New York City–based architectural designer Adam Paul Susaneck started the Segregation by Design website after reading Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (Liveright, 2017). “[Rothstein] goes tactic by tactic, describing the policy measures by which the government enacted segregation,” Susaneck says. “I want[ed] to see what that looks like in practice.”
The website grew out of his increasing frustration with the American city. “When you walk around in the American downtown, the sense of destruction is palpable,” Susaneck says. The architect is clear in his position that the U.S. is at the center of the world’s worst Modernist city planning. “I think the lack of respect for the built environment is an American thing,” Susaneck says. “A lot of the disrespect for the urbanism built into Modernism is racism.”
These topics are touched upon in architectural history—through transportation and housing, for example—but a lot of the issues are discussed separately even though they are interrelated. “It’s systemic,” Susaneck says. Using a combination of striking visual elements and careful research, the site—which is organized by cities, including Atlanta, Boston, Philadelphia, and Houston—clearly marries these topics and makes obvious ways that midcentury politicians, architects, and planners used the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, which created the interstate highway system, to literally divide and conquer communities.
Compelling videos accompany the site’s imagery, depicting the new expressways and housing projects relentlessly scything through American cities in the 1950s and 1960s. Visitors accustomed to seeing Google Earth’s ubiquitous satellite imagery might take a moment to recognize the work these videos entailed. To show the pre-1956 cities, Susaneck has stitched together 1938 aerial photographs to create nearly flawless visual depictions of the intact urbanism that was systematically destroyed.
Segregation by Design continues to grow. Thanks to a forthcoming full-time Ph.D. program at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, Susaneck intends to document the approximately 180 municipalities that received funding from the 1956 Highway Act. As of this writing, there are only a dozen cities on his site, but that’s soon to change.
This article first appeared in the October 2022 issue of ARCHITECT.
