We are celebrating 15 years — and counting — of stories that are deeply researched and deeply felt, that build a historical record of what the city has been.
We are celebrating 15 years — and counting — of stories that are deeply researched and deeply felt, that build a historical record of what the city has been.
Join New City Critics and BlackSpace for an “Open Classroom” with Jerald “Coop” Cooper of Hood Century.
Tuesday, May 19, 2026
6:00 – 8:00 pm
The Brotherhood Sister Sol
512 W 143rd St, New York, NY 10031
Criticism of the built environment today comes in all forms. The project of Hood Century highlights the unique designs of mid-century and overlooked architecture in Black neighborhoods across America using Instagram, rent parties, and exhibitions to reach new audiences. For the coming months, Hood Century’s founder, Jerald “Coop” Cooper, trains his eye on New York City.
Join us for an “Open Classroom” with Hood Century — part conversation, part trivia, part walking tour — at Brotherhood Sister Sol, a community center and West Harlem mainstay whose purpose-built home, unveiled in 2022, hosts afterschool programs, poetry slams, a sprawling garden, rooftop basketball court, and state of the arts cantina. This event is co-hosted with New City Critics alumnus BlackSpace Urbanist Collective Inc.
About Hood Century
Jerald Cooper’s Hood Century reframes Black vernacular architecture as a living archive of design, memory, and social rhythm. Beginning as the Instagram account @hoodmidcenturymodern, Cooper’s platform has grown into a movement of aesthetic recognition and cultural preservation. Drawing from historic and current Black American neighborhoods, Hood Century examines how Black communities shape, preserve, and reinterpret mid-century design. It defines Black modernism as a spatial logic, one that is inherited, modified, or radically reinterpreted through the particulars and variants of Black American life. Using pop-cultural juxtaposition and sensory engagement, Hood Century shifts perception: making the overlooked visible and the local monumental. Preservation becomes participatory and embodied, an act of care that merges personal memory with civic vision.
About BlackSpace
BlackSpace Urbanist Collective (BlackSpace) is a national 501(c)3 that strengthens equitable distribution of resources and power in community-based projects. Through our collective work, BlackSpace inspires and influences thousands of people in the design fields to enact individual, community-based, and systemic change.
Over the past decade, BlackSpace has evolved from hyperlocal gatherings of changemakers in Brooklyn, NY into a national force in direct engagement of over 6,000 people in liberatory design and urban planning practice. We created the BlackSpace Manifesto, a vision for incorporating liberation principles into public projects and urban design. That Manifesto has now reached over 22 million people, sparking conversations about liberated space far beyond Brooklyn.
We’ve completed physical transformation projects – community centers, gardens, cultural spaces – and have invested more than $3 million directly into neighborhood projects that push boundaries and towards liberation. Along the way, we’ve built a network of over 90 urbanist organizers, one third of whom have invested in building their own studios in service of liberated public spaces and launched our newest urbanist accelerator program, Kinfolk Imagining Neighborhoods (Studio KIN).
About New City Critics
New City Critics is a fellowship program that empowers new, fearless, and diverse voices to challenge the ways we understand, design, and develop our cities. The fellowship supports the development of five critics from underrepresented backgrounds through guest lectures and workshops, research guidance, mentorship opportunities, networking, and production of new critical projects in Urban Omnibus and other leading publications. Through public programs and other channels, the fellowship encourages a more expansive conversation on the future of cities. New City Critics is a joint project of Urban Omnibus/The Architectural League and Urban Design Forum.
The views expressed here are those of the authors only and do not reflect the position of The Architectural League of New York.
