveled to Tunisia after graduation to see what he had missed, and then on to Paris and New York, where he married American writer and activist Jean Carey. In 1964, they moved to Ghana, where Bond helped build the modern, postcolonial country that Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah, a proponent of Pan-Africanism, had envisioned. Bond’s major contribution was a bold concrete library in Bolgatanga.
Returning to the U.S. in 1967, he was committed to advancing the civil rights movement through the tools of his field. Work with his first firm, the New York City-based Bond Ryder Associates, included community-generated development plans, flexible housing responsive to residents’ needs, and building materials, especially masonry, that created jobs for Black workers.
Meanwhile, Bond Ryder became preeminent in designing monuments commemorating the Black freedom struggle. The King Center in Atlanta (1982) and Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (1980) recorded histories still unfolding. A decade later, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute opened, its prominent dome making those histories unignorable in a city that had marked their apogee. These structures, like many of Bond’s designs, shared brick construction; forms integrating modernism and the architectural history of the African diaspora; and an emphasis on the human scale and surrounding cityscape.
Though Bond found success as head of a Black-led firm, served on the New York City Planning Commission, and was a professor at Columbia University and a dean at the City College of New York, he was still at a disadvantage in the business world. Black architects then—as now—made up only 2 percent of the profession, according to the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards, and many private clients wouldn’t hire Black architects for high-profile projects.
In 1990, amid an economic downturn, Bond Ryder merged with the predominantly white Davis, Brody & Associates, a move that finally brought Bond some big, privately funded projects. One, an extension of the Harvard Club of New York in the early 2000s (with his firm by then renamed Davis Brody Bond), involved Bond’s effort to escape the backward-looking architectural forms he associated with his undergraduate frustrations. When some members protested the geometric, largely glass-and-stone façade as an unwelcome deviation from Harvard’s architectural orthodoxy, Bond heard echoes of his past. Yet his vision and persistence won out on 44th Street.
Never one to demand the spotlight, Bond viewed architecture as a collaborative pursuit. In his final years, that commitment won him central roles on some of the thorniest projects of the day. Bond’s firm served, for example, as the associate architect for the memorial on the site of the destroyed World Trade Center. A critic of Ground Zero’s reconstruction—“The rush to get to a building almost inevitably set up a process that was exclusive and elitist,” he told The New York Times in 2003—Bond became the foremost Black architect shaping it. A second project, which Bond had pushed for since the early 1990s, was the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. In early 2009, his team, which included architects Phil Freelon, David Adjaye, and the firm SmithGroup, became a finalist in the competition to design the building.
Bond, however, had by then received a grave cancer diagnosis. He did not live to see the realization of the project of his lifetime, a bronze standout on the National Mall. He died on February 18, 2009, two months before his team won the commission. Yet the museum’s 2016 dedication marked indelibly the shaping impact of Black history—and Bond’s own history—on the built form of the United States.
